Glimpses of creatures provide ‘wow’ moment

AN art exhibition to be held in Goring next month will show a glimpse of the birdlife in the village, as well as creatures from further afield.

Organised by Sarah Pye, Artists at Goring will include paintings by Sarah as well as Liz Chaderton, Anthony England and Andrew Field, with jewellery by Janet Richardson.

Andrew Field, 56, who lives in Caversham with his wife, Kathleen, is a canoeist who often takes to the River Thames. He says: “I am sometimes privileged to see kingfishers, or at least a fleeting glimpse. Bright flashes of turquoise and gold are often all you see. It is this flash of colour and movement that I like to capture.”

Andrew works for the Caversham Picture Framer at its Pangbourne workshop.

“As an artist it does come in useful,” he says, “because I get offcuts of picture frames and moulding and stuff like that.

“I paddle at Caversham and on different areas of the Thames and occasionally you do see that fleeting glimpse of turquoise and gold and then they disappear because they’re so fast and so small.

“I started painting on maps because it gives an idea of what the kingfisher, or any bird, sees looking down, they see the bigger picture.

“When you’re working on a nice bit of fresh watercolour paper, you get the luminosity of the white coming through, while with maps, you get the pre-printed contours and churches and all the names and everything.

“It’s fascinating looking at old Ordnance Survey maps or even current ones, such bygone names are still used all over.”

Originally from Birmingham, Andrew and his family moved when he was about three. “My brother Chris and I moved with my mum and dad up to the Lake District and they did up a cottage. We just had the whole fells, the becks, the stone walls as our playground and you suddenly became aware of nature. The primary school had some owls brought in one day and it was amazing that you were allowed to hold them.

“I learned to canoe while I was up there. Then when I moved down south, because both my wife Kathleen and I taught for 30 years at local secondary schools, I just started paddling on the Thames.”

Andrew’s paintings and drawings include owls, sparrows and ducks, in graphite and charcoal. He has heard there are lots of kingfishers around.

“I’ve had customers who’ve talked about them sitting and they’re just watching them on the other side of the river bank. You don’t see a lot of them, so when you do see them it’s like, ‘Wow, I’ve seen a kingfisher’ and it’s a stand-out moment.

“People do see them and they like to point out where they’ve seen them and how they’ve seen them and around Goring. I’ve been told there’s quite a lot of families of kingfishers around.”

Liz Chaderton, from Hurst, who is married with two sons, also likes to capture bird life and animals. She says: “Andrew uses wonderful maps which actually I do in my work, because I think a good Ordnance Survey map is a thing of beauty.” Her paintings include a scarlet macaw from a holiday in Costa Rica last year and a pair of pelicans from a visit to Australia two years ago. “Although I have been doing some more exotic animals recently, on the whole I am more likely to be painting sparrows and cows and cats, rather than macaws and wildebeest and tigers.

“So it’s about celebrating those animals that we sort of encounter and hopefully making people go, ‘Ooh, wow’.

“If you remember that feeling that you got when you saw a giraffe in a zoo when you were little and you were like, wow, that’s just crazy, I want people to have that ‘wow’ feeling again.

“I started doing some really large pieces, watercolours tend to be smaller and I like the size because it really celebrates the animal.

“Even if it’s something like a sparrow and you paint it huge, it says this that we so overlook is actually something gorgeous and to be celebrated.”

Liz adds: “It’s all about celebrating the natural world and it’s very colourful.

“It’s about paintings that will make you smile every day if they’re hanging on your wall, that really are joyful.”

Sarah Pye says: “I have picked this collection of artists as all our work is so different. This is one of the lovely things about art, no two brains ever work alike and no two ideas will ever be the same.”

l Artists at Goring is at Goring village hall on Saturday and Sunday, November 8 and 9, from 9am to 5pm. For more information, visit www.artistsatgoring.co.uk