Contemporary Fine Art @ The Piper Art Bar

James Longueville PS RBSA After the undoubted success of our past exhibitions of James's work, we are delighted to welcome him back this summer. James has been painting around his beloved East Anglia again for this show, but with works from recent trips to Venice, France and London to name but a few also included. Born in 1942, James first had a career in Fleet Street journalism. He started to paint professionally in 1972, concentrating on the landscape around his South Cheshire studio. His work is traditionally figurative influenced by a long line of exponents in European Landscape painting from Boudin, replica watches Constable and the East Anglian School to Wilson Steer, Seago and others. He learned much from the fine North country artist, Angus Rands. James's talent for painting is rare, in that he is equally skilled & respected in oil, pastel and watercolour. "I paint daily," he says, "and two of the places to which I keep returning are East Anglia and Venice. In essence, they have much in common and their subtle earth colours call for my low key palette. The places in themselves are totally dissimilar; East Anglia with its broad horizons and Venice with its more intimate charm; but they are equally able to excite the painter. It is no accident that both have been the en pleine air studios of landscape painters for the last two hundred years." He successfully captures colour, light and atmosphere in his paintings. Being interested in, and/or excited by, his subject is of paramount importance to him. As all painters, he is fascinated by light and its interaction with colour and activity. James Longueville has twice won the Patterson Pastel Award at the Pastel Society and was awarded the John White Memorial Prize at Patterson's Venice in Peril Exhibition in 2010. He has exhibited regularly at the Mall Galleries, London with the Royal Society of British Artists, Royal Society of Oil Painters and the Pastel Society of which he is a highly regarded senior member and was elected to the Society in 1983. James's has also exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Cambrian Academy and with the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, of which he was elected as a member in 1989. His work hangs in public and private collections as well as in significant corporate collections in this country and abroad.