GALLERY - Elisabeth and Martin Wheeler

'Crossing Lines'
Elisabeth and Martin Wheeler
Sept. 2008

Elisabeth and Martin Wheeler work from their home in Glastonbury, Somerset.

Both have a passionate interest in sculpture, drawing and painting - mainly in watercolours and acrylics. Using the computer as an additional - or supplemental - image-making tool has been an essential part of their working practice for the past two decades; and has resulted in some unexpected co-operative works which were not planned as such from the outset; producing works which cross those lines arbitrarily drawn between traditional boundaries.

This exhibition presents some of these joint works; as well as individual pieces by each, reflecting their current interest in landscape representation, as well as portraiture and abstract expression.

elisabeth @ ewheeler.co.uk
martin @ martinwheeler.co.uk

(see either website for exhibition catalogue)

Tor

Flame

Elisabeth Wheeler

My father was an artist of considerable merit. My mother’s uncle was an R.A. I received my own training at the Malvern School of Art, under Victor Hume Moody ARCA (Battersea Polytechnic ca. 1915, later at the Royal College of Art ca. 1929). He adhered to traditional values, and I was stunned by the beauty of the flesh tones in his oil paintings of nudes. The main subjects we studied were life drawing and antique drawing. Mr Moody guided me into sculpture, and I was able to work from the “life class” models.

Until I married I worked as a tracer/draughtswoman at ICI headquarters in Welwyn Garden City. After divorcing in the early 1980s I felt the urge to pick up a brush again. I exhibited a painting in York; and it was during this period that I painted in watercolour various scenes from the Book of Hours: Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry. I sold miniature framed prints of The Virgin in the cathedral shop at Gloucester in 1992.

Painting ceased when I moved on to research the life of Catherine Howard, completed by 2003. The resultant study Men of Power will be published in October. The cover design for the book has already been completed and framed for this exhibition – along with my recent watercolour painting The York Conspiracy. The objects came together, one after the other, as I painted the story of the removal of Catherine by those who plotted her downfall during her visit to York with Henry VIII in 1541. (The broken pottery tiles denote the house where I lived in York – in which they once adorned the fireplace – for it was in York that I first gathered material to start this research).

For the past two years I have been tutored by Tiana Marie. Through the benefit of her inspirational talent I felt able to accept the offer of the Frameus Gallery to show my work. The majority of my paintings exhibited here are of recent origin.

Martin Wheeler

Martin Wheeler has a professional background in academia (languages and linguistics).

Brought up in the Lake District in a family where creative expression in all its forms was actively encouraged (his mother developed a respectable career as a sculptor and potter late in life, and two of his sisters are also painters), he sold his first painting in 1964 to the French Cultural Centre in Madagascar, where he was then living and working.

He then continued drawing and painting as a very occasional personal hobby, but was not to sell any further personal art works for another forty years.

In the meantime, constant involvement in academic publishing meant he was able to indulge a personal passion for typesetting and book design, eventually becoming a specialist publisher in his own name in the early 1990s. Having been introduced to the use of computer technology as a research tool in the late 1960s, he was able to make the transition to digital book and image production with no difficulty, and immediately began exploring the possibilities of personal expression through the creation of purely digital artwork.

Only on retirement did he take up painting seriously again; and immediately began to merge this with the production and manipulation of images on-screen, or by using high-resolution art quality print techniques to produce new works from digital sources; some of which he had tentatively begun to sell in 2004.

This exhibition presents works produced mainly since 2006, whilst under the tutelage of Tiana Marie, and where the lines between hand-drawn / hand-painted and digitally-manipulated are quite deliberately crossed over and blurred.