5 February – 4 March 2022

The first exhibition staged at Gallery on the Green in 2009 featured the work of pupils at Settle Primary School. We have retrieved these pieces from our archives and will be displaying them again. This time with an invitation for the artists, who will now be in their late teens, to return to the gallery and see if they can identify their early work.

Were you at Settle Primary School in 2009? Do you know someone who was? Spread the word. And even if you were not directly involved come along and seen what marvellous and imaginative work our current teenagers produced in their days at primary school.

Coming of the spirit

 30 April – 24 June 2022

The harsh landscape of the North , from Settle to Shetland, is the inspiration behind Peter Osborne’s second exhibition at Gallery on the Green in two and a half years.

In 2019 he showed his water colours of the out barns of Bowland, drawing attention to the deteriorating state of buildings that once were central to the local farming economy. For his new exhibition he uses the deeper and more intense oil pastels to look at the relationship between the hard landscape of the North and its spiritual history.

The Lancaster based artists says: “The title ‘Oil Pastel North’ is two-fold: medium and subject, but they combine in a particular way.  The subject ‘North’ is, physically, from Settle to Shetland, but more deeply something else.  North is hard and challenging, further north more spiritual.  In the exhibition the physical things seen and the spiritual things encountered are juxtaposed:  near a Shetland cliff where the sea smashes into a wound of a geo, is the martyrdom of Edmond (from Pickering Church) into whose flesh tear the arrows.  The weather-beaten rocks of Brimham reflect the damage to an ancient Anglo-Saxon reredos.  Weather-torn posts on the bare fells take on the persona of the ‘old rugged cross’.  Thus images are shown together less by subject than for deeper rapport.

“In the small scale of the Gallery on the Green these themes need more intensity than water-colour can give but which oil pastel can.  It is not good for detail but it has a density in both colour and application.  It offers richness of colour, with clear hues and contrasts, and also the possibility of more expressive marks and handling, even impasto.  It feels more suitable for accommodating the hardness and suffering if the subject.”

Peter Osborne was born in Norfolk. His early memories are of foghorns at sea and bitterns booming!  Aged seven, he was invited by bird artist Roland Green to learn in his studio: cleaning brushes, meeting artist friends and learning to  draw.

After university he undertook post-graduate study at the Courtauld Institute, before going on to lecture at art colleges in Lancaster and Blackpool, eventually becoming  head of school at Blackburn.

Peter has exhibited at Abbot Hall. London Regent Street and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park . He has also featured in the Lunesdale Studio Trail.

He is chairman of Christian Arts, and in that capacity has exhibited  in Worcester Cathedral and Lancaster Priory Church.

Golgotha Stump