Painting from Memory

Introduction to the book:

"But should any of these rough abrupt parts be more strongly marked should the rocks and the broken ground distinctly appear and their lines be such as a painter would express by firm decided forcible touches of his pencil then the picturesque would begin to prevail and in proportion as that distinct and marked roughness and abruptness increased so far the character of the beautiful would decrease." Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful. 1812

Italy's influence on Tatton Park is pervasive: in the paintings of Milan, the prints of Venetian palaces and in the Italian Garden. The late Lady Egerton's own watercolour paintings, displayed inside the Mansion House, are equally indebted, depicting mountains and lakes of the Italian Alps.This book draws together a number of watercolours produced by Simon Pope in collaboration with watercolour painter Mike Hoyles, echoing Lady Egerton's journeys and her picturesque depictions of alpine landscape. Having walked in the Alto-Adige/Südtirol and the Brenta Dolomites in May 2008, Pope returned to Tatton Park to enter into dialogue with Hoyles. Recalling scenes from memory, Pope described views of lakes and mountains encountered in Italy. Finding common-ground in the language of pictorial composition, the paintings' production was shared by the two artists; a composite of imagined and remembered landscape, of the spoken-word and watercolour on paper. The paintings bound into this artists' book are the result of this process of negotiation and dialogue - between artists, landscape and the conventions of their respective art practices.