In October and November, the Grange Art Gallery opens its doors to wide ranging and thought provoking exhibitions. Prepare to have your ideas and perceptions challenged.

6 – 18 October. Rob Upward. “High and Low.”
This is Rob Upward’s fifth one-person exhibition at the Grange Art Gallery, and he has called it “High and Low”, because his thirty paintings look at landscape from mountains to sea. “I have become fascinated by the predominant colours in different landscapes; for example, the red-brown vastness of the Nullarbor Plain in Australia, the black lava fields of Hawaii.”

20 October – l November. Amanda Davidson. “Imagination. Dead Imagine” (Samuel Beckett)
Amanda Davidson is a published children’s book illustrator, author, who works mainly in pen and ink, watercolour, oils and acrylic. In this exhibition, shared with Vince Donlin, they explore the meaning of self, perception, bereavement, imagination, love and life in paint.

23-15 November. Society of Sussex Painters.
“The work of members has always been fresh, lively, contemporary” says Barry Hinchliff, the society’s president. And this year’s exhibition will show the work of fifteen to twenty Sussex artists, each contributing up to four pieces of work. The society was formed in 1924. Since then, they have had annual and bi-annual shows, very often at The Grange.

17 – 29 November. Jim MacAirt. “Zen TV”
“We are mesmerized with phones, i-pads and widescreen tvs. I see that we are trapped in devices,” says Jim MacAirt. In this exhibition, he offers an antithesis to today’s intense preoccupation with watching. Showing abstractions, images that require no dialogue or theory.

Marian Philips

Sara Hill is a local artist. She attended Eastbourne College of Art and Design from the age of sixteen. She continued to paint when she left, but also spent time as a band photographer and promoter, designing logos, posters and record sleeves.

For over twenty years she has had many exhibitions, some solo, which have had local press coverage and her appearance on local tv and radio. She has also had exhibitions in London and as she says “from Southwold to Edinburgh”. A visit to Berlin resulted not only in sales but two successful exhibitions.

However, appreciation of Sara’s art is not limited to the world of art galleries. Some of her pastels were commissioned by BBC 1 for the “Randall and Hopkirk Deceased” remake. And some abstracts were used in an ITV production of “The Shell Seekers” starring Vanessa Redgrave. Her paintings also featured in the BAFTA award winning BBC2 sketch show “That Mitchell and Webb Look”. And Disney commissioned two of her paintings for a programme on its’ ITV children’s channel.

Her solo exhibition at The Grange Art Gallery in August consists of about forty paintings entitled “The Sea Calls My Name”. For, as she says, “My work is a mixture of seascape, figurative and abstract oils on canvas, colour energetic and thought-provoking.”

Marian Philips