Garden Landscape. Oil on canvas. 80cm x 100cm
Untitled, Oil and pastel on canvas. 80cm x 100cm
Celia Johnson
Celia studied Fine Art at Central St Martin's School of Art as a mature student. having worked in the City as a stockbroker and marketing executive for a few years after leaving university. Her first exhibition was at the Stroud House Gallery, Stroud just after she graduated, in the autumn of 1999. At the beginning of 2000, she moved to Herefordshire where her work developed to reflect the Golden Valley landscape that is her home – away from a harder, more minimalist, urban abstraction to a free, large-scale, expressionistic style that is directly inspired by the rural environment and that takes it as its subject. Her exhibitions have included three at the Globe Gallery, Hay on Wye in 2000, 2001 and 2003, and two as part of the Hay Festival (2001 and 2002), as well as at the Meadow Gallery, Burford House in Tenbury Wells (2003).
My paintings begin as studies of the countryside in which I live, mainly as drawings in pencil or charcoal on canvas which are developed into oil or mixed media images. They record, visually, my experience of and response to the environment around me – so they are, primarily, landscape paintings.
Although the landscape is the subject of my work, I am just as essentially concerned with the process of making art – with form and colour, and the creation of space. I am trying to echo the feeling of being in the landscape, translating that feeling into a two-dimensional image.
Celia Johnson, 2005