Tag: painter

Designer Desire: Muriel Delahaye

Montage of Muriel Delahaye artworks

This summer, we made a couple of day trips out to the seaside visiting Borth and Ynyslas; this week’s highlighted Designer Desire artist lives & works on this part of the Welsh coast.

Originally from Oldham in Greater Manchester, Muriel Delahaye moved to Borth around 50 years ago.
She described herself as a figurative artist.

In the mid 1970s, Delahaye won the MOMA Tabernacle Art Competition the theme that year was “The Sea! The Sea!” The subject of her winning painting was from the 7-part Greek book, Anabasis by Xenophon. It’s one of the paintings she has kept in her own possession. It was after this success that she began to concentrate on figures in a coastal landscape; she can actually see the beach from her studio.

Growing up in Oldham, our trips to the seaside were always a great event. I have always loved the sea, and the landscape around Borth is fantastic. It’s such a change from living in Oldham, which was full of people and had no landscape whatsoever. In an industrial town you don’t stop and say, ‘Oh what a wonderful sunset.’ You’re surrounded by people all the time; people coming from work, going to work, people talking about people. Coming to Wales I’ve found I have the best of both worlds – I’ve got the background of people plus the wonderful landscape to incorporate with it.

A lot of Welsh artists concentrate on landscape without figures but for me the figures are important. I’m interested in figures in the landscape, and how they’re reacting to that landscape or to whatever situation they find themselves in.

I concentrate on the people – they give me my ideas – but the sea often sets the atmosphere. I live opposite the sea and that’s the first thing I see in the morning when I get up and its always different – I love looking at it. Walesonline

Original works can be bought from Oriel Mimosa Gallery in Llandeilo and Oriel Tir A Môr Gallery, Borth. Prints and greeting cards can be bought from Delahaye’s own website.

UPDATE: Muriel passed away peacefully at her home in Borth on Friday 4th December 2020.

All images: Muriel Delahaye©

Additional image credit:
The Wales Weekly

Designer Desire: Marina Strocchi

Montage of Marina Strocchi artworks

This week’s featured Designer Desire artist hails from Down Under. Marina Strocchi (b. 1961) is a fine artist and printmaker working primarily with acrylic on linen.

Born in Melbourne to an Australian mother and Italian father, she has lived in Central Australia for many years – an environment that heavily informs her artistic practice.

She has exhibited internationally and her work is included in the collections of Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria.

In her artist statement, she explains:

The surface of the painting is my main concern, along with the structure of the drawing. I try to suggest the qualities of nature in my lines and colours. The landscapes of the central and western deserts are currently my primary inspiration. I am also inspired by road trips to places elsewhere. I sometimes take a point of perspective that could be described as a sweeping bird’s eye view. I use the patterns of nature and a desert palette to recreate fragments of memory. I have memories that seem to slowly become part of the present in my work. The openness of nature is what most inspires me.

Her work sometimes comes up for auction and is also available to purchase from Art Images Gallery, Jan Murphy Gallery, Studio 5 and Australian Galleries.

Portrait of Marina Strocchicredit

Here’s Strocchi, showing some of her most recent works which were inspired by a 2019 residency she undertook in New York.

Designer Desire: Wilf Roberts

Montage of Wilf Roberts paintings | H is for Homecredit

England has St Ives, Scotland has Kirkcudbright and Wales has Anglesey. It must be something in the air… or light that draws artists there or inspires their artistic sensibilities. Today, we’re featuring yet another Anglesey-based artist, Wilf Roberts (1941-2016).

His landscapes and cottages feel so Welsh – we really want to visit Anglesey some day soon.

Wilf, himself, explains his inspiration, subject matter and methods best of all:

I’m mainly inspired by Wales as it used to be. I don’t like modernism that much, so I tend to go back to my childhood and remember things as they were. The old cottages and farmhouses are quickly disappearing, but I make use of some of my old sketches to try to capture things as they used to be. I don’t really put anything in paintings that’s in any way modern except telegraph poles.
My painting is about the love and affinity I have with the island and in particular my own square mile at Mynydd Bodafon – for this is where I live and work, its paths are familiar to me and it’s where I’m most comfortable.
I make fairly quick sketches just to get the main outline of what I’m trying to do. All the painting is done back in the studio. I apply the paint with anything that comes to hand – mostly painting knives but also credit cards, my fingers, brushes, a pizza cutter, sticks – really anything I can think of that will get the desired effect.
I’ve often gone to a painting the morning after and scraped it all off simply because I’m not sure about it or don’t like it. It happens to about a third of what I do. You never achieve perfection, but you want to think you can get close to it. If a painting’s going well, somewhere towards the end, the whole thing comes together and makes some kind of sense. That’s when I feel, ‘Yes, I’ve achieved something’. WalesOnline

Portrait of Wilf Roberts

We brought a nice collection of art with us from Yorkshire, few of which seem to sit right in our new cottage. Hopefully, one day, we’ll own a Wilf Roberts piece (or two!) where it will be perfectly at home.

Additional image credits:

Attic Gallery | Martin Tinney Gallery | Invaluable

Designer Desire: William Turner

Montage of William Turner artworks

William Turner (1920-2013), or William Ralph Turner to differentiate him from his more eminent namesake, is considered the last of the great Northern Industrial artists.

Famously, Turner was the only person to have painted L S Lowry’s portrait from life.

We have had a fair few of Will Turner’s paintings pass through our hands; all of them are pictured above. We bought them from Dave Gunning, the art dealer with a gallery in Todmorden who is credited with ‘rediscovering’ Will.

In 2005, there was a long overdue retrospective of his work that took place at Gallery Oldham for which an accompanying book was published – William Turner, An English Expressionist. Another monograph by Stuart Archer & Bill Clark was published in 2010.

Here’s a rare interview with the artist done by Granada’s North West Tonight news programme.