The Granary Gallery: It's All Happening Here

In the summer months there is a collective sigh among gallery owners, as the weather brightens and they slam shut their gallery doors until September. Not at The Granary Gallery!
The painting displayed in the ground floor window of The Granary, is a wonderful coastal landscape encouraging visitors to view our summer exhibition on the second floor. The painting is by Simon Carter, called "Reflection" of his favourite part of the Essex coast, towering clouds reflected in the marshland shallows.

The second floor of The Granary building has been installed with a selection of new work to suit a range of tastes and budgets. We have a large-scale painting by Linda Jamieson, with several more modest examples of her recent paintings depicting imaginary landscapes that reflect a state of mind, as well as new coastal landscapes of the coast near Wells by Mary Blue.

We've brought in work by artists with an established creative practise who are located on the Norfolk north coast. We've introduced new paintings by Mary Blue, Linda Jamieson, Elizabeth Merriman, Anne Payne and Suzi Joel, all of whom bring the outside in. The installation has a more playful, graphic feel. We've included a recent John Kiki 'Infanta' painting, that lifts the heart and we have a new paper cut work by Ruth Howes that displays her skill and vision in rendering a linear subject using paper, in three dimesions. We also have a selection of recent collograph prints of coastal features by Lincolnshire-based printmaker Catherine Headley.

It is the first time we have shown Elizabeth Merriman's paintings. Her still lives of flowers and foliage grown in her own coastal garden have an abundant approach. We have some beautiful examples of her work at Houghton Hall Stables at the moment. Elizabeth is a confident and experienced colourist. She works on paper using pastels as well as watercolour, matching dark reds and jade greens with mustards and warm greys. There is a sense of joy in her observation of a subject matter she knows well.

The larger paintings by Linda Jamieson have been admired in Jarrold's main window display for the last few months and are now transferred to the gallery wall for closer scrutiny. These beautiful landscapes replace several smaller more highly coloured works from the spring show, and reveal a very different side to this new body of Linda's recent work. Their increasingly confident graphic visual language reminds the viewer that we carry landscape with us, it follows the course of our emotional development. Our environment is crucial to our equilibrium, particularly when we are faced with an increasingly overwrought troposphere.

John Kiki has been painting variants of a young female figure derived from Diego Velasquez's `Infanta', from his painting 'Las Meninas' from 1656, for almost sixty years. His deftly drawn, poured paint outline describes the familiar figure of a young woman in a formal dress on a grey background of layered canvas and gauze. It is a subject John returns to again and again. This is a particularly fine example, a contemporary take on a history painting.

The Granary is open during Jarrold's opening times on Bedford Street, Norwich.

About the author

Paul Barratt

Paul Barratt started working in contemporary art galleries in 1989, having graduated in Fine Art from Goldmsith’s, London University. He initially worked at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, one of the contemporary art dealers, who dominated the London art market in the 80s and 90s. He was approached by the Lisson Gallery to be gallery manager for the influential art dealer Nicholas Logsdail. This was followed by a short period in New York at Gladstone Gallery, to work for visionary art dealer Barbara Gladstone, working with the artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.

 

On his return to London, Paul secured a place on the postgraduate curatorial course at the Royal College of Art, to complete an MA. After graduation in 2001, he worked as an independent curator on several projects in Oslo, London, Brighton and Basel, before joining Paul Vater at his design agency Sugarfree in 2004. He has worked with Paul ever since.

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