Lorraine Bewick
Lorraine Bewick is a painter working full time from her studio in west Norfolk. She is originally from Oxford, and after leaving school spent three years travelling in Europe and West Africa before studying fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic, where she took a degree in painting.
She then lived in London and worked for Tiranti, the sculpture specialists. She moved to Essex in 1992 and commuted to London for another ten years, lecturing at colleges around the country on technique, and in 2002 became an art technician at New Hall School in Chelmsford. It was in that period that her own practice turned towards the landscape of eastern England. She moved to Norfolk ten years later.
Artist Statement
As an artist there is something I find acutely compelling in the landscapes of West and North Norfolk. The empty, isolated panoramas of the Wash and of the North Norfolk coast are a short trip from my home and my paintings draw strongly on the sense of space, light and atmosphere that I find there.
The Wash in particular fascinates me. A place without human presence, its shifting vistas of mudflat, salt marsh, sand and open sea combine with changes of weather, time and light to create at times, a vast, featureless emptiness. The shifting and blurring of the borders of earth, sky and sea fills me with a sense of awe and sometimes of danger and I find excitement in the often iridescent light.
The challenge facing me as an artist is to remake on canvas the monumental yet momentary and fluid qualities that I encounter in these environments and their natural phenomena.
