The Trecento Black Death robbed Siena of many of its innovative painters, but their work continues to exert an influence on those artists who share their clarity of vision and sensibility. In the face of the more recent pandemic, they continued their life-affirming practice, but with travel restricted, exploration took place closer to home, resulting in a time of reflection and paradoxically, one of regeneration and productivity. Those earlier painters were often working site-specifically for commissions and their depicted narratives were full of local detail, but their curiosity led them concurrently to develop universal abstract values – concerns that are fundamental to the current exhibitors who also find common ground in related sources, both historic and contemporary
                    Sharon Hall has immersed herself in the culture of Italy, spending long periods of time there and her interest in architectural structure is evident in her photographic work. She creates paintings with finely tuned colour and subtly inflected surfaces, using almost mathematical precision to create dramatic visual journeys.
  For Geoffrey Rigden, the National Gallery in London enabled close study of works such as Duccio’s ‘The Annunciation’ and Uccello’s ‘St. George and the Dragon’ that sustained an extensive series of paintings. He was the first of the four of these artists (with Harding, Morris and Webb) to become an artist in residence at Cyprus College of Art in Paphos, becoming familiar with the island’s spirited, if not always sophisticated, Byzantine tradition, which had itself sprung from Roman art and was in turn reinvented by the Italians.
For both Jennifer Harding and David Webb, the built environment of a specific location offers a starting point for a theme. In Webb’s case, a motif is often centrally placed within an enclosing framework, with subtle textures contributing to the ambiguity of positive and negative space often suggestive of a maritime setting. A hybrid of painting and printing was devised by Harding during a residency in Cyprus, finding an equivalent of the layering of space seen through lattice-like grilles and window shutters, whose foregrounds and backgrounds are made interchangeable by the tricks of Mediterranean light.
Certain early Italian paintings display an array of patterns to rival a cloth merchant’s sample book, and their intricate flat expanses provide a counterpoint to the perspective of tilework making deep recessive space. In a parallel way, Mali Morris’s luminously-coloured works orchestrate space through a loose configuration of grids and chequers, and she has likened the process of painting to the facture of weaving, echoing the warp and weft of canvas.
Sienese painters utilized abstract designs often with Arabic inscriptions, showing off exotic textiles imported from Iran and Iberia. Andalucia is a regular destination for Stephen Jaques who has become fascinated by the Islamic art found there, and his investigation of pattern emphasizes its inherent rhythmic and percussive qualities, which unemphatic paintwork makes more mesmeric.
From fourteenth century Siena to twenty-first century London, the threads of connectivity unspool like the cocoons of silkworms, since the simple (or not so simple) act of putting ultramarine, vermilion and ochre on a surface has survived for millennia and will continue to be a human necessity, in the face of declarations of the death of painting, AI or pandemics.

Jennifer Harding
2025

---