In his near 70 year career as an artist Garrick Palmer has excelled in every medium he has adopted through painting, wood engraving & photography & his work is in The Tate, Southampton City Art Gallery, Reading Museum & The Towner in Eastbourne but by far the largest body of work is in the collection of Portsmouth City Museum in his hometown with the earliest paintings dating from the 1950s & every decade represented thereafter.
Born in Portsmouth in September 1933, Garrick Palmer has remained in the area all his life and now lives in Horndean, in a house given over almost entirely to his art as evidenced by rooms filled with stacked engraved woodblocks & prints, photography equipment and at the very top, with apparently the best natural light, his painting studio. While the younger artist David Hockney has adopted technology to work on a large & prolific scale Garrick Palmer continues with the laborious & for him somewhat tortuous process of making paintings on large canvases using brushes & paint.
His exhibitions have spanned from 1956 until now and shows the incredible work he has created. Having a second career in his photography means this artist is multi-talented and it will be great to see some of his photography never previously displayed. In his 2018 exhibition at the Yellow Edge Gallery, he said “My past work, exhibitions, and CV are well documented on my website, but I would be reluctant to forecast beyond, suffice it to say, I am still working. For as long as I can recall, I have had a love-hate relationship with wood engraving. It is by nature a very exacting medium, progress is very slow and painstaking. The final print, to be left for as long as possible will reveal whether or not it meets one’s expectation. Any signs of an excessive use of white line is, in my view, the fore runner to disaster, followed by the prospect of re-facing. It could be one reason why I have produced such a modest amount of wood engravings.”
The Jack House Gallery is very pleased to open a third solo show of work by this fine local artist in what is his 89th year. The exhibition is on from the 1st April until the 28th April. ‘Reflections’ will feature some powerful new paintings made during the pandemic alongside a selection of his extraordinary unmistakeable wood engravings of Hampshire landscapes and for the first time some of his photographs.
