Archive 2008
These talks took place in 2008.
A Day with Desmond Tutu
Brian Elwell
Thursday 18th December
Brian Elwell will be showing a short film of his meeting with the Archbishop in Salisbury, and some of the paintings he has made as a result. The paintings are a continuation of Brian's project entitled "Meetings with Remarkable People". Other portraits in the series can be seen on his website at www.phoenixgallery.co.uk
Along the Dorset Coast and Beyond
Jeremy Gardiner
Thursday 25th September
The talk focused on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset and a painting expedition to Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago in Brazil.
Jeremy Gardiner moved to Bath a decade ago with his family after fifteen years in America. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and exhibits widely in Europe, South America and the United States. He has remained responsive to his Purbeck origins, as instinct, impulse and observation have shaped a visual language. Over the years the paintings have undergone shifts in sensibility and have varied in degrees of abstraction with the underlying interest in expressing landscape.
Martin Andrews on 'Robert Gibbings'
Thursday 19 June
Martin Andrews, author of a biography of Gibbings, talked and illustrated the many dimensions of Gibbings' life. The talk focused on his growing reputation as a wood-engraver after the First World War, the establishment of the Society of Wood-engravers, his years as Director of the Golden Cockerel Press and then his success as a best-selling author with his famous series of travel and river books. Gibbings was a colourful and larger than life character - an adventurer, nudist, naturalist, broadcaster, who lived life to the full.
Martin Andrews was a graphic and exhibition designer working in museums and art galleries. In 1990 he joined the Department of Typography at Reading University where he teaches printing history. He is deputy director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies at the University and curator of the department's collections. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century wood-engraving.
Meetings With Remarkable People
Brian Elwell
Thursday 15 May
This talk coincided with Brian Elwell's Exhibition in the Widcombe Studios Gallery (see gallery listing). Elwell has dedicated the past eighteen months to painting heads and portraits. The talk covered issues of identity and the history of the people painted.
Brian Elwell is a painter at Widcombe Studios. He was formerly employed as a senior lecturer in fine art at Southampton Institute until 1987, and has devoted himself to his painting full time for the past twenty years.