Lot 7 , Edward Chell, (b.1958), Soft Estate I, 2017, oil on shellac on 400gsm heritage acid-free watercolour drawing paper, 135 x 105 cm

Edward Chell
(b.1958)
Soft Estate I, 2017
oil on shellac on 400gsm heritage acid-free watercolour drawing paper
135 x 105 cm
£2,500-3,000
Edward Chell aims to “capture the collisions between the values and meanings we bring to our experiences of place, with a particular focus on borders and peripheral places.” In Soft Estate, he explores landscapes that have both been made accessible and also transformed by car culture. These motorscapes depict the kind of hidden, unseen, ignored landscapes we often drive past on motorways, dreamlike places of nature left to its own devices, existing somewhere between wild and cultivated.

Questioning the relationship between our experience of landscape and how we travel through it was also central Chell’s earlier series of paintings, The Garden of England, that drew on the 18th-century English landscape tradition to investigate the motorway verges of Kent. Chell exhibited the paintings in Little Chef restaurants, as the modern equivalent of the network of 18th-century watering holes that catered for the Grand Tour.

Chell has long combined his own practice with research and teaching. After a BA from Newcastle upon Tyne and an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art, he is currently Reader in Fine Art at University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury.

Publications accompany Chell’s exhibitions Soft Estate, Eclipse, Bloom and Phytopia. These books form a key part of his practice and combine elements of catalogue, academic publication and artist’s book.