The Claude Lorrain Experience

I was born in the town, and the first landscapes I noticed were ones printed in books, old paintings reproduced in black-and-white or in slighty weird colours. The world they showed, the castles and fields and distant hills, didnt much correspond to the world I saw around me in Bedford, and it never occurred to me that they should. They were obviously pictures of vanished or imaginary worlds. Most of us now are born in the town, and to us a landscape is bound to be a kind of pastoral.

Perhaps the most idealised of arcadian images are Claude Lorrains Italian landscapes. Their calm perfection makes them so distant that its impossible for us now to see the world that way. In fact its unlikely that even at the time his paintings were seen as accurate depictions. They only make sense as dream versions of the world.

But the English landscape itself a kind of dream version of England. The old churches, the fields and hedgerows, all the picturesque trappings we see through the train window are a bit of a fiction, not the product of the society we live in, but the preserved relics of an agricultural society that has largely gone. Thats partly why I often find Claudes landscapes a good starting point for my own work. The feeling they give me of being in a beautiful theatre set is the feeling I get in the English countryside.

John Workman, May 2025

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It gives us great pleasure to welcome John Workman to the new 73 fold! In Gallery2! (This name is temporary).

The Claude Lorrain Experience, an exhibition of mixed media paintings by John Workman, opens on Thursday, the 15th May 2025, 18:00 until 21:00 at Studio73: Gallery2:Arch 18 :SW9 8PJ.

The exhibition will run across the following 3 weekends, Thursday-Sundays; 14:00-18:00. Concluding on Sunday 1st June.

Please keep an eye on www.studio73art.com as there ought to be a soundtrack that features John, taking us through his artistic journey!