Josephine Trotter's Love for Landscapes
"Her home exudes an atmosphere of wellbeing, warmth, nature and art, that spills over into the celebration of life which makes her paintings so distinctive."
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Josephine Trotter
The River Test
oil on canvas
60 x 90 cm, signed, £7,000
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Trained at St Albans School of Art with the distinguished artist, Euan Uglow, Josephine Trotter lives at one with the landscape that surrounds in her in the Oxfordshire hills. For the last two years, landscape has engaged her most although throughout her long career she has also painted still-life and portraits.
She has often travelled to paint in sunnier spots, Greece, Turkey, Italy and France, but now it is in the landscapes of Britain that she finds her inspiration, especially in their wonderful variety of greens. There is a sense of rapture at the heart of all Trotter’s work and is expressed, above all, through radiant colour.
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Josephine Trotter, Flowers in a Tuscan Landscape, oil on canvas, signed, 60 x 50 cm, £6,000
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Josephine Trotter, French Interior,
oil on canvas, signed, 60 x 50 cm,
£6,000
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Trotter’s gift for distilling in her paintings that first ecstatic response to a scene brings to mind Van Gogh, an artist she admires. Like Van Gogh, she reacts immediately and powerfully to a motif that she finds compelling. ‘I get an absolute bolt in the head’, she explains, adding ‘I can’t explain it – it’s very powerful.’
She paints en plein air in a single creative burst, usually finishing a painting in one day. The early morning light determines the feel of a painting. She dislikes the ‘flattening light’ of midday and as the sun moves across her subject throughout the day, rather than adjusting the tones of her composition to the shifting conditions, she remains true to that first light that ignited her imagination. She does no preparatory sketches and never relies on photographs, but draws the broad outlines of the composition with a brush loaded with thinly diluted paint. Once a painting is finished, she never revises in the studio.
This truth to nature is often physically challenging. Like Monet struggling with the weather on the beaches of Normandy, or Van Gogh with the Mistral in Provence, Trotter sometimes has to weight her easel with bags of stones to stop high winds carrying her canvas away.
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Josephine Trotter
White Sands Pembrokeshire
oil on canvas, 49 x 59 cm, signed, £5,000
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Trotter’s latest work shows her at the height of her powers. She is an artist rooted in the tradition of modern Post-Impressionist painting but her deeply felt, poetic response to her native landscape brings a strong and totally individual vision to her subjects. She is a superlative painter in the truest sense of the word. ‘I absolutely love putting paint on’, she declares, ‘I love paint, the smell of paint and its texture.’
In the end, her art is about the stuff of painting, and it is in the visceral essence of the material itself that she has always found herself and the reason why her paintings speak so vividly to us.
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Richard Smythe, River Otter, oil on panel, 25.5 x 25.5cm, £495
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Arabella Shand, Penlantelych, oil on board, 24 x 27 cm, £295
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Kirsty Wither, Fair Frost, oil on canvas, 41 x 51cm, £2750
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Leonie Gibbs, Plockton Harbour, oil on board, signed, 41 x 58.5 cm, £1,850
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If you have any queries or would like either to buy anything or have something on approval please contact us:
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Amanda Lowther
07770 822673
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