Art and Friendship Exhibition
from South London
Tuesday 12th to Saturday 23rd October 2021
Val Coumont & Linda Latter
Paintings, Drawings, Art Autobiography, Storyboards & Cards
We are showing artwork completed when together walking as well as work done individually. These are places seen, experienced and loved, for example, Val’s travels to the Hebrides, the Auvergne, India and Nepal and Linda’s holidays in La Gomera, Sussex and Greece.
Val has a series of “windows” and “doors” inspired by the colours of India and Nepal alongside some writing which grew from this intense experience.
Linda has a series of paintings entitled “meridians” on the theme of changes through life from youth, the middle years to the end of life. She also is showing two “Storyboards” based on poems.
We include our Art Autobiographies which have been developed by Val into her “Painting our Lives ” group in her work for the Mental Health Service.
I spent five years at art colleges and then taught art in Secondary Schools, the Youth Service and Adult Education. I also ran art groups for parents and children before working in educational advice. Later I re-trained in counselling and spent 35 years as a counsellor and supervisor including some teaching. Concurrently, I was in a peer-led art therapy group for many years. In the NHS, I also worked for 7 years with a group of patients using art and craft materials to improve their confidence, well-being and re-engagement. In retirement I now have more time for art.
Val Coumont trained as a psychotherapist in the mid-1980’s. While working at the Waterloo Community Counselling Project in 1988, she met Linda Latter, and the two have been friends ever since, sharing a love of painting and walking. They both became members of an art therapy group, and it was as a result of this that Val unexpectedly began painting in her fifties. She loves the undivided focus and absorption which painting requires, not dissimilar to the therapist’s undivided attention to her client in a psychotherapy session.
In 2007, just before she turned 60, Val visited India for the first time, and the main group of her paintings in this exhibition came from that journey. Travelling south from Mumbai in trains and buses, she visited towns and cities, temples and shrines, markets, coffee plantations and waterways. 9 years later, she began to paint this experience.
Other pictures are from journeys which Linda and Val have shared, particularly in the Scottish islands, and central and southern France.
In recent years, Val took inspiration from Linda’s art autobiography to create “Painting our Lives” groups within an NHS mental health service, as well as to record parts of her own life-story in pictures.
She lives in South London with her husband, a visiting cat, and an unaccountably tame fox.
Jane came to London aged 18 in the 1970's and attended the pottery evening class which started, for her, a life-long enthusiasm for working in clay. She studied at Harrow School of Art in 1977 and obtained a Higher Diploma in Studio Pottery in 1979. She had a stall in the Apple Market in Covent Garden from 1980-1983. As well as working in a studio in Pimlico selling pots to shops, a restaurant and at Craft Fairs, she started teaching in Adult Education Institutes. This followed with other classes in Youth Clubs and Day Centres. She has just retired from teaching Pottery at Sutton College and Penwortham Primary School where she taught mainstream classes, adults with learning difficulties and disabilities and primary school children of all ages.
Jane has always enjoyed creating pots on the wheel and the work on display in this show is all thrown. She uses a variety of clays to make bowls, bottles, jugs and vases which she decorates with surface texture, slips and Chinese glazes. In recent years Jane's focus has been on teaching and she has welcomed the opportunity to make a collection of work for this Art and Friendship exhibition in Sprout to sit alongside the paintings of Val Coumont and Linda Latter.
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