Alphabet Soup: Narrative artists – Shellie Byatt and Betty Pennell

Here be stories.

Shellie Byatt is the co-curator, and really the onlie begetter of this exhibition, it was her idea, after Clive’s folding alphabet primer and the open maquette exhibition at the Artlog, to have another on the alphabet theme, and her suggestion to make the black-and-white+1 stipulation.  As it says on her website, her images tell tales.

Here are her four offerings:

(Personally I am more than a little captivated by the Lady in the Lemon Chair.)

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Shellie’s friend Betty Pennell has submitted five images.  Betty says of her work:

Although I do make preliminary studies using a combination of photographs and sketches, memory has a greater role in the final work.  I sometimes find a perfect setting and a sense of place for my narrative paintings during visits to country houses throughout Britain, with their historic buildings and magnificent gardens in which I can imagine figures in mysterious situations.

Betty often works in black-and-white; to me this enhances the elements of elusiveness and memory, so that  these images seem to suggest something  known long ago but since forgotten.

She didn’t  want to apply any lettering to the pictures, so the captions added are those she attached to the images when she sent them.

Birds

Dog

Shelter

Temple

Urn

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More tomorrow.

(Lucy Kempton, minding the Artlog while Clive’s away!)