onionbagblog

The summer season is upon is - Rose & Crown booze, Regattas (Rowhedge this weekend) and a rumour I hear of Jazz on the Quay on 26th June. Plus there’s also the wonderful Water Marks, the annual Wivenhoe Summer Exhibition at The Nottage.

Local artists Pru Green, Alison Stockmarr and Barbara Peirson are exhibiting in the splendour of the old building, each Sunday from 2 - 5pm, all the way through until 11th September.

It’s a three pronged artistic assault covering ceramics, salvaging & stitching and more traditional oil based landscape paintings. Individually the artwork is excellence - collectively it adds a strong Wivenhoe theme across the different mediums.

What I really liked about Water Marks is that the Nottage has been laid out not with each artist in isolation in each corner, but the hat trick of talent is exhibited together.

More than the sum of the parts etc, with each item of art enhancing the others around them. If this was the Tate Modern then the awful ‘multi-media installation’ artistic twaddle might be banded about.

Thankfully this is Wivenhoe; Water Marks is a collection of local talent working together.

Plus you get to look around the Nottage, always something of a local treat. The smell of history literally hangs off those walls - or maybe that was just the high tide drifting in the aroma of the Pooh Factory upstream from the Hythe?

Either way, I’m always a sucker for all things maritime - much like Water Marks itself. This is an exhibition that could only come out of Wivenhoe. You’ll recognise local landmarks within the work, and see them through a different perspective.

A return visit is likely - probably with booze, hopefully with wallet.