Leaves from a Book of Hours

Last Friday evening I was invited to a private view of an exhibition of watercolours by Rebecca Hind at St John's College Barn Gallery here in Oxford. Rebecca Hind is an Exhibiting Artist and Tutor in Painting and Drawing at the Ruskin School in Oxford and at Arts in Provence.

My invitation and contact with her comes from a long-standing friendship with her parents from my days in Yorkshire, where her late father was an Anglican priest, and her mother a resourceful vicar's wife and local historian, and it was a great pleasure to actually meet up with her again after more than twenty years of contact only by e-mail.

I have seen a previous exhibition of Rececca's paintings in 2008 at the Museum of the History of Science, which were watercolours of the moon, and they can be seen at MHS | Moonscope Lunar watercolours by Rebecca Hind

She is the author of Sacred Places, Sacred Journeys and The 1000 Faces of God, books which link spiritualiity, art and architecture.

Her latest exhibition at St John's she has entitled Leaves from a Book of Hours.

Her watercolours can be seen as being at the interface of representational and non representational forms, executed in large format and depicting cosmic forces and features in a striking combination of precise detail and broad swathes of subtle colour.

The Word

Image:oxonarts.info

When I was bidding my farewells to Rebecca I said that I assumed everybody was pointing to the reference to the final line of T.S.Eliot's Little Gidding, "And the fire and the rose are one", in respect of her painting "The Word", but she told me I was the first to make that connection. To me it seemed an obvious image of what Eliot was writing about, and I am surprised no-one lese was struck by the parallel.

The exhibition is open on weekends from 25th October until 9th November 2014 and by appointment. Please visit http://bit.ly/1DEnc9Q for further information.