Lynne Cartlidge & Andy Waite
5 - 29 May 2017

Here are two painters shown together for the first time, whose approaches to painting share a number of common elements. Lynne Cartlidge, whose main focus is on the still life, uses the subject as an endless source of experimentation with light and shadow. Andy Waite’s paintings of remembered landscapes, drawing upon the tradition of the Romanticists, uses the handling of the subject to reflect his own wandering moods. There is a softness and a warmth to both of these painters’ work. Images emerge out of built up layers and a natural light pours over tablecloths and through the delicate petals of flowers, through heavy cloud and reflections on still waters.

For Lynne Cartlidge ‘colour, mark and tone offer a metaphorical language especially when everyday rational judgement is momentarily suspended’, she explains. ‘I’m fascinated in painting as a visual language that speaks in metaphors as poetry does for the language of words.’ Her work is influenced by painters such as Bonnard as well as compositions encountered in Oriental art, having spent time in China.

Andy Waite paints from quickly worked field sketches and photographs back at his studio. These references are developed with a focus on particular suggestion of colour and form, sometimes changing in mood or composition, ‘so although based on real places the paintings are becoming, increasingly, landscapes of the soul’.  This emotive exhibition features entirely new work that demonstrates the impressive, painterly approach by two semi-figurative painters and is a collection best appreciated ‘in the flesh’.

Lynne Cartlidge was born in 1964 in Wellington, New Zealand and lived in Cornwall between 1967 and 1984. She studied art at Falmouth Art College and then Cardiff Art College attaining a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree in 1987 when one of her paintings was selected for the Whitworth Young Contemporaries. More recently she has enjoyed studying with Alice Mumford at the St Ives School of Painting and with Rose Hilton at the Newlyn School of Art.

Andy Waite, born 1954, graduated from West Sussex School of Art & Design in 1977 and pursued a successful career in graphic design. He has been painting full-time since 1989. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions across the United Kingdom and also the United States of America and has held regular solo exhibitions in Bath, London, Hampshire and Sussex since 1992.