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Overview
"Striving to capture the weather on the canvas; the emotion that the rain or sunshine brings us using colour and brush movement, [Potter's] paintings are about trying to find that elusive otherworldliness that strikes a cord within ones' soul"
Georgina Potter is a contemporary British painter celebrated for bold, expressive oil paintings of the British landscape. Working predominantly en plein air, directly from life, outdoors, she captures the ever-changing moods of the British countryside. Her work is held in private collections worldwide, and she is represented by Gladwell & Patterson. Georgina's path to painting was not a conventional one. Having first pursued fashion, she quickly recognised that her true calling lay elsewhere. Inspired by the great British mid-century painters, she committed fully to painting and spent several formative years building her technical foundations through sustained studio practice.
Her work gained real momentum when she moved from painting from photographs to working directly from life outdoors, discovering that the unpredictability of plein air painting - the shifting light, the sudden weather, the physical presence of a scene - brought an energy and honesty to her canvases that no studio reference could replicate. Today, Georgina paints instinctively and at speed, working on small boards on location before translating these into larger studio pieces. Her tools are unconventional: brushes share the canvas with palette knives, fingertips, and whatever is to hand. She covers the whole surface loosely from the outset, building up the painting in decisive, layered marks and stopping before a work becomes over-worked. The result is painting that feels genuinely alive. She has exhibited with the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (2020, 2022, 2023), the Royal Society of Marine Artists (2021, 2023), the ING Discerning Eye, Chelsea Art Society and the Bath Society of Artists. Her prizes include the Diana Brooks Art Prize, the Yoshimoto Prize, and 3rd Prize in the Broadway Arts Festival Plein Air competition (2019). She has been longlisted for the Jackson's Open Painting Prize and in 2019 was selected as an Ambassador for Cranfield Oil Paints.
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Works
Georgina Potter
Sparkles from the WestOil on Board20 x 50 cms / 7¾ x 19¾ inchesFurther images
Description
Inspired by the landscapes of Cornwall, Sparkles from the West is less concerned with depicting a specific location and instead centres on atmosphere, texture, and the changing qualities of natural light. Potter often keeps her settings intentionally ambiguous, allowing the scene to feel open and familiar rather than geographically defined. Using expressive brushwork and layered colour, Potter creates movement throughout the composition, from the shimmering water to the rugged coastline and expansive sky. Soft muted tones are contrasted with brighter highlights that draw attention to the shifting reflections across the surface of the sea.
on locationA morning with
Georgina Potter."My work often starts with some scribbles. Nothing special," Georgina reflects. "The minute you take the pressure away and stop trying to do something perfect, something beautiful can appear." It is a philosophy that runs through everything she does - and one that explains why her finished oils feel so alive. Working en plein air across the British landscape, Georgina doesn't observe nature from a distance; she immerses herself in it. Her paintings unfold in real time, in response to changing light, shifting weather, and the physical experience of being present in a place. What results is a body of work that holds both the fleeting and the timeless simultaneously — a quality that no studio-based process could replicate.
Watching Georgina paint on location is to watch someone operating entirely on instinct. Intensely focused, she steps back from the canvas repeatedly to read the whole composition before moving in again with swift, decisive marks. Speed is deliberate: she covers the entire surface loosely from the outset, building structure before detail, and stops long before a painting risks being overworked.
Brushes are just one tool among many. Georgina reaches for palette knives, her own fingertips and scraps of kitchen roll as freely as she reaches for a brush - whatever the surface and the moment demand. This resourceful, hands-on approach builds layers of texture and depth across the canvas, giving each work its own distinctive, unmistakable character. Alongside her, keeping faithful watch, is her black Labrador Wilbur, occasionally catching a flick of paint on his coat as the work progresses.
Central to Georgina's practice is her colour palette, developed over years of sustained work with Cranfield Oils, for whom she serves as an official Paint Ambassador. The rich pigments and depth of tone these paints offer have become inseparable from her artistic voice, enabling her to push colour beyond what the eye strictly sees, interpreting the mood and emotion of the British landscape rather than its exact appearance. Warmth, atmosphere, and a painter's instinct for colour are what distinguish her canvases from simple landscape records.
Georgina is candid about what brings out her finest work. "I don't mind painting on my own, but I do prefer knowing someone else is next to me or around the corner doing the same as me," she explains. Fellow painters have become some of her closest friendships, offering a rare mutual understanding of the creative compulsion that drives her. Her most rewarding paintings - and often her strongest - emerge in moments free from agenda: on a family holiday, in a field she happened to stop in, perched on a cliff edge with no plan beyond the view in front of her. "Impromptu painting always brings out my best work, especially when I have zero expectation of what I will produce." Sometimes she paints an entire work with a single brush from start to finish. The instinctive energy of those sessions, their honesty, their directness, is visible in every stroke.
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