Oriel Q - Queens Hall Gallery, High Street, Narberth, Pembrokeshire, SA67 7AS [t] 01834 869454 Manager: Lynne Crompton
GLENN IBBITSON: 21 Apr - 20 May 2006
This exhibition contains a selection of Glenn’s figure paintings and portraits, together with a suite of interiors and landscapes from Salisbury Plain, North Yorkshire and West Wales.
For more than twenty years, the focus of Glenn’s art has been the human figure, painted in a representational idiom, based on careful observation.
On a formal level the works comprise a synthesis of colour and line to describe volume and structure; the technical skill employed presents a counterpoint to contemporary celebrity-driven culture of the perfect body by depicting ordinary people with their myriad physical idiosyncrasies. The isolated figure; vulnerable and self-absorbed, is often observed as a foreshortened scape in which peculiar details have been carefully depicted; the asymmetry of a pair of ears, the angle one toe makes with its neighbour, the pull of flesh between finger and thumb, the sideways fall of a breast under its own particular weight.
Only certain areas are meticulously painted; they comprise a juxtaposition of thick impasto with thin glazing; careful multi-layering alongside cursory thin layers; broken colour techniques beside flat areas to give the painting a greater surface interest at close-quarters.
The exhibition is open 10am-5pm daily.
Below are examples from the 'animal ceramics' touring exhibition in Oriel Fach.
