Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Plates bright. National Gallery sticker in front. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> By the end of 1998 astonishingly he had completed several thousand drawings and eighteen paintings. Each of these images depicts the estuary looking towards All Saints Church. This is their id?e fixe a recurrent motif to which the eye is irresistibly drawn. In image after image the tower stands on a distant horizon like a tiny watchful sentinel. An exhibition of these paintings at Spacex Gallery Exeter signaled a terminus to this phase of sustained activity prompting expectations about Virtue’s next move. His walks down the Exe valley had taken him to the mouth of the estuary and with All Saints behind him the prospect of a huge empty envelope of space and light beckoned. It seemed that Virtue’s next subject would be the sea. But as the recent works in the current exhibition reveal this was not to be. These new paintings confound any supposition that Virtue’s work was about to enter a phase of Pacific calm. Choosing as his subject walks taken alongside the canal higher up the estuary the drama of the earlier Exe paintings has if anything intensified. Partly this is due to the nature of the new motif. The canal-side is a different landscape altogether. (LL)