Dan Wrightson exhibits in our gallery
NLAN artist Dan Wrightson is exhibiting a number of his watercolours in our gallery on Lancaster Road in New Barnet until March 6th.
Dan paints buildings and landscapes in the moment and in the weather – what the French call “en plein-air” -with pencil, pen and ink and watercolours; materials that are easy to carry and easy to work with in the field, similar to those used by the traveling artists of the Grand Tour. Working directly from reality allows him to record the moment as well as the scene – the weather, the sounds, passersby who stop to look are all part of his experience and therefore all in the picture. Dan often writes notes on his work about the details around him, or the history of the building he is painting, and these form part of the work.
Dan is a member of the “Brass Monkeys”; a group of artists who go out painting in any weather; a member of the “North London Artist Network”; a group of professional artists based in North London, and an associate member of the United Society of Artists, a group founded in the 1920s.
Dan was brought up on a self-sufficient farm in Tuscany with no running water, no electricity and no phone, but a lot of helping his stepfather re-build the house. He went on to study Art in Florence and then read Architecture in Cambridge and Sheffield. He was an architecture Scholar at the British School in Rome, where he painted a series of images of the buildings seen by the 10th century bishop Sigeric when he traveled to Rome to be made ArchBishop of Canterbury. Dan is now an ex-architect who loves buildings: medieval buildings are all about the relationship with God, renaissance buildings about the birth of the individual and his favorites; late 19th century buildings, all about the structure of society.”
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