Whose woods these are…..
Aspects of Landscape

December 2nd 2022 - January 14th 2023

GBS Fine Art are proud to present an exhibition of the work of 4 artists who each take radically different approaches to the depiction of landscape, its title derived from Robert Frost’s 1922 poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Jeffrey Blondes, an American living in France, makes long meditative films honing in on the intersection of time and the landscape; the exquisite panels of Sue Bryan, Irish yet resident in NYC, are founded in drawing, working and reworking her memories of the Irish landscape; Devon-based Keiron Leach “paints” in india ink and wash, fashioning the pictorial equivalent of haiku poems on tiny paper sheets; and watercolourist, Magnus Petersson, brilliantly evokes the light and landscape that surround his home in the vast forests that swathe Sweden. Installation shots.

Jeffrey Blondes

Le Bois de Mametz 2016
An hommage to David Jones - poet, artist and author of In Parenthesis.

The work is a result of two visits to Mametz Wood in January 2016 and on 10th July 2016, exactly one hundred years to the day of the 15th Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers’ attack on the wood as part of the Battle of the Somme, during which David Jones was wounded – one of the seminal experiences of his life and one which was later, of course, to inform so much of his masterpiece, In Parenthesis.

The 24-hour film begins at sunrise on that July day, the very hour of the attack exactly 100 years before, as the camera starts an ascent up the trunk of a tree from the ground to the sky. Tilting slowly and inexorably upward over about 18 hours, it scans the length of the tree from its base to the canopy of leaves overhead. The camera then rotates in a circle, with a slow dissolve transitioning from summer to winter, when the leaves have fallen and the branches are bare. The camera then descends, recording the tree now upside down. The viewer is now falling backwards, as the camera ends its journey at sunset in the dead leaves below. Shot dawn until dusk in the middle of winter and the height of summer, the two presented consecutively amount to 24 hours, i.e. the summer section lasts considerably longer than that of winter.

Sue Bryan

Keiron Leach

Magnus Petersson