Watermark Gallery in Harrogate has already gained an enviable reputation for the quality of fits exhibitions. The latest, opening on Saturday 7 September, is ‘Return to the Land’, a collection of work by award-winning painter and printmaker Emerson Mayes. Emerson has exhibited widely, and his work can be found in many private and public collections nationally and internationally. This show sees the artist returning to his first passion, landscape painting.
We spoke to Emerson in his studio with his work providing some welcome colour on anotherwise dreich Yorkshire day and he told us why he encountered an unexpected block to painting after moving back to town.
Why ‘Return to the Land’?
Mainly because this is easily the largest collection of new landscape paintings I’ve produced in nearly a decade. Since moving back into Harrogate after living ‘out in the sticks’, a disconnect has arisen in relation to my landscape painting. Alongside an ever-increasing demand for my printmaking work, this struggle has resulted in no major bodies of landscape painting leaving my studio for a number of years – until now.
Is your return a physical or an imaginative act, or both?
Definitely both. I’ve never been a ‘holiday painter’ and have never had the impulse to set up an easel and paint a landscape I don’t intimately know and aren’t connected to - and by ‘know’, I mean something beyond how it looks, such as its history, flora, fauna and how it changes throughout the year, among many other things. All the paintings in the exhibition are of places I know and love – mainly North Yorkshire, Northumberland and Scotland – but they were completed in the studio with only my memory, brief sketches and photographs asaide-memoires which means the ‘return’ also had to be an act of imagination.
Why do you think the environment informs your work so much?
It probably stems from childhood because, even though we were brought up in town, both sets of grandparents worked on the land and lots of our weekends were spent knocking around on farms helping various uncles and friends. While at university in Leeds studying for my degree in Graphic Design and Illustration, all my holiday jobs were on a farm and the act of getting up at 5am and often working well over twelve hours a day really gave me a sense of the cyclical nature of the landscape. Saying that though, even as a child in our small suburban garden if I wasn’t playing cricket with my brother, I’d be watching the garden birds.
What do you believe people can find in your landscapes that they might not find in your printmaking?
Apart from a complete change in subject – there are no trees or clouds in my prints or indeed animals in my landscapes - mainly colour and texture and the three dimensionality that oil paint allows. My paintings are based less on drawing and more a distillation of atmosphere and mood, capturing the essence of a place.
What is it like to be painting again?
Difficult! I think I have a bit of a split personality: when I live in the sticks, I want to move into town and when I’m in town, I get itchy feet to be back into the countryside. It’s the same with my work: when I’m printmaking, I want to paint but, as soon as I start painting, I hanker after the printing press again.
In terms of process, my printmaking is all about immediacy and expression with less riding on the outcome - if a print doesn’t work, it’s in the bin and I move onto the next piece. With the landscape painting, there’s definitely more of a struggle going on. It’s all about putting paint on and then scraping it back off until there is something there worth keeping. Also, if I’ve invested a few weeks on a piece, I’m less likely to feel as comfortable about binning it and starting again (although I often do).
You’ve moved back into Harrogate from the countryside. How has this affected your work?
Since moving back into town, I must admit I’ve struggled with a disconnect between what I paint and where I am. Have I solved the problem with this body of work? Probably not, but at least the discussion has begun.
Having said that, I am fascinated by town and city ‘edgelands’, those areas of overgrown, undeveloped land that play such an important role in the ecosystem but are fast disappearing as more and more of the land gets built on. Perhaps capturing those should be my next project.
There are a lot of landscape painters out there. What do you think makes your work different?
I’m not sure difference is the key as I’m not doing anything radical, but I do hope anyone who comes to the exhibition sees honest and uncontrived work from a painter who has been wrestling for over thirty years with a landscape that he knows and loves.
How does it feel to have a solo exhibition in a gallery in your home town?
It’s always particularly special to have an exhibition in Harrogate, as it gives family and friends a chance to see the work. It is also great to be in a gallery again. The art world has changed very quickly, with social media and online sales making up the bulk of what I do, but for me personally it’s important to have large collections of work hung in a gallery as it gives me a chance to see connections between paintings and pathways in my new work that I don’t get in the studio. It’s also healthy to have a full stop after an intense period of work – a chance to take a breath before moving onto the next chapter.
How would you like people to be feeling when they leave the exhibition?
Laden down with new Emerson Mayes paintings! Hopefully, they will be having positive thoughts and not thinking ‘well, he’s wasted a year of his life painting all those landscapes!’ or ‘I much prefer his bird prints.’
On a more serious note, everyone looks at art for different reasons, so I’m not sure I have any right to say how anyone should feel after looking at mine. But, if the paintings have engaged people in some way, if they have given them the chance to slow down and if they come out of the gallery happier than when they went in, I think that’s a job well done.
‘Return to the Land’ is at Watermark Gallery, 8 Royal Parade, Harrogate, from 7-21 September 2024. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm.
Header image: 'A Cold Morning Walk' by Emerson Mayes 57x41cm, oil on board
