Christine Bass
Art Forms
Painting
Exhibition and News
This will be my twentieth and final year at St Dunstan’s for Bucks Art Weeks. I’m really hoping to see lots of our loyal returning visitors in this landmark year for me. I’m also looking forward to welcoming new faces, especially those who have always wanted to visit. Art at St Dunstan’s is one of the oldest Bucks Art Weeks exhibitions. We are known for a great variety of artists and makers, all of whom produce work of a high quality. Do come along – you won’t be disappointed!
My exhibition will focus on the Ridgeway which has been a constant theme in my paintings, linking my Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire landscapes: Ivinghoe Beacon at the eastern end of the Ridgeway in Buckinghamshire where I lived for almost thirty years; then westwards to Chinnor Hill; on to Swyncombe Downs, Nuffield and Grim’s Ditch in South Oxfordshire where I now live; thence to Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow on the Ridgeway near the Uffington White Horse, and Odstone Coombes just below the trail at Ashbury.
There will also be a selection of paintings of watery places: the wetland at Cothill Fen, the restored Wharf Stream at Eynsham, College Lake at an old quarry site near Tring, and the reservoir at Wilstone.
Biography
My landscape and still life paintings are characterised by blocks of saturated colour, flattened planes, and strong lines and shapes.
The paintings consist of several layers of acrylic paint on a collaged base. I begin by drawing the composition onto board before collaging the whole surface with tissue paper. The drawn composition is important to me; when it begins to disappear beneath the layers of tissue, I re-draw it. I then paint in acrylics onto that collage base, focusing on the original drawing but also incorporating many of the shapes that originate from the tissue layer. My aim is a synthesis between the drawing and the more abstract collage, with the painted layer bringing the two together.
In my earlier artistic career, I worked as an illustrator, producing black and white, pen and ink drawings. My first, very vibrant paintings were a change of direction and reflected a desire to work in colour. I still use strong colours in my landscape paintings but they tend to be more natural – greens and yellows, blues and greys, oranges and browns.
In the spring of 2022, my painting ‘Ivinghoe Beacon from Steps Hill’ was judged Overall Winner in the Swire Ridgeway Arts Prize. This annual exhibition is coordinated by The Friends of the Ridgeway, a voluntary organisation that seeks to preserve and celebrate the Ridgeway National Trail.
In the autumn of 2019, my painting ‘Pulpit Wood’ won second prize in ‘The People’s Landscape’ exhibition at Claydon House. The exhibition was organized by The Courtyard Art Studio in conjunction with The National Trust.
Contact
christinebass.art@gmail.com
Get in touch
christinebass.art@gmail.com
https://www.christinebassart.com
Art Weeks Venue
Christine Bass
