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Brenda Hartill is an innovative British painter / printmaker based in East Sussex where she has a studio. Her working time is also spent in her studio in the Andalucian mountain village of Gaucin in Southern Spain, and on visits to the wilds of New Zealand where she was brought up.
Her work explores the texture, pattern and light of landscape, and ranges from finely drawn figurative works to bold, heavily embossed abstract images. She is most interested in the strong light and shadow of Southern Europe, as well as remote New Zealand.
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Born in London, Brenda Hartill emigrated to New Zealand with her parents, in the late fifties, and was educated there graduating FA honours at the University of Auckland. She returned to London in the late sixties, as a graduate student at the Central School of Art and Design. She become involved in theatre design, and after marrying, spent a period lecturing and designing in University theatre in the United States (North Carolina State University). Hartill returned to London in the early seventies to take up a British Arts Council award in the National Theatre at the Young Vic under Frank Dunlop and Peter James. She then worked as a freelance designer at the National Theatre, (Fanfare for Europe "Twelfth Night" at the Old Vic), Criterion Theatre ("Rosencrantz") Royal Shakespeare Company, amongst others.
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In the early eighties, in search for more artistic independence, she turned towards printmaking and has successfully been publishing her own work from her own large studio in Southwark. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers (R E), showing regularly at the Bankside Gallery, London (next door to the Tate Modern), and at the New Academy Gallery, Windmill St. She often shows in the RA Summer Exhibition and the National Print Exhibitions in London, as well as many mixed shows countrywide. Her work is in the collections of many large companies , including BP, Bank of England, Global and BT, and her work is sought after by art consultancies, interior designers and architects worldwide.
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Printmaking - Etchings and Collaged Etchings with Carborundum
"Always with my work I like to allow the medium to dictate to a large extent the direction that I follow. I am a great believer in lateral thinking, and with my etchings I work on the metal plate, "going with the flow", keeping an open mind, and "riding" the happy and unhappy accidents that occur along the way. I also like to use the action of the acid very much as part of the creative process, and my recent themes of elements in the landscape-erosion, structure, water flow, texture and universal forms, are a gift to the process of etching .
To retain maximum flexibility I often work on many small plates at a time, and the final images develop out of collaging the contrasting elements in juxtaposition. The etching/carborundum series, "Fractured Earth", and "Broken Land", are developed in this way. The theme of the fragility of the earth grew from the earlier "Hot Rock" series, and my visit to New Zealand in 1995. The land is crisscrossed with dramatic reminders of very recent earth movements, thermal activity and earthquakes, which is less obvious in older landscapes, where erosion takes over. In New Zealand there is always a sense of underlying danger, of the possibility of cataclysmic changes to the landscape and our lives. Now we have global warming and a sense that man is dramatically, perhaps irrevocably, affecting his environment.
More recent collaged etching / carborundum work, explores the theme of chemical reaction and erosion. "Silver Meltdown" was developed from a plate that had accidentally been immersed in pure nitric acid, then the dynamic and eroded forms which resulted were cut and reworked. The addition of silver leaf for "Silver Meltdown" developed this idea, which led to the "Alchemy" (where I used pure gold for the first time), and "Metamorphosis" series."
Alongside the printmaking, Hartill also finds a more direct painterly approach refreshing, and has recently rediscovered the clear colour and overlaying possibilities of watercolour in her abstract works which serve to extend the vocabulary she uses. In addition the three dimensional have always interested her. The more sculptural embossed etchings and collographs have led to a breaking away from print on a single piece of paper to mixed media compilations - the "floating landscapes".
Brenda Hartill’s last solo show at the Attic Gallery was April 2007. The gallery always has a wide selection of her graphic work in stock.
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