The Great Atlantic Map Works Gallery

St Just based artist Melanie Stokes holds art related degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh, Dundee and Chelsea College of Art. She has enjoyed a number of solo and mixed exhibitions in recent years and is now pursuing a professional painting career with some vigour. We, at The Great Atlantic Galleries, are delighted to be able to introduce Melanie's work to a wider audience through this introductory show that will no doubt lead to greater things.

“I love to work crouched on the rocks that face the Atlantic Ocean. There is excitement in the silent, solitary act of drawing. Everything around me is moving, driven by the tides, the weather, the calendar and the efforts of man. My eye is drawn from the chaos to the frail rituals of tying up the boats, returning home. Moments in time notched up against the vastness of the elements in which we live. The finished drawing anchors me to the joy of being here.”

Melanie Stokes St Just-in-Penwith, November 2007

“This series of paintings is about my astonishment at walking around the edges of St Just-in-Penwith” in early summer and finding the landscape utterly transformed by flowers. My usual strides to the rocky coast with its mighty headlands have turned into little hops from one amazing clump of hedgerow to another.

“I have been completely enchanted by the waves of colour and splashes of detail that animate the land so close to the restless sea. All my paintings derive from drawings made in situ. I have sat under clouds of cow parsley along the stream in Kenidjack Valley, reminded by a Robin’s song that Nature’s eyes are upon me. Drawing is a world of silence and sound. The silence of concentration punctuated by singing water, birds, wing beats, the distant humming and buzzing of farm machinery. And then there is the lung-blessing air, ferrying its fragrant messages.

“The mystery of life cycles permeates the hedgerows: last year’s battered stalks blanket the base of new shoots and leaves. The last of the bluebells stand dryly under the new bracken unfolding on the cliff top… .

“These paintings are my songs of love.”

Melanie Stokes August 2008

www.greatatlantic.co.uk/stokes
www.greatatlantic.co.uk/melaniestokes