THREE WOODS

Three Woods  was shown at 'St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery Lymington' July/August 2005  and at 'Royal Cornwall Museum and Art gallery' October/ November 2005.

Last year the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath put on an exhibition of my work called Two Woods - a body of work comparing a small Cornish wood [Skeyjack] to a much larger woodland [Ashcombe] near Bath as they changed through the seasons. Recently, because of my memories of the New Forest, I decided to work on a project based in the Forest and to add these to the original group of paintings, hence, Three Woods. This exhibition was shown at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery, Lymington in the New Forest and now here in Truro.

My links with the New Forest go back to when 1 was very young and lived for a short spell near Southampton. During this time my father worked in an art shop and became friends with the artist Sven Berlin who had recently moved to the New Forest from St Ives. My parents would then visit him in the forest and meet the gypsies he knew and had lived with. Although my actual memories of this time are vague, I grew up with the stories and then later these memories were reinforced when visiting Sven in his last years and reading his books. Once I had met and married Caroline, her strong affection for the forest and a childhood spent camping there, only added to my interest in this part of the world.

In Cornwall during the last twenty years I have painted alongside travellers and their families on a number of projects. I have thought about Shave Green, the location of the traveller site referred to by Sven, for many years These paintings are a result of several recent visits to different parts of the forest including Shave Green- which has now reverted to just another part of the wooded forest

The Exhibition

A body of work resulting from time spent immersed in three different woodlands. Two at opposite ends of the South West of Britain - Skewjack in the tar West of Cornwall and Ashcombe near Bath and then the New Forest as Kurt follows the journey of the artist Sven Berlin who on leaving Cornwall travelled and lived with the gypsy community settling in Shave Green, "the green city", a traveller compound in the New Forest. These paintings portray these three different places throughout the year as they change with the seasons.

"... most impressive is his painterly translation of the ecology of wild places. In his woodland studies the patterns of light and shade, the thickness and invasiveness of the paint, the sudden detonations of colour and embryonic forms, echo the vitality of the natural processes they signify." Richard Mabey, 2004