Thomas Denny

Thomas Denny trained at the Edinburgh College of Art and now lives and works in Gloucestershire. He has exhibited extensively throughout the U.K., and has had numerous commissions both as a painter and a skilled practitioner of stained glass. The exhibition of his recent landscapes on paper at the Frith Street Gallery will represent the bulk of his work over the last two years.

Denny travels throughout the British country-side, seeking landscapes which have an insistent elemental and historical presence – the downs in Wiltshire where Sarsen stones are scattered, the stone circle at Stanton Drew, the flattened landscapes of Sutherland and Lincolnshire. Drawings are made on site and then continually re-worked as paintings in the studio. The paintings thus become a re-invention of the subject – not an image of a single place or moment; rather, an accretion of colour containing the sense of light and time acting upon a site.

Consequently, Denny’s recent landscapes have enormous presence -dense in texture and rich in colour. Substantial and beautiful images themselves, they suggest that time is relative and abstract, while simultaneously asserting that all time is implicit in one object, or in a single space.