Geoffrey Elliott was born in Derbyshire in the in 1935. He studied at Derby and Brighton Colleges of Art, and taught in both Brighton and Wolverhampton Colleges of Art , won an Italian Government Travelling Scholarship and emigrated to Australia in 1983. He has his own sea side studio in Cleveland , close to Brisbane , Australia . Geoffrey Elliott has travelled and worked in the U.K., Australia , U.S.A, Greece, Italy, Spain, Cyprus, Malta, Bali and Sri Lanka. . He has work in collections in the UK including Tate, British Council, regional art galleries, libraries, schools and in national and international corporate collections. He was commissioned to two large murals for public areas in SE Queensland , and six large panels for Rosehill Racecource in Sydney.

Of his own work Elliott has said: 'I am happiest painting in the landscape , or in my studio on studies done from nature. I try to capture the spirit of place, the very essence of its being. When painting I become part of the subject , birds and animals come close to me - without fear, behaving as it must have been at the beginning of time.'

 

http://www.geoffreyelliottartist.com/

 

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.