As part of a local environmental week, Nature in Art is showing a selection of paintings by Meg Stevens that are part of Nature in Art’s collection and were last shown in their entirety in 2017.
They are from a remarkable collection of paintings all done in situ by Meg Stevens in and around the Brecons, where she lived. She could be found out in all weather capturing the wild places she loved. These pictures in particular, highlight the flowers in their habitat.
In talking about the series, Meg said: ‘When I find bits (of land) where wild flowers grow plentifully, I want to celebrate. All art makes a statement of some kind about something experienced, emotionally or physically. It may be a proclamation or a protest, a poem or a political statement. I think mine are a sort of celebration’.
However, capturing those celebrations was sometimes a struggle! Meg much preferred painting out of doors taking her equipment out into the countryside on her bicycle. She said, ‘If I find myself painting in places where I almost have to cling on with my teeth, it’s because these are often the only places left where wild flowers can grow in profusion – the way they are meant to be seen.’ Meg went on to say, ‘Every picture is a fight. It wouldn’t be worthwhile, I suppose, if it weren’t. One suffers cold, heat, stiff neck, tennis elbow. Brolly springs a leak, blows away. Easel collapses. Seeds in one’s socks and prickles in one’s pullover! …… I can’t decide if it’s me fighting to find how to say it or the picture fighting to get itself said. That they do get themselves somehow said is not a tribute to my skill but to the beauty which, in spite of all that we do to our environment, insists on breaking out wherever it finds the smallest chance.’
Aurora
Paintings by Nick Jones
This autumn, Nature in Art presents two galleries of paintings by Nick Jones, made between 2015 and 2020 and drawn from his long fascination with landscape, light and the far north. The museum previously exhibited Jones’s Arctic paintings in 2023, and now returns to his work with a further telling of the story — both the aurora that first drew him north, and the optical phenomena that followed.
The first gallery brings together Jones’s aurora paintings, made after a series of trips to Finnish Lapland from 2014 in search of the Northern Lights. Those who have witnessed the aurora have long reached for the language of wonder to describe it; the polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen called it “colour etherealized,” writing that nothing more beautiful could exist than the Arctic night. It was in that same spirit of awe and wonder that Jones set out to paint what he saw. The results are quiet, luminous works that seek to evoke the mesmerising experience of standing beneath the aurora.
The second gallery turns to other optical phenomena of Arctic skies: halos, coronas, parhelia, fog-bows and rainbows (the last increasingly seen as rain becomes more common in a warming Arctic) formed as sunlight passes through the ice crystals, water droplets and mist that fill the polar air. Many of these paintings were made before Jones had seen such phenomena in the Arctic for himself, and developed in the studio out of a growing curiosity about the far north, and in preparation for his 2018 residency in Greenland and Baffin Island.
Across both galleries, Jones’s work traces not just what these phenomena look like but evokes something of the wonder and mystery that those lucky enough to have seen them have long described.
Nick Jones will also give a talk on 24th November, sharing more of the story behind both bodies of work. Book a ticket here