We are proud to showcase for 2020 a selection of our finest horticultural artists carefully picked to appeal to the discerning gardeners who we hope will be visiting our virtual Chelsea Show. We won’t this year have an artist in residence each day painting but we hope to have a surprise in store for you at the end of next week. The show has been held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, London every year since 1913, apart from gaps during the two World Wars and now in 2020. We look forward to your response to our wonderful stand, not this year on Southern Road close to the Bullring Gate, but next to our gentle millstream here at Molecey Mill, West Deeping.

This video focuses on the beautiful ethereal landscapes of the West Coast of Ireland in Connemara. Kenneth enjoys this primordial landscape and the way that it reveals a real sense of how world is changing and how nature is fighting back. The soft quality of diffuse light in Connemara and the dominance of water - both below in the sea and the bog, and suspended in the air - makes this a world where light diffracts and splinters in all directions. A land of rainbows and shards of colour where reason dictates none should be. For an artist like Kenneth Webb, who sees saturated colour where only the tiniest hint exists for others, it is an irresistible enticement.

The garden at Kenneth’s Ballinaboy Studio has always been an essential source of inspiration to Kenneth. Originally the garden was an area of natural peatland with some lovely patches of rock and local flora native to Connemara. Over the past 40 years Joan and Kenneth have nurtured the garden into an oasis of colour and texture, with a variety of enchanting environments and spaces including the water lily pond, a woodland area, patches of poppies and irises and astilbes.

Blackthorn with Moon is a theme Webb has taken on several times through his long career, notably in the late 60s/early 70s. The spectral image, the bare skeletal structure highlighted by the brightness of the moon, appeals equally to Webb’s spiritual and graphic sensibilities. For an artist who is possibly best known for his colour use, this theme may seem at first to be an unlikely choice, but Webb sees intensity even in the darkness of the night.

This week we return with the third video in our series of Kenneth Webb’s exhibition ‘Resilience through Colour’, which explores Kenneth’s love of textures, shapes and colours in the rock formations on the West coast of Ireland.   Kenneth's daughter, Jenny Davies, explains this beautifully:  Webb’s favourite places are all where the weather plays freely, unfettered by the resistance of humans, such as the West of Ireland and the open wilds of Dartmoor. There, wind and water shape the land, stripping away the cultivated and superficial and exposing bare rock. Indeed, only the strongest rocks survive the worst ravages of weather, predominantly granite and bluestone. Webb has always loved these rocks. In particular, he is fascinated by the monumental element of the stone against the other elements, and the textural contrast of their surfaces. Most of his rock studies - be they small outcrops or towering mountains - are therefore set against the delicate transparent texture but intense colour of wildflowers, or against the smooth, powerful movement of water as sea or lake. This balance of elements epitomises the harmony that exists in Nature without intervention, and which allows the soul to breathe easily. 

Poppies have been a recurrent theme of Kenneth’s oeuvre since the 1960s. He is constantly drawn back to the enduring challenge of capturing their simplicity of form in his bold, textured brushstrokes. The tint and colour of the poppy varies so greatly, with season and light and movement. Sometimes the light shines entirely through the petal as though transparent, at other times the colour is opaque, creating what Kenneth describes as ‘an exhilarating impact’. Whilst an individual poppy may enchant, when grouped in a great display, the impact can be tremendous.

In his eternal endeavour to reveal a landscape’s spirit, Kenneth Webb is drawn again and again to the peat bogs of Connemara, in the far west of Ireland. In few other places is that spirit so strongly felt, where the direct touch of man is light and the vista is (almost) entirely earth and sky and water. Where nature’s base elements are so raw and pure, so distinctly alive, it is easy to hear the landscape’s voice and feel its emotion. No wonder that some of Webb’s students, treated to a rare fine day in a little-known isolated spot in that vast wilderness, huddle together for comfort. Exposure to the primitive can be intimidating, even frightening, and stories of horror and the supernatural abound in such places. But Webb thrives in this land, more alive by far when ankle-deep in peat and heathers and windswept by the salt- laden Atlantic gales, than in manmade civilisation.