LONDON.- The Fine Art Society presents a major exhibition of British landscape artist Norman Ackroyd RA. The exhibition includes some of Ackroyd’s greatest expressions of Nature’s grandeur in prints and watercolours. Most of the 70 works in the show have been drawn from the period 1978 to 2000.
Norman Ackroyd is widely considered one of the great landscape artists. Drawing on the advice of his tutor at the Royal College of Art, Cecil Collins, to ‘Be single-minded. Just be a poet’, Ackroyd has remained true to his vision for the last 60 years. Ackroyd is inspired to his most powerful reflections on his native land by the extremes of Nature and weather, producing wild, romantic landscapes. His knowledge of the British Isles, coastlines and its remotest places is deep, encyclopaedic, and unrivalled, informing a body of work like no other in his time.
In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, the poet Andrew McNellie writes: “[Ackroyd] sees straight into and seizes things instantaneously as from mid-air, transmuting onto paper and into art what's always fleeting before eye and mind: the sea, sea-light, the sky in all its weathers, forms in nature and place, things waiting to be found and made new, if you are a seer, if you are an artist.”
Ackroyd’s total devotion to landscape has been unusual in his time, but so has his use of printmaking as his principal medium in a period when etchings in black and white could scarcely have been less fashionable. Gordon Cooke, Director of The Fine Art Society and print specialist, commented: “His working lifetime has coincided with a great flowering of printmaking as a whole and the foundation of studios and publishers throughout the world. His example and his enthusiastic support of prints as an art form have been of the greatest significance in the rise of interest in the medium in the past fifty years.”
Born in 1936, Norman Ackroyd studied at Leeds College of Art from 1956 to 1961, and subsequently at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1961 to 1964. Ackroyd has had many solo exhibitions worldwide and is represented in major public collections in the UK including the British Museum, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Scottish National Gallery; as well as internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery, Washington DC, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. !
Norman Ackroyd was elected a Royal Academician in 1991 and was made Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2000. In 2007 he was awarded a CBE for his services to engraving and printing. Ackroyd lives and works in London.
