Exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Simon Dorrell

At the moment, despite, or because of, having so little time to paint, Simon Dorrell is enjoying it more than ever before. He has many other demands on his time including creating illustrations for Hortus (hortus.co.uk). As art editor of the international gardening quarterly (to which he has contributed a succession of highly-acclaimed fine line drawings since 1988) his work is well known to thousands of subscribers around the world. He also works as a garden design consultant, and was responsible for designing the much-praised new gardens at Hampton Court, Herefordshire. He is currently working on the development of two gardens in Surrey, and on a royal commission for a garden in central London.

He says, 'I started my career as a painter of gardens before graduating to landscape - principally farmed landscape; not altogether surprising, since I was born into a farming family in the Severn Valley in Worcestershire. I have always been interested in the abstract qualities inherent in the ritualised pattern-making of the predominantly arable landscape of my boyhood - a landscape not unlike the Welsh border country around my home near Presteigne. It is this potential for abstraction that attracts me to a particular tract of land, and I work in a representative style in order to make this characteristic of landscape as accessible as possible. A lifelong fascination with architecture, particularly domestic architecture, and its relationship to gardens and to landscape provides the inspiration for many of my paintings and drawings.

Over recent years I have become acquainted with the upland valleys of the Mynydd Eppynt in Brecknockshire and some of the oil paintings in this exhibition are representations of the small, rugged farmsteads thereabouts. There are paintings of the moonlit border landscape around my home and also paintings, in oil and in ink and watercolour, of vernacular architecture from the south Cardiganshire and north Pembrokeshire coast. This exploration led me, perhaps inevitably, to the intensely urban Valleys of South Wales, which were a revelation. I have also been working on a series of smaller ink and watercolour studies; some of domestic interiors such as those inspired by a Carmarthenshire farmhouse (the creation of designer and master-carpenter Hilton Marlton) and a Somerset manor. Others depict the subdued interiors of West Country churches; like all painters, perhaps, I am seduced by the elusive qualities of light and how it can transform in an instant, and perhaps only for an instant, the truly earthbound into the truly ethereal.

Winter work took me to Pan's Orchard, a derelict and pathetically vulnerable grove of apple trees less than a mile from my home. A recent change in neighbouring land ownership has led to unsettling "modifications" to the character of the immediate vicinity. Fear for the future of the orchard drove me to chronicle what I could. An identical sentiment resulted in the studies of ailing alders in the adjacent water-meadows. The fragility of all these beautiful trees is reflected, hopefully, in their depiction.'

For further information or images 01584 875363 or exhibitions@silktophatgallery.co.uk or silktophatgallery.wordpress.com.