Kate
Ashton & Gerrit Offringa
Waddenzee
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Kate
Ashton (b.1948),
born in Ayrshire, Scotland, now lives on the Moray Firth.
She grew up in the Chilterns, trained as a nurse in Edinburgh
and worked on Nursing Times in the 1970s, latterly
as news features editor.
After moving to the Netherlands in 1979 she wrote
fiction and later had published in the Frisian language a biography and a literary
monograph. She worked meanwhile as a corrector of English-language texts, copy-editor
and translator, and continues to work as such for publishers in Amsterdam and
London. She also reads modern Dutch/Flemish literary fiction for an independent
London publishing house.
She has remained largely unpublished as a writer
of poetry and literary prose. Her collaboration with Gerrit Offringa on the present
project came about whilst they were living and working for many years in neighbouring
villages in the lovely rural landscape of north-east Friesland. |
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Gerrit
Offringa (b.1943), born in Drachten, Friesland,
in the north of the Netherlands, now lives farther north
still, in a tiny agricultural village on the edge of the
Waddenzee. He graduated from art academy 'Minerva' in Groningen
in 1966 and has since worked, painting in oil on canvas,
drawing, and making three-dimensional objects.
His oeuvre is impossible to identify with any
particular trend or school in modern art. It alludes both to the classics and
to Japanese schools. It is delicate, exquisitely executed, finely felt and
deeply individual. The objects are fashioned with an intuitive sense of the
diverse materials from which they emerge. Paintings and drawings change according
to the light and the distance from which they are viewed.
His photographs, quite private and incidental
to his other work, depict the changing and immutable beauty of the world as
seen through the eyes of the painter and artist as he walks, watches and recreates
it.
His work has been on regular exhibition in Europe,
in Canada and is currently on show in Brazil. |
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Please
click on the right silver arrow above to go to the first
poem in the sequence. The left silver arrow will take you
back to the Gallery start page. Then navigate through the
sequence by using the same silver arrows.
All
texts in this part of the Gallery site are copyright © Kate
Fowler, 2006, and all photographs are copyright © Gerrit
Offringa, 2006. All rights reserved. |
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