Please join us for Hannah Brown’s exhibition at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk, running until 22nd March. This is Brown’s first solo museum exhibition in the United Kingdom.
Hannah Brown | Song for Autumn presents twenty five paintings, including a new group of smaller scale works, some of which directly respond to the countryside around Sudbury, in particular Cornard Wood. It was here in 1748 that Gainsborough painted his celebrated work of the same name, now held in the collection of The National Gallery in London
Our perception of landscape is shaped by how artists represent it. That principle closely informs the work of Hannah Brown (b. 1977), whose paintings of hedgerows, verges and less-trodden pathways make gentle but insistent requests of us to attend to everyday landscapes we might otherwise fail to notice.
In both sketches and large-scale works, Brown handles paint with a fluency that evokes the great open-air painters of the nineteenth century. Unlike them, however, she is not an artist who strikes out into the countryside to transform views into visions. Her subjects have a way of finding her. James Lane, for instance, is a cut-through close to her home in East London, a sliver of green amid the urban sprawl. Often she photographs a location for several years before deciding to commit it to canvas.
Brown is conscious of working in the British landscape tradition, but also – with her interest in edges, borders and peripheral places – of pushing inquiringly against it. Her Day for Dusk (Coast Path) paintings, for example, allude to the sun-saturated cliffs of William Holman Hunt’s Our English Coasts (1852) while granting only partial views, obscured by tangled foliage in the gloaming.
For this exhibition Brown has made a group of oil sketches that respond to Thomas Gainsborough’s Cornard Wood, Near Sudbury, Suffolk (1748). These works draw on photographs that Brown took while searching for the location depicted by Gainsborough, then digitally modified to approximate the colour palette of his painting. They are views of her own – but ghosted by another artist’s landscape.
Tom Marks - November 20215
