Josephine Trotter’s 25th Solo Exhibition, Cromwell Place review

'Look at all those greens!' exclaims the landscape artist, Josephine Trotter, as she surveys the rolling hills of her native Oxfordshire. To mere mortals, there are fields, yes, and they are green, but Trotter sees a kaleidoscope of greens, more subtle, more varied, more acute, than most of us perceive. Until, that is, we see her paintings.

Trotter’s 25th solo exhibition at Cromwell Place, which includes 60-plus landscapes, still-lifes and portraits, shows an artist 'still at the height of her powers' (said Ann Dumas, curator of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and curator of European Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas). Her gift for seizing and distilling in her paintings her first ecstatic response to a motif in nature brings to mind Van Gogh, an artist whom she admires, while her still-lifes, many produced in the dark days of studio lockdown, express an irresistible exuberance.

As a teenager, Trotter was tutored and mentored by Maurice Feild, a close associate of the Euston Road School, who insisted on a restricted palette of just five colours; it was only when she went to Chelsea Art School in the early Sixties that Trotter discovered colour. 'I felt very wicked when I went into an art shop and bought six tubes of different greens!' she says.

Besides the greens, there are, of course, contrasting colours in Trotter’s paintings. In Herefordshire, for example, the pinky reds of the fields and Hereford cows complement the greens and really makes them sing. There are five paintings of her beloved Brailes Hill and others from across the British Isles and Egypt. Allt-y-bela, a painting of the house belonging to the garden designer, Arne Maynard, is particularly intriguing.

Trotter is an unapologetically happy painter and what makes her happiest is that others find her work uplifting.

This is a truly joyous exhibition.

Cromwell Place, 4 Cromwell Place, London SW7 2JE