Although he is now settled in Cambridge, landscape painter Jonny Church grew up on the Welsh borders and studied at Aberystwyth School of Art, surrounded by mountains and wild seascapes.
His evocative semi-abstract works seek to convey intangible atmospheres in nature while referring always to the actual physical presence of mountains, fells and fields in different weathers.
Remarkably he seems equally at home in the flat fields and woods of Cambridgeshire or the mountains of Wales. The play of the elements is after all to be found everywhere.
I sense a kind of serene dynamism unfolding in these paintings, where the physicality of paint often disrupts and transforms the emerging image. The pallette is subtle and rich, shades of ochre, tan and beige with bruised creams and purples in the sky, merging and interacting with great fluidity. These paintings are in a sense a narrative of actions, the canvas is treated as if it were a palimpsest, with layers of working built up then partially erased, or sometimes scratched and scored in order to create a record of gestures in time.
A liminal sense of working at boundaries emerges, where the subtle elements of water and air interact with the less fluid forms and colours of the earth. These are canvases of subtle energies, contemplative yet extremely dynamic, they evoke the ungraspable ‘thusness’ of the fluid play of elemental presences in a real landscape.
