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Painter and nature buff Meriel Cooper Wallace will be unveiling her latest works in a month-long exhibition which captures her fondness for nature and the true beauty of the kingdom.
Her last exhibition, which will be launched at 7pm at Lina's CafŽ in the Diplomat Area on Saturday, consists of 30 paintings including water-colours and mixed media.
The collection features tourist attractions such as the Bahrain Fort and the dhow anchorage near Bahrain Financial Harbour, as well as buildings, plants, flowers and birds.
Meriel's landscape paintings of Bahrain have caused a stir in the hearts of art enthusiasts across the kingdom. In her four years on the island, she has fallen in love with a side of Bahrain rarely seen by most.
Her fascination with nature has drawn her to Bahrain's private gardens, farms and undeveloped beaches providing her with inspiration for a series of landscapes. The influence of Bahrain on her art is overt in this series.
The landscapes are characterised by their more intimate sizes, subtler colours and a more distant perspective than previously seen. Meriel's painting of the fort consists of the fort itself surrounded by date palms and details of the barren ground in front of it.
In her Fisherman's Shack, Seef Beach, the shack reveals exquisite details of texture and colour but is still dwarfed by the expanse of blue sky. The structures are after all, manmade; while Meriel's true interest lies in their natural surroundings.
Meriel's Kenyan childhood has also left her with an intense fascination for nature, a love that has manifested itself in her landscaped gardens and large paintings of plants and birds.
Her garden in Barbar has provided her with endless inspiration over the years and she has also been influenced by artist Georgia O'Keeffe, which is evident in her work. Large flowers explode out of the canvas, surrounded by masses of green leaves, some perfect and others mottled, all painted with a precision and specificity that belie Meriel's medium, largely unforgiving watercolours.
Although stylistically different, O'Keeffe's influence is also clear in Meriel's Dartmoor Lamb Skulls where she renders in ink and bleach the skull motif that figures prominently in O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings.
However, O'Keeffe's strongest influence manifests itself in Meriel's approach to her art. Like O'Keeffe, she fiercely resists any attempt by her viewer to read her life through her art.
She paints, not to give voice to any statement or angst, but because she is passionate about the process of creating art and capturing the beauty and serenity that she perceives in her environment.
Meriel has also been influenced by American watercolourist, Patricia Tobacco Forrester, one of the artists with whom she studied while living in the US.
Like her mentor, Meriel's paintings are not 'slavish imitations of nature'. She interprets her surroundings through her love of nature.
Meriel's large hibiscuses, lilies, peonies and macaws assail the viewer. Unlike Tobacco Forrester, however, Meriel is far too pragmatic to be a 'plien air' purist, choosing at times to paint in her studio rather than in the open which gives her an even greater flexibility to interpret her subject matter and position it on her canvas.
