Petleys

Edward Beale has always lived in London and this is where he produces most of his work. Although much of his work has been made form the immediate environment around his home in Lambeth, he also paints in Kent, Somerset and the Western Isles. He works mostly in oil paint but he also uses gouache. Drawing is an important part of his working experience as is print-making in the form of etching.

Many of his rooftop townscapes are painted near his home and show the changing scene over two decades of demolition and redevelopment. Local streets, such as Walnut Tree Walk and the famous Lambeth Walk, all feature regularly in his paintings. But the paintings are not topographical views, they are about the feel of the place and the moment. This is the real subject of all his work and is very evident in his response to rural landscape. Here he often uses gouache, partly because it is convenient in more remote places to work with a lighter, water-based medium, but he uses it in the same robust and immediate way as he does with oil paint. In recent years, he has also worked in the old East India Dock area near the Lea River where he has made large paintings of the wide views across the Thames and towards Canary wharf and the Greenwich peninsula.
He always paints in situ directly from nature. This explains the sense of immediacy and spontaneity that pervades his work. His liberal use of thick oil colour gives a robust physical presence to the paintings. He can show the Thames as quiet and smooth as silk, with sailing boats or barges barely breaking the surface, or swaying with the heaviness of a high tide or the motion of white crested waves. Sudden changes like a downpour in summer when dark clouds appear out of nowhere are conveyed with a sure application of heavy tones and slashing marks.
Edward says, "in all my work, I want to make the viewer aware of the process involved. So in my paintings I try and make the paint itself equally as evident as the subject matter. I like the robustness of impasto paint and the way its unpredictable nature ca suggest different possibilities. I usually work at completing a painting before it has a chance to dry.
I am interested in the way brush strokes can be made to serve as equivalents for the things I paint. Whether I am working from landscape or anything else, I am interested in expressing the feel of the bulk and shape of the forms in front of me. So I am not aware of trying to paint my emotional response to the landscape, instead I want to get across the way I make sense of the forms and other elements and the way they seem to interact within the composition".

Claire Edwards

A selection of works can be found here on our website:
http://www.petleys.co.uk/works.html