Paintings Built to Last @ Gissing Hall Hotel, near Diss. By Richard Inman.

Paintings Built to Last @ Gissing Hall Hotel, near Diss

By Richard Inman

This beautifully presented exhibition, in a spacious, well-lit gallery, shows the work of four artists and their very different approaches to built structures.

Barry Watkins shows portraits and assembled images. His greatest strength lies in landscape painting that evokes an actual place.

In Swansea Bay he combines photographic collage of buildings with robustly rendered landscape. Swansea Bay – Blue and Gold is painted throughout and is a stronger work. Here the artist uses the structure of waterways and rows of rooftops to create a complex series of horizontal ribbons.

Kay Ohsten spent two years producing watercolours from the Castle Mall development in Norwich. Her paintings depict building sites, complex structures, cranes, semi-dilapidated facades of buildings. In Red Cranes the artist finds strong abstract rhythms that recall David Bomberg. There is a strong sense of texture, rough walls, rusty metal. In Castle Gardens modern materials during construction are compared with the great tower of the castle.

David Jones's abstracts recall the 1950s and 60s. In River Through the City he makes poetic use of the theme. The robust shapes in tonal colour would be stronger without black lines included to sustain a balance.

Edith Raaby's ceramics make striking tower-like structures embellished with bold abstract shapes; they complement the painting admirably.

The exhibition is on 10am-5pm daily until February 24.