Artist Linda Ryle has designed belts for celebrities on Chelsea’s Kings Road, published cards with pictures of cats and farm animals, painted dreams inspired by Jung, and produced images based on the sound and movement of wind through leaves and branches, sunlight on pebbles, the drag and flow of reeds.
Now a new exhibition in the Lake District features paintings from the last five years, during which time she’s been exhibiting regularly in London. Close Encounters will open in Grasmere on June 11 at the Heaton Cooper Studio archive gallery in a show curated by her husband, the mountain painter Julian Cooper.
The work on display are studies in texture, colour and light and, she says, “a balance struck between the painted surface I am creating and the objects being depicted”.
Born 1947 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Linda studied at Newcastle College of Art, Goldsmith’s College in London, and Liverpool College of Art.
She lived and taught in London until 1975, then moved to Ambleside in the Lake District with Julian, eventually settling in Cockermouth in northern Cumbria.
She featured in many group exhibitions as Linda Cooper, then her first solo show as Linda Ryle was in 2004 at the Percy House Gallery in Cockermouth.
The paintings of trees, river and beck had begun in the late 1990s, inspired by the sound and movement of wind of the natural features around her.
Linda said: “Because I don’t have an overall theme driving my work there is always a fear that the well will dry up and nothing will say paint me, especially as I don’t subscribe to the notion that anything can be made interesting.
“I have to feel a connection. When out walking, particularly along a beach, I keep an eye out for possible subjects. Occasionally I buy interesting objects and I also make things which I would like, but can never own.
“You could say that the wall paintings in this latest collection don’t conform to this analysis because the climbing plants were very much alive, but it was the old stones, their sculptural forms with the flowers like punctuation marks of colour, which made me want to paint them.”
Her early clients in London at the Ace shop and Covent Garden included singers, actors and celebrities such as Elton John, Lulu, Bianca Jagger and Britt Ekland, who all bought her belts.
But now her paintings are recognised in a much wider art world with regular exhibitions in London at Browse & Darby and the Mall Galleries.
Linda said that lighting was a strong aspect of her work where the shadows are an integral part of the composition.
She added: “Sometimes with a camera I catch a moment in time as the sun touches an object, but frequently I create and fix a drama using artificial light which enables me to paint from life.
“So, I am scrutinising the tableaux before me, attending to the textures and colours, their relationship to each other and crucially their relationship to the edge of the canvas because the training I received at Goldsmith’s – colourfield abstraction – still informs me.”
Close Encounters opens to the public on June 11 and will run until September 6 at the Heaton Cooper studio.
