Art - Miranda Ellis

I meet Miranda Ellis on Monday morning in the Chalk Gallery at the tail end of her hanging process. She’s looking a bit harassed. The first thing she does is apologise, “I was up until 2 am last night”, she tells me. “I’d completely underestimated how long it would take to frame everything up for the exhibition”. Although it seems she needn’t have stayed up quite so late, as the floor is filled with excess artworks. “Now I’ve brought it all here”, she says, “I’ve realised that it’s much stronger to have just a few images”. She’s right. In one corner there are four or five of her oils on canvas and two or three watercolours. In the window - a couple more oils, but it feels like more. It’s the intensity of the colour that seems to fill the space. Rich hues of oranges, reds and purples. Exotic.

“All the work here is from the last six months”, Miranda tells me. “Last time I brought a selection from different time periods but this is far more concentrated.” I ask her why this period has been so prolific. “I’ve done a lot of travelling this year”, she tells me, “I’ve always been inspired by travelling. I like painting other countries and representing that first reaction to the landscape - the sort of shock encounter.” The resulting pieces chart her visits to Paris, Costa Brava and Morocco. A series of three or four are of the Sahara desert, some painted at sunrise, others by moonlight. Whilst the composition remains largely the same - a group of camels dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape around them - the richness of the colours suggest a variety of different moods.