Alison Neville- Cathedrals,Mosques, Madrasas and Little Houses 3rd-23rd November

Alison Neville is probably the most well travelled artist we have ever met.Her career spanning show at Curwen Gallery is a document of the many exotic places which she has travelled to and been inspired by.

       Alison Neville, Royal Albert Hall, etching, £450 fr

Alison Neville is an adept printmaker with a distinctive, characterful style.This show
builds upon a solid grounding of work from her early career (Westminster Abbey, Poets Corner was shown in Curwen Gallery's first show 30 years ago) and charts both a lifetime of work and of travel.

For me, the most significant factor in this body of work is that Alison is exceptionally accurate when capturing a sense of place.There is a feeling that Alison has absorbed so much from each place and then managed to transcibe this experience into a single image. Each etching is like a distillation of the essence of the subject location.For the places I know, I get a genuine feeling of nostalgia, for the many places I have never been I feel that I must go at once!From conversations with the other visitors to the show, I think these sensations are a surprisingly common reaction to this work. 

                             Alison Neville Mosque-Pesharwar, etching,£375 fr

Her most recent works document a trip down the Congo River.Last Tuesday evening (15th Nov.) Alison delivered a fascinating talk on this rare experience.From this trip she has created a series of delicately produced  etchings of the "Little Houses" she encountered while travelling down the Congo.The remarkable character of these makeshift buildings are what Alison has most faithfully reproduced. One gets the feeling that there are a wealth of different stories which live in the fabric of these little houses.Also, when the whole series hang together, there is a real sense of the narrative of Alisons own journey and the many stories which she could tell of this much mythologised river.

                                         
        Alison Neville,Congo River Series:The Widow's House, etching,£150 fr 
Alison Neville- Cathedrals,Mosques, Madrasas and Little Houses runs from 3rd-23rd November