Alan Cotton: Where the Light Takes Him

David Messum Fine Art proudly presents a new exhibition of paintings from Venice, Provence and Piemonte, by the celebrated British painter, Alan Cotton, to be held at their gallery in St. James’s this September.
Alan Cotton is an artist-traveller like no other. He is a landscape painter whose passions are for place and pigment and people. But as shown by the pictures in this exhibition, and the testimony of those he has met along the way, links with the living have proved the chief spur to his nomadic art. As a teacher, author, broadcaster and, essentially, as a dedicated painter, he connects with people and they connect with him. From Provence to Piemonte to Venice to the far west of Ireland, he celebrates the life within the landscape.

In his Venice pictures, which form the core of this exhibition, Alan provides a curious sensation that the city spreading before you, quite familiar to anyone who has visited before, was something you are seeing for the first time. As if we are looking over the artist’s shoulder, we see startling new landscape as they make their presence felt in richly impastoed oils.