The paintings, prints and drawings of Elizabeth Talbot evoke a mysterious and silent world devoid of human presence and recall the spectacle of the 19th century Romantic tradition. Their sense of scale moves from English pastoral to the delicately silhouetted forms of Chinese mountain regions.

Working from her urban studio using imagery retrieved from the literature of travel, Talbot’s work relates to the representation of landscape and as a memory rather than directly experienced. These paintings present a powerful combination of intensity and timelessness, remote from everyday reality, that reflects a sense of longing for the natural world as an ideal and mirror of inner states of being. These qualities are enhanced through delicate surface qualities with minimal evidence of brushwork, resulting from a gradual build up over weeks and months of countless thin layers of paint. The paintings have a way of leading the viewer through to focus on distant horizons, whilst at the same time making the position of the viewer ambiguous.

These are paintings that draw the viewer in to contemplative spaces that supersede specific national or regional identities, but with which viewers readily find an affinity.