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A strong line-up of internationally recognised artists, new stars and leading South Coast maritime painters gives Artists Harbour Gallery a great array of fine work for its Under Sail ~ Past, Present and Future exhibition from May 17 to August 8 in Storehouse 9 at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard (entry to the Historic Dockyard is free except during festivals).
The sailing-themed exhibition, which runs until just after the Cowes Week Regatta in August, is timed to welcome to Portsmouth the Volvo Ocean Race, whose 70-metre high-tech boats have been covering around 600 miles a day. They are racing from New York, spending a week out of the water for public inspection in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard (between Artists Harbour and HMS Victory) then racing west around Scotland to Rotterdam. Thousands of people are expected in Portsmouth to see the boats.
A total of 20 artists have contributed to the exhibition, but the most spectacular work has been submitted by Robin Eckhardt, a 26-year-old woman from Buckinghamshire who was one of the star new artists at the London Affordable Art Fair in April. Eckardt’s Capping the Wind is a stunning 6ft mixed-media painting of racing yachts that lights up the gallery with brilliant translucent colour.
Former boat chandler Chris Wood, now a leading art teacher in Portsmouth and Gosport, will be painting in our gallery every evening while the boats are in, working on his dramatic boat portrait Race Leader: ABN Amro One Races for Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower (which will be published as a limited edition print). Chris, who is currently also finishing a seascape commission for an American client of Artists Harbour, has also painted a portrait of four of the six other Volvo boats racing towards Portsmouth.
Also on display is the latest limited edition print by J. Steven Dews, the Solent artist now resident in Australia whose originals command £40,000 upwards. The print in our gallery, showing Velsheda versus Ranger , two great J-Class racers, is No.4 from a worldwide edition of only 50, and is expected to be snapped up quickly.
Limited edition canvas prints by American yachting painters Christopher Blossom and Don Demers provide a comparison to Dews and Wood, but also have to compete with the fine work by Isle of Wight Member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists Martin Swan, whose racing yacht watercolours are bathed in a golden glow of evening light.
Sculptor John Mellows is on home turf with sailors and the Volvo Ocean Race; he makes the Outstanding Seamanship trophies that Musto awards at the end of each leg of the Volvo (which as the former Whitbread Round-the-World Race is the premier round-the-world sailing event). John is becoming used to selling his stunning stainless steel yacht, sail and bird sculptures at Artists Harbour; numerous pieces have now set sail from here to the USA and Saudi Arabia. In the exhibition we are proud to show No.3 in his Albatross Circling the Globe series, of which No.1 was commissioned by the Royal Ocean Racing Club for presentation to Dame Ellen MacArthur for her solo trans-global exploits.
Well-known in American auction houses for his fine historic studies of warships and harbours is South Coast artist Brian Coole, with three brilliant oil paintings of old Portsmouth in Victorian times.
American artist Carolyn Ross, a local in this area for six months every year, has painted a couple of big, vibrant, contemporary studies of Spice Island and Camber Dock in Old Portsmouth as they are today, complete with Spinnaker Tower, while Julian Bond has gone for small canvases of local waterscapes.
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