Mottled Hedgerows Across Brecon Beacons

Peter Kettle

42 x 30 cm | 16 x 11 in


Subject: Abstract
Tags: Flower


'Mottled Hedgerows across Brecon Beacons', original painting in mixed media on board. "Inspired by the painterly gestures of Anselm Kiefer's destructive style of painting in landscape, I stumbled across a meadow swallowed by the Brecon Beacons. Ablaze with colour and beneath pockets of blue sky, I was overwhelmed by the energy of the scene in front of me. Layering clay and oil, I wanted to seize the broader rhythms of the undulated passages of mottled colour and weather-beaten hedgerows. Like many of my adventures in painting, I stumble into unforgiving conditions and at times find the fluctuations of light and weather anarchic. It is this energy that I like to bring to my paintings with Catholic ardour. "


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Peter Kettle

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Kettle’s work has the surfaces of well-worn exterior walls, buffeted and corroded with the appearance of having withstood the effects of time and weather – a technique that gives his work an enlivening combination of stoicism and nostalgia.

If one glanced at Kettle’s work for a matter of seconds, it might seem abstract. Quickly, however, a landscape unfolds. A deep green often streaks across the top of the canvas. The implication is the ocean or a night sky, either seems applicable. Look further and we might detect a sort of dance. Each painting has its own internal rhythm. Paint is smeared across the canvas, the trace of a palette knife or similar instrument visible. Drips, drags and smears give the painting body. No wonder Kettle has titled his recent paintings as a sequence of sea shanties. The paintings act as placeholders for songs, for shanties. Human bodies are absent and the paintings are stronger for it; they embody the aftermath of the party, the event, the song. Here, we might draw a comparison with Giorgio De Chirico’s cities, made all the stranger by the lack of human presence. And lastly, a note on Kettle himself. A keen mountaineer and traveller, his artist photo depicts him setting out camping equipment on a snowy mountain. We see a backpack and beside it, three small packages in red, yellow and green. Look at the paintings and these three colours clustered together are a constant. Another trace of human activity, in this case, likely Kettle himself.


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Mottled Hedgerows Across Brecon Beacons by Peter Kettle

£230.00