Tom Deakins ‘Quiet Places’ Small Oils 1-30 November, 2014 open every day 10-5

Chappel Galleries Colchester Road Chappel Essex CO6 2DE 01206 240326

Email info@chappelgalleries.co.uk www.chappelgalleries.co.uk

I first encountered Tom Deakins’s work about ten years ago – the small oil painting on sale was a meticulously rendered im-

age of Great Dunmow’s roofline and pond, that was astonishing in its detail and soft autumn coloring, and which put me in

mind of Vermeer’s famous view of his home town of Delft, so lovingly was it painted. It is this intensity of feeling for a par-

ticular place that Deakins manages to capture in his work - not just how something looks, but also how he, as an artist, has

experienced it; the crunch of snow underfoot, or the smell of summer rain on tarmac, or the warmth of sunlight on a brick

wall.

Tom Deakins’s landscapes deserve to be more widely known, and this exhibition will go some way towards addressing that

omission. Although seven of his paintings are in public collections, including the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and

the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden, most are dispersed amongst his ardent admirers who recognize something unique in his

style and chosen subjects, whether a patch of scrubby snow-covered field with bare trees on the horizon silhouetted against a

winter evening sky, or a large cloud formation turbulently moving across a cultivated Essex landscape of cornfields and

hedgerows. His artistic vision is imbued with the sense of place that other artists - such as John Constable, Samuel Palmer and

Paul Nash - have written about at length, and indeed Deakins himself has said that his home in Great Dunmow and its sur-

roundings have been at the heart of his inspiration for over 40 years. His paintings all bear signs of the human activity that has

shaped the local environment, whether by agriculture or building, accident or design, and whilst being devoid of human fig-

ures, are saturated with human presence and meaning. These are not landscapes in the picturesque sense, but all carry a quiet

hint of the poetic, or the mysterious, the unexplained. Educated at Newport Grammar School near Saffron Walden in Essex,

Deakins went on to complete a BA in Fine Art at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University in 1980. Since then he has been teaching

and painting subjects that are dear to him, the vast majority of which are located within a few miles of his home, but occasion-

ally venturing further afield to Suffolk, Wales and the Lake District. This exhibition of more than forty paintings, completed

over the last decade or so, is a testament to his enduring vision.

Lesley Nolan A Trustee of the Fry Gallery