Peter Watson’s Landscape Rhythms Celebrate The Beauty Of The Wolds

Landscape Rhythms, a major six-week exhibition featuring some 25 paintings by Peter Watson, self-evidently one of Yorkshire’s finest artists, begins on Saturday, the 22st June, at the Dorothy Rowan Gallery, in Scarborough.

Opened in 2020, the DRG has quickly established itself as the must-visit place to see the best of local artists. No sooner has the latest exhibition by the gallery’s owner, Stuart Hirst, come to a triumphant end than another is opening.

“I am delighted to showcase the work of Peter Watson,” says Stuart, nationally famous for his series of northern streets painted in watercolours over a 50-year period. “I consider him to be one of the finest artists currently working in the north - and no one has done more to evoke the spirit of place of the Yorkshire Wolds.”

I couldn’t agree more, although conventional wisdom in the art world is that the idiosyncratic David Hockney is the presiding artistic genius of the Wolds, after his relatively brief spell living and working there.

But feast your eyes on Peter’s paintings, some 10 originals and the rest popular prints of commissioned pieces, and see this beautiful unspoiled area as it really is, as it is intimately known to someone who grew up in its midst, is highly attuned to its rhythmic cadences and has an incomparable artistic ability to capture its soul!

A genuine Man of the Wolds, not a fashionable oftcumden, he was raised in Beverley and went to school in Pocklington. As a boy he visited the region’s farms, large and small, with his father, an agricultural inspector.

As an aspiring artist, he was endlessly fascinated by the luscious greens of the valleys that gently cut a swathe through the undulating chalk ridges running down from Garrowby Hill and across from the Vale of York. The dramatic coastline stretching from Bridlington to Holderness he’s tramped times without number - so too the Wolds Way as it passes through Market Weighton and Fridaythorpe on its way to Filey, where for much of his career he taught Art.

Undulating fields appear in the foreground of his Wolds’ evocations, visualised in wavy parallel lines that disappear into infinity - as in the captivating centrepiece, Potato Field, at Octon - and in contoured variegations, carved, flowing, shimmering, resonating, anything but static. The angles, energy, and enigmatic geometry of Sheep Lane, Kilham, captured from the Roman Road, discover anonymous ancient fields pulsating with life, possessed of a personal identity.

After pursuing a Foundation Course at Hull College of Art, Peter studied Graphics at the Liverpool College of Art and believes the approach of that relatively modern discipline sharpened his awareness not only of bright blocks of colours but of angular shapes and random patterns like these.

The effect on the viewer in so many paintings merely of empty fields, whose features are found in ploughed land with lone trees, rather than uplifted landmarks, is illuminating. We are invited to see beyond the mere hedged boundaries and rounded contours to the very heart of this remote corner of England, where nature seems primed to detonate at the turn of each season, release nurturing forces and energies or wither into dormancy.

Each rolling field is a swatch with its own measure, determined by itself, with its own tenacious sense of organic form, largely unchanged in centuries, though now - we note - imposed upon by modern agricultural practices, not least the stencils cut by the tractor-drawn plough, in the fancifully named Furrowed Brow.

Perhaps more than any other current artist, he celebrates this tranquil glory in, for example, the diversity of Fordon Dale’s patchwork of ploughed fields, scenes entirely overlooked by traditional romantic landscape artists in search of rugged grandeur under golden skies.

I have to stress it is only my opinion - but I also find Hockney’s landscapes to be showily unrestrained, by comparison, flagrantly contemporised, obtrusively meretricious even, and more about their progenitor than the sense of place.

The Wolds are central to Landscape Rhythms, but the exhibition also offers insight into Peter’s work over a long period and beyond the confines of his native heath.

In complete and utter contrast are prints of classical industrial masterpieces, commissioned by the National Mining Museum, in Wakefield, where they are on permanent display. Paintings of such as Kilnhurst Colliery and not least Orgreave, near Rotherham (where the infamous confrontation between miners and police took place), poignantly document the closing in quick succession of 14 pits, the passing of the industrial age, the tragic ending of a way of life. There are also poster-bright evocations of places on the East Coast and North York Moors that locals and tourists will know and admire.

Most days throughout the exhibition Peter, now based in East Ayton, will be in the gallery to show visitors around and discuss his works and oil-painting techniques.

ForLandscape Rhythms by Peter Watson may be viewed at the Dorothy Rowan Gallery, 47 Eastborough, Scarborough.

more information see:
http://peterwatsonpaintings.co.uk


See also Andrew Liddle’s feature, in his ongoing series on great northern artists:

Watson-Of-The-Wolds