Derek Eland at the Northern Lights Gallery,
Dec 2019 - Jan 2020

 ‘Field Patterns'

Very excited to be bringing you a new, vibrant & what looks set to be a diverse set of new paintings by local artist Derek Eland based on field patterns.

These dynamic new paintings are Derek's personal interrogation of the Lake District landscape, the dark & light, the colours & patterns, the dry stone walls, executed in oils & on paper.

 

Hailing from a family of Cumbrian farmers, Derek says he's always been, "interested in the impact Humankind has made & continues to make on the landscape."

Here in the Lake District,"it’s most obviously seen in the copses, hedgerows, dry stone walls as well as the hamlets, villages and farms. Wordsworth put it well when he wrote, ‘Once again I see these hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, green to the very door’."



Before going to art college Derek painted & exhibited in North Wales for many years, little surprise then that the influence of those great North Welsh painters stay with him, Sir Kyffin Williams & Peter Prendergast in particular taught Derek the importance of contrast, structure and pattern in the landscape we see.

There's also a nod to local luminaries such as Percy Kelly & Sheila Fell, yet if you look closely at Derek's art, a fused line of beauty also stretches back to the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group, to early Kandinsky & Münter in Murnau circa 1909, the ornamental configuration of colour in the spirit of Matisse, strong angular lines associated with French Cubism & Les Nabis & the cloisonnism of Gauguin.



These new paintings are a direct response to the local Lake District landscape, & in recent years his work has been exhibited widely "yet it’s always a thrill to show work in my native county, Cumbria."