Diana Hulton
Parables of Light
1 April - 1 May 2003
LONDON Main Gallery



                

The title of this exhibition is derived from Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October". It was written on his thirtieth birthday, in memory of a landscape in which he walked as a child with his mother.

Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels.

For nearly a decade Diana Hulton has lived on a hill farm on the Welsh border country of Radnorshire, where her studio is surrounded by a landscape dedicated to agriculture. Her farmland is organic and its ancient buildings, exquisitely restored or converted, are an idyllic symbol of cultivated existence.

It is not by chance then, that her paintings are transcendent celebrations of nature. At the same time they are concerned with order and harmony, harnessing a pulsating quality of colour and a play of light that radiates with jewel - like intensity. In composition and handling, the paintings are highly structured and inherently 'classical', extending the great legacy of Cezanne.

For her first solo exhibition since 1993, Hulton focuses on four places she has chosen to visit and work in during this period: South Africa's Helderberg Mountains in the Cape, Santes Creus near the Valdosera in Spain, Mt Amiata in Tuscany and the Black Mountains in Wales. The highly sensuous use of paint in the symbolic red and gold Mountain series, reveal another aspect of Hulton's art. They are based on her experience of the Drakensberg in South Africa in 1983, and she has continued to work on them since moving to the UK in 1986. It is here that the Field series began, leading to metaphorical explorations of open landscape, and eventually to place-based landscape painting.

The themes of Field and Mountain are consistent in all Hulton's work, wherever she is. Marilyn Martin remarks in her catalogue essay how Hulton's understanding of Cezanne's dictum that there are two things in painting - the eye and the brain - means that her painting is underpinned by an unrelenting search for the technical means with which to capture the moment, as well as the underlying structure of nature.. She adds that Hulton's work is rooted in a tradition and a genre that have occupied artists for centuries. The strength of her work lies in the renewal of that tradition, in extending the boundaries of the art of landscape, in her own terms, and flowing from a meditation on human kind's relationship to the primeval forces of nature and a striving for the metaphysical.

The quality of the work is remarkable: considered, rich, beautiful and powerfully rendered, its evocation of place and its dynamic sweep across
horizons as far as the eye can see, make it gorgeous to look at and uplifting to live with.

Diana Hulton lectured and taught fine art in South Africa from 1976 to 1986, when she moved to the UK. Her dissertation in 1990 was on "Landscape Painting and the Search for an Indigenous Ethos in South Africa".

Works in public collections include The South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Durban Art Museum and the SASOL Art Museum in Stellenbosch.

An illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition with an essay by Marilyn Martin, Director of Art Collections and Iziko Museums of Cape Town.

Diana Hulton Web Site