[A] young artist offering a new perspective on the landscape will be the curtain-raiser for this year’s Kendal Mountain Festival.
The now traditional Festival preview event at the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere will feature the work of Stefan Orlowski. After the private viewing on Wednesday November 15, the exhibition, Land Lives, will run until the end of the year.
The work on show will combine Stefan’s own interpretation of the Cumbrian interior landscape and coastline. Expect to see landscapes, subjects taken from domestic life and reclaimed objects from outdoor explorations that recur in a diverse range of media including oils, watercolours and small egg tempera panels. All things are connected and so this show sets out to draw parallels with the subjects the artist holds dear but rarely shows side by side.
The Heaton Cooper exhibitions have become an established fixture of the Mountain Festival calendar, in recent years featuring the Fell and Rock climbing guides’ drawings of William Heaton Cooper, the mountain charcoal and chalk pictures by Tessa Lyons, and the apocalyptic photographs by climate change campaigner Ashley Cooper, Images from a Warming Planet.
The Studio in Grasmere was opened by William Heaton Cooper in 1938, although the business was founded on another site by his father, Alfred Heaton Cooper, in 1905. A prominent and significant feature of Cumbria’s cultural heritage, and the Lake District Centre for the Interpretation of Landscape, it includes work by the Heaton Cooper family and guest artists, with the Lakeland landscape at the heart of displays in the newly renovated archive gallery.
Julian Cooper, grandson of the founder, whose own retrospective exhibition Full Circle is currently showing at the Studio, will curate Stefan’s exhibition.
Stefan says that the exhibition will attempt to offer insight into a handful of recurring subjects and motifs: “There are landscapes and a number of other subjects from domestic life that recur in an act of obsession and constant re-examination.”
Cumbrian-born Stefan, who is based at Barrow’s Art Gene Studio, studied fine art at Aberystwyth University and the Wimbledon College of Art. He has exhibited locally and in London, including St Martin in the Fields, the King’s Place gallery and the Mall Galleries. He spent four months as Artist in Residence at Trelex in Switzerland.
Director of the Heaton Cooper Studio, Becky Heaton Cooper, said that the partnership with the Kendal Mountain Festival had become an important and exciting feature of their gallery exhibitions. “We are delighted on this occasion to offer an opportunity to such a talented and dynamic artist as Stefan.”
