YORK Minster is one of the most iconic buildings in the north of England and the city where which it stands has long been a tourist trap.
Jake Attree was born in York and as a boy walked round the walls with his mother and father.
“It is an attractive city and I like the elevated sense on the walls or the minster’s central tower”, he says.
His paintings have covered a wide series of locations, but he keeps returning to his native city and its famous minster.
Never more successfully than in his big exhibition at the Crossley Gallery, Dean Clough, Halifax (until January 25), which has been about two years in the making.
This is a memorable show and particularly the two huge landscapes.
One shows the minster’s light stonework rising up above the red brick of many nearby buildings and the other a group of figures passing the building’s west door.
Jake’s furrowed brushwork and impressionist approach provide for a highly individual and characterful output.
He is an admirer of Pissarro, the French Impressionist, while two of the paintings on the exhibition, York Minster, the South Transept in Pale Sunlight and The South Transept with Figures, remind you of Monet’s famous Gothic cathedral pictures.
“I think Pissarro is an under-rated painter,” Jake says. “I like some of Klimt’s landscapes. There is some Klimt in this and also some Van Gogh.”
He enjoys using a limited palette, highly successful in works like Rover Landscape, Sienna and Grey and Blue River landscape.
York, Looking East from the Minster’s Central Tower is a powerful composition.
“Why go elsewhere to paint when there’s this wonderful building in the city where I was born?” Jake asks.
Visitors to this show will no doubt look forward to 2010, when Jake will have an exhibition in Huddersfield. The Halifax show will surely enhance his growing reputation.
In the Upstairs Gallery at Dean Clough there is some interesting work by a group of Romanian artists, entitled Illustrate This and sponsored by the Romanian Cultural Institute in London.
There are illustrations, boxed assemblages and some striking and emotive paintings by Amalia Dulhan, with feminine subject matter, and Stefan Ungureanu, with a warlike theme.
