Balm for the soul

Mary Miers discovers the coronavirus has not dulled the taste for well-executed paintings inspired by Nature, nor impaired the dealer’s nose for sniffing out emerging talent

- Mary Miers

COULD we be looking to artists to lead us into the new Eden? The thought occurred as I asked six well-established gallery owners which of their contemporary artists are currently most in-demand and why their work is striking a particular chord.

Covid-19, it seems, has intensified what was already a growing interest in works inspired by the natural world, with landscape painting—in an echo of its flowering after the First World War—proving particularly popular, together with botanical art and other works on environmental themes.

‘People are sitting at home looking out of their windows. Landscape means so much to us; we’re British, we can’t help it. It’s a metaphor for everything,’ says Johnny Messum of Messums London and Wiltshire (www.messumswiltshire.com), whose two recent exhibitions of works by artist and environmentalist Kurt Jackson—watery scenes that explore fragile landscapes as they change over time—have been sell-outs.

‘There’s so much anxiety and uncertainty at the moment, people are turning to art to help lead them through,’ says Sarah Long, co-director of the London gallery Long & Ryle (www.longandryle.com). ‘We’re looking for paintings that feel optimistic, but also that have a depth, even a certain spirituality or sense of longing.’ She singles out John Monks, whose recent painting Distant Landscape, rendered in thick impasto, the paint poured on and scraped with a palette knife, the surface glazed in layers, views its subject from a huge, ambiguous space filled with shafts of light: ‘Never before has he connected the light within and beyond with such weighted contemplation and relevance.’