An exhibition of contemporary landscape painting by Paul Mellor and John Elcock at Editions Gallery.
Paul Mellor’s paintings explore history, loss, and mortality as he seeks to question the idea of both private and collective memories, their illusion and ambiguity. Taking his personal memories – of places (real or imagined) – as a starting point. He uses source materials from the internet, film stills, postcards and his old photographs to affect a distance from the subject so the final painting is viewed atmospherically rather than descriptively.
The paintings often feature distant horizons, quiet spaces and empty landscapes as a place where time, geology and older civilizations are layered into a painterly chronotope, in the process undergoing multiple changes in colour, perspective, and composition. The finished works are removed from their point of origin, creating a psychological space, more representative of a state of mind than any specific, real-life place.
John Elcock is a visual artist based in Liverpool with a multidisciplinary practice centred on painting and conceptual sculpture. His work has been exhibited nationally with paintings recently featuring in the ING Discerning Eye and Wales Contemporary.
‘There seemed a strangeness..’ references the eponymous poem of Thomas Hardy in which ‘the land’s lean face’ is the setting for an uncanny interplay between the poet and some elusive- other. Mellor and Elcock’s landscape paintings for this exhibition at Editions feature places each with their own genius loci as a starting point for a similar exploration of liminality.
From Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales to the Wirral, the artists have gathered a series of enigmatic yet strangely beautiful paintings that shed new light both on the familiar and the unknown. The works are accompanied by a selection of found objects, photographs and other ephemera, specially chosen by the artists to provide a glimpse of respective journeys towards their practical realisation in the studio.