Alex Lowery
Landscape Paintings
16 November - 23 December 2004

For his third solo exhibition with Art First, Alex Lowery has worked on three different groups of paintings. His distinctive West Bay series from the Dorset Coast, continues. Luminous skies and the precisely reductive modernist structures of walls, buildings and piers set against the sea shore, all rendered in flat fresco tones, bring to mind those clustered hill towns in Piero della Francesca's and Fra Angelico's quattrocento paintings.

Then there are the quarries of Portland which have yielded beautiful stone for many great classical buildings throughout the country. "The stern and uncompromising quality, in counterpoint to the superb marine light, provides ample scope for a robust beauty", says Lowery.

The third group of paintings are based on a tract of heath close to where he lives. All of a sudden brushstrokes make an appearance. They bring into play new textures and a different relationship of space between foreground and background. Lowery's paintings are absolutely silent and their cool, meditative qualities impart a poised sense of resolution that makes each work rewarding to live with.