Oxenhope Paintings
Tom Barnett
110 New Bond Street W1S 1EB
The moorland of West Yorkshire is an ancient landscape, and it would require as many millennia as it took to create to properly explore its every nook and cranny. Numerous precipitous valleys gouge through the eastern slopes of the Pennines, and this geographical area is in turn striated by the progress of mankind: roads, canals and railways, and agricultural and urban developments, create a tense dialogue between the natural and artificial world.
In January of this year Tom Barnett worked in Moorside, Oxenhope, which neighbours the Calder valley. The village lies eight miles north of Colden where he lived as a boy, and his school lay in Ted Hughes’ birthplace, Mytholmroyd, a couple of miles to the east. (The valley is also a stone’s throw from the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth).
Barnett attests that before working on the Oxenhope paintings he had been largely unaware of the power this stomping ground of his formative years had exerted over him, and was taken by surprise at the outpouring of creativity resulting from this reacquaintance. Two things are essential here: the childhood experience of a place that lies dormant, and the visit that reignites associations, bringing new things (in this case paintings) into being.
Oxenhope, with its population of less than 2500, is the focus of these works. Tom Barnett uses this small village to explore and expand upon the landscape of the Calder valley, West Yorkshire and England, and the realm of landscape painting itself.
