Now Showing - Christmas show - Russell Gallery - London

Heath Hearn is a painter in the Modern British abstract expressionist tradition. Much of his work is inspired by living and working on the Edgcumbe Country Estate on the unspoiled Rame Peninsula in South East Cornwall, where he is surrounded by water.

Hearn’s work is expressive, evolving from feeling rather than a fixed process or concepts. His brushwork is loose, painterly and honest with no gimmicks to trick the eye. The palette is naturalistic and rich, evoking simple forms that play off each other to form narratives that speak to the viewer and draw them into the beguiling worlds he has created.

The work in Hearn’s latest show, By this River, demonstrates a fascination with the riverine environment, where the natural and industrial worlds butt up against and inform each other. Rivers are also places of leisure, and some of the more playful paintings, such as River Box, enable him to merge a childhood perspective of life by the waterside with a love of naive painting, in a manner that he describes as leaning towards Alfred Wallis and the St Ives school.

Other pieces continue long-standing conversations with the work of British artist Ivon Hitchens and US painter Richard Diebenkorn. Warm Breeze Down the River expresses the elemental and physical experiences of being by a river as form.

River Rust and Cadmium Sunset River speak of amorphous elements that need to be painted with gestural marks, allowing feeling to flow.

The eponymous By this River – in which forms are held in perpetual stasis but one feels one has glimpsed movement suddenly arrested – he considers to be very much in dialogue with the praxis of Hitchens.

Overall, Hearn’s latest show takes us on a journey through the many wilds and shapes of riverine life.

Sophie Galleymore Bird

Click image below to open “By this River” catalog

Blue Talisman VI

Click image below to open the full catalog for the 2020 solo exhibition - Russell Gallery - London

-Still-

Heath Hearn lives and works on the Edgcumbe Country Estate within South East Cornwalls Rame Peninsula.

'Still' is inspired by the painters 2020 diary and sketch book.

Hearn's gentle observations on the more positive sides of the year take you into a timeless world where nature reigns supreme.

Many of Hearn's paintings in this exhibition are hinged on a tension between the figurative and the abstract, not unlike the painter Ivon Hitchens, who Hearn has taken inspiration from for the woodland landscapes for this show, uniquely stylising the shapes and immediacy of Hitchens application.

Other observations in this exhibition include the simpler joys of life. Paintings of hanging washing on a line blowing furiously in the wind, a still life of a posy of primroses, to more childlike narratives such as the dazzling 'Silent Parks and Empty Buses'.

It is not only visual observations that are distilled into this work but also emotional and aural. Vertiginous skyscrapers that hinge on the abstract and the figurative, translate the artists emotional response to the events of the year.

Listening to a radio programme about natures reclamation of man and marine life appearing in places where they have never been seen in recorded history, takes the painter beyond his surroundings to imaginings of whales rejoicing in the absence of industry, which Hearn translates as a metaphor of hope for the future.

'Still takes you on a wondrous journey through an artists musings and observations of a very quiescent year.