Describing Landscape

(Detail) Sheep on the Isle of Mull, Scotland:  oil pastel on paper 30x30cm.
© Lyn Melville-James 2018. All rights reserved.

A new exhibition of drawings, prints and paintings by Lyn Melville-James explores what it means to be in landscape.

Opening on 7th July 2023 at the Highgate Gallery, Describing Landscape is the newest body of work from this award-winning landscape artist.

Known for her use of bold line in printmaking and graphite drawing and expressive use of colour in painting and pastels, Lyn aims to describe the state of perpetual change from monumental geography to the fine detail in landscape.

Describing Landscape offers a powerful opportunity to open up the world again for us, placing us at the heart of an expansive landscape to breathe out, standing very small as part of something vast — an emotional connection particularly heightened after recent confinements.

“These works go beyond the lines, patterns and slabs of colour and embrace emotional response when describing the neverending orchestration of life force” Lyn Melville-James. 2023

A graduate of the Camberwell College of Arts MA programme, Lyn’s influences include Hamish Fulton, David Hockney and Kyffin Williams, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic travelogue Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes — artists who each enter the landscape with powerful, individual and unique responses.

For Lyn, the quest is how to ‘be’ in landscape — as she notes: “Landscape is never static, silent or of one mood. It is never seen in one light. Landscape has temperament, power and large expansive notes as well as tiny structural details.”

About the artist
Lyn Melville-James is a landscape painter and printer living in north London and Winner of the Printmaking Council Award 2011.
She has studied printmaking in Florence, Belgium and London.
She has exhibited in Falmouth, London, France, Spain, Portugal Luxembourg, Germany, Bulgaria, Australia, Hungary and the US in solo and group exhibitions and her work is held in private collections around the world.

For further information contact: Lyn Melville-James

The Exhibition co-ordinator: Alison De Cleyn