Artists – V

The artist Charlotte Verity painted Bottengoms, the house and garden of the writer Ronnie Blythe in Wormingford on the Essex/Suffolk borders, over three intense periods between September 2016 and April and July 2017. The watercolours she produced are painted on heavy sheets of paper, and are close to monochromatic. They evoke with poetic simplicity the garden created by John Nash from 1943, and cared for after his death in 1977 by Ronnie. In 2018 nineteen of these watercolours were exhibited at the Garden Museum, London. A selection is now available from Cobbold and Judd.Of ‘Their Bench ’ Charlotte has written:‘The bench was the first thing that I painted. It sloped down hill and just above it stretched a branch of an ash tree making a perfect horizontal in contrast. Its neglect was poignant but to me it resonated with conversations from the past. I imagined John Nash as well as Ronnie sitting there when both it and they were younger, observing and discussing the garden and other things. Cedric Morris was a frequent visitor as well as many figures from the literary world, so many animated conversations would have been had on it and around it’.Since graduating from the Slade, Charlotte has exhibited regularly in London since 1980 and in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. Her garden in SE London and now in Somerset, has been the focus of her work. By immersing herself in it by drawing or painting, she has developed a deep knowledge of the forms she depicts and her paintings are often meditations on broader ideas and themes.