ARTIST FEATURE - BETH QUARMBY

ARTIST | FEATURE

BETH QUARMBY

Our featured artist this month is Beth Quarmby, a painter based in Stroud. She takes inspiration from the wildness around her, from the smallness of her garden to the grandness of the landscape, using it to explore the relationships she observes and experiences. Her signature naive and illustrative style brings a joy and playfulness to a deeply thoughtful practice.

Beth creates paintings which are whimsical yet imbued with meaning - not taking herself too seriously whilst exploring serious topics: grief, memory and her own identity. She is allowing a playful nature to describe real feelings, finding a sensitive resonance without being subtle or timid.

Using bold, confident shapes and lines, Beth's stylised and illustrative work maintains its sense of ease and play without losing a connection to the real. Her botanical shapes feel familiar if not exact, and somehow they are more real for it; drawing the viewer in to play in her created world, and feel how she does there.

Using a reduced colour palette, with pops of colour that don't seem cheesy or over the top, Beth uses earthy, deep tones and subtle off-whites to softly convey narratives in simple yet layered ways, utilising rough, textured marks, giving point of interest to negative space.

Beth's work plays with interesting compositional styles, explorative, with bold use of negative space - she is not afraid to fill a canvas or to leave it half empty, happy with her decisions to let her marks hold space, allowing shapes to live distinct and dynamic on their background.

You can view Beth's latest pieces over on her portfolio, buy works directly from her site, and find her at Sixteen Gallery in Print's Not Dead in December and our members' collective exhibition in January - keep an eye out for both!

VIEW BETH'S PORTFOLIO