ART EXHIBITION: Elspeth Hamilton, View Two Gallery, Liverpool

Mar 13 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

CROSBY-BORN artist Elspeth Hamilton has been celebrating her 65th birthday with her first Liverpool exhibition.

Her show, Lifelines, opens at the View Two Gallery, in Mathew Street, today and Hamilton was there to see it off in grand style.

Now living in Cornwall and London, she was meeting up with old friends from her time studying at the Liverpool School of Architecture in the early 1960s. At least, those who remained in the city.

Since leaving the school, she has worked as an artist, architect and teacher, all careers she suggests are interchangeable.

"Women tend not to have careers, they have lives," she says.

Her life has certainly been a varied one, although some of it she prefers to keep private. But she does say the land she owns on Bodmin Moor she hopes one day to develop into an educational centre for "exploration and quiet study".

It is also where she paints in what she describes as a "half-built studio". She prefers to work in the outdoors where she does not so much sketch as "prepare paintings".

The exhibition contains a good number of her landscapes and seascapes, highly stylised, perhaps echoing her interest in mathematics and science (one London exhibition of hers featured equations, poetry, her paintings and a dinner party).

She uses bright colours in her work which captures rock faces particularly well along with the pounding sea which surrounds Cornwall’s rugged coastline.

Along with her large paintings are smaller works, gentler landscapes but with at least some containing brooding clouds (they came from a storm she observed last year while travelling).

There are also some mixed media paintings (watercolours, ink and oil pastels) she painted of the Crosby shore where she grew up.

The Iron Men feature in one, more crowded together than in actual life.

It is the large landscapes which impress most, however, full of life and swirling motion and very evocative of the Cornish scenery. Although she has had various exhibitions elsewhere, this is her first in Liverpool.

Some time ago, she simply arrived on the gallery doorstep and asked for an exhibition. Owner Ken Martin took one look at her portfolio and agreed.

"I particularly wanted to exhibit during Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture," she said.

* LIFELINES opens today at the View Two gallery and runs until April 12.

philipkey@dailypost.co.uk