An Absence by Philippa Beale
The Exhibition
From 31 October to 11 November 2023, An Absence by Philippa Beale will be on show at The Margate Gallery.
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The exhibition will be running in tandem with shows at The Turner Contemporary and Pie Factory where there will also be readings from local writers as well as film screenings.
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Beale's works on display at The Margate Gallery is an exhibition of trees, woodland and forest, and concerns itself with the question; "What is missing?"
The Works
This exhibition is the culmination of research depicting 'What is Missing?’
From Beale's first solo show at the Camden Arts Centre in London; ‘The Highgate Series’, inspired by the monuments of the North London Highgate Cemetery, to fallen, rotting fruit, depicting waste in ‘Windfalls’, capturing what has been destroyed or lost is of interest to her.
For this show, Beale has been documenting missing forests, woodland and trees since 2013 and this exhibition features some of these artworks. Technically they embrace her concern with mark-making through drawing and how far these marks can be taken towards abstraction while still being readable. Painting and printmaking intermingle to create a diverse range of images.
The Artist
Philippa Beale is an artist/curator, a Founder member of the Arborealists, and Creator of ‘A Sense of Place'.
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She was born and raised in the Hampshire countryside before moving to London where her artistic concerns were mainly political and sociological. Now she lives in the country, opposite a lake and a grove of trees with a river at the bottom of the garden she has become a landscape painter in the tradition of English Landscape Artists like Edward Arthur Wilson, Paul Nash and Samuel Palmer.
Taught by the etcher Paul Drury who posited that the pastoral landscape was in the blood of all English Artists and given the opportunity and the right views, we couldn’t help but record it. 'The Hunting Wood ' for instance, started as a small pen and ink drawing, which was then scanned and printed in archival ink onto canvas. The image is then overpainted in oil paint while preserving areas of luminosity one gets from CGI.