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Rose HILTON
(b. 1931)
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It is now twenty years since the Cornish artist, Rose Hilton, held her first one-woman show at Messum’s. The exhibition of her new work, to be held there in June, will be the first since her retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2008, and in it she is revealed as an artist at the height of her powers. After living for so long in the shadow of her talented but difficult husband, the artist Roger Hilton—twenty years her senior and latterly bedridden due to the long-term effects of alcohol—she is finally achieving the recognition she richly deserves. The show will coincide with the publication of a frank and revelatory biography by the writer and art critic Andrew Lambirth.
The recent retrospective at Tate St Ives was testament to the formidable reputation Rose has built over the years that followed Roger’s death as a St Ives artist of imagination and power. The connection to place, Hilton’s rootedness in the artistically fertile soil of West Cornwall, is asserted first of all by the use of local place-names in the paintings’ titles, but from the specifics of location she extracts something of the essence of the windswept headland on which she lives. Rose’s Cornish landscapes are, thus, a Cornwall distilled, but in no way reduced, and they are unembarrassed in their celebration of beauty, a quality for some reason often spurned by the serious-minded art establishment of today. As Rose says, “It doesn’t upset me if people say my work is decorative. I rather like it. You see, I’ve gradually worked towards being more decorative.”
Other recent developments in Rose’s work have included experimentation with monotype—the most painterly of the printing techniques and perhaps the most suited to Hilton’s calligraphic spontaneity. As Andrew Lambirth has commented, “One of Rose’s strengths as an artist has been her receptivity to new ideas. Since student days, she has never stopped learning.” This latest selection of her work is testament to the ongoing truth of that statement.
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