LONDON.-Sam Shaw paints moment by moment to capture the essence of the landscapes before her. A new exhibition in October at London’s Cork Street Gallery will showcase this East Anglian artist’s recent work which ranges for inspiration the length and the breadth of the British Isles. The exhibition continues the revival in interest in contemporary art towards painting in a traditional, albeit abstracted, manner.

‘A location is just a starting point for me,’ the painter explains, ‘though I’ve set up my viewpoint in, say, Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire for example, I’m actually weaving a whole tapestry of effects to try and capture that first moment or even the slight shift in light or reflection that first caught my attention. It’s incredibly difficult to interlace light, texture and mood together effectively – actually it sometimes takes years.....I find some places evoke my response to them a long time later because my imagination is fired by the place itself and my mind goes on working within it. ‘Wicken Fen’ is a prime example as I first visited there with a friend some years ago – I think this painting, although finished recently, is a distillation of the process I go through in thinking about a location.’

Trained at City and Guilds of London Art School and a prize winner from the Royal Academy of Arts, Shaw paints in the English Romantic tradition and tries to look above and beyond the tangible. This concept of looking beyond the material reality is in part inspired by a long heritage of British landscape artists – Turner, Palmer, Joan Eardley and Winifred Nicholson are cited by the artist as formative influences under the original guidance of her C & G tutor, Eric Morby. Further, it is possible there may be a genetic legacy as several of Shaw’s antecedents over the last three generations painted - including her great great grandfather Sir Howard Elphinstone, extraordinary confidant to Queen Victoria and the subject of a recent biography. The royal link is still maintained as Shaw can count H.R.H. The Prince of Wales among the many influential collectors of her work.

A painter since childhood, Shaw now lives with her husband and three children in rural Hertfordshire after intentionally leaving the city behind her. More than thirty recent works will be hung at The Gallery in Cork Street – starting points for the paintings include Holkham Beach in Norfolk; Ingleton, Whernside and Pen-y-Ghent in Cumbria; Dartmoor; Loch Spelye on the island of Mull, and the Dales National Park as well as the Orkneys. Shaw offers the preliminary pen and ink sketches alongside the paintings as a more complete record of the process she follows – carefully weaving the foreground to the background of a scene with infinite care, holding the landscape in creative tension. In the moment.