Charlotte Verity

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Karsten Schubert London is pleased to present Echoing Green, an exhibition of new work by Charlotte Verity. The work will be split into two parts, featuring paintings and watercolour monotypes across two consecutive shows.

Throughout her career, Verity has been preoccupied with the act of looking. For many years it has been in her immediate surroundings and the garden of her home in South London that Verity has found her source, not only for the beauty and colour of the natural world but for the opportunity to note the changing seasons and to depict the life cycles of its flora. Her work finds its focus in the overlooked and in what can be discovered by the painter’s eye. In contrast to the permanent nature of oil on canvas, the paintings capture elusory shifts in light and take shape over long periods of intense looking, with the artist observing methodically yet allowing intuition to take over until each layer filters seamlessly into a final image.

For Verity, the long stems, flowers, buds and leaves she works from provide structure: their natural curves and twists build a framework, a web composed of organic shapes and irregular lines that weave in and out of the pictorial space. Flat expanses of paint in muted colour lie next to intricate brushwork describing the curl of a leaf or intimating the fragility of a cluster of petals. This fine balance of detailed mark-making against fluid, painterly washes and heavier textures achieves a complex yet harmonious surface.

Echoing Green is the title of one of five new paintings on view at the gallery. It is drawn from a poem by William Blake and suggests notions of reflection, repetition and transformation over time. Verity’s paintings display their close affinity to these themes through motifs that echo one another and create reflections that are seemingly untethered from a time or place.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with text and haiku poetry by Rachel Spence.

Charlotte Verity is an artist who has honed a lucid and highly specific visual process to attain truth in her work. Fastidious observation is at the heart of her practice. In contrast to the fleeting nature of her subjects, the paintings develop slowly and have a suggestion of deep space and the wider world.

Whilst she has undertaken residencies and projects elsewhere, most notably a year-long residency at the Garden Museum, her garden in south east London has been and remains the focus of her work. For decades, she has immersed herself in it either by painting and drawing out of doors or by bringing elements of it into her studio to observe. With this practical restraint she has cultivated a deep knowledge and intimate respect for the forms that she depicts, and in this way, the paintings track the seasons and the passing of time. They become meditations on broader themes.

Since graduating from the Slade she has exhibited regularly in London since 1980, and in solo and group shows nationally and internationally throughout.