Exhibition: “Dorset in Inks” by Rachel Baynes

Our first exhibition of 2022 presents images in ink inspired by the Dorset landscape, including highly textured images, drawn with the knife and coloured with inks.

Rachel writes: “Perhaps it is not surprising as someone who started nursing at eighteen in the days before hoists and undertook university studies as a mature student with family responsibilities, that when after 25 years of designing and quilting for bed or wall I made the leap to painting it was the ‘hard way’: via several years of untutored lifedrawing.

In addition to re-training hand and eye, they increased my appreciation of curve in the clear unbroken line I had admired in 1930’s book illustrations and on railway posters as a child, and the curving lines of the Dorset landscape drew me to move here in 2009. Drawing remains the base of all my pictures, including those in oil or acrylic; textured works are mostly ‘drawn with the knife’.

I find exploring new materials, media and methods exciting, and though a reluctance to stick to ‘rules’ has limited success in watercolour, works exploring the appeal of saturated colour in inks have sold well in London and Reading as well as local shows, fill my sketchbooks and now inks colour some textured works, while others could be used for printing.”