Also in the Gallery

Michael Ayres | Frank Gillougley | John hall | John Muckle | Rupert M. Loydell | Michael Smith |

Kate Ashton & Gerrit Offringa

Waddenzee

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     She has remained largely unpublished as a writer of poetry and literary prose.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.

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.