Ollie Tuck: Small Pleasures
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Overview
"This collection has been a year in the making and my intention from the start has been to tell the story of the small pleasures that punctuate the seasons. From cosy holiday cottages to seasonal produce and Spring bulbs coming into bloom, each painting in this collection tells its own small story of simple pleasures. Of the paintings I've worked on over the past twelve months, these are the paintings that best describe where I've, personally, found moments of joy throughout the seasons" - Ollie Tuck.
It is with great pleasure that Gladwell & Patterson presents its first solo exhibition with Ollie. This collection brings together the full range of her recent work, from pocket sized fish on grounds of coral and buttercup to generous table top gatherings of lobsters, lemons and daisies and quiet domestic interiors. Together these paintings make a simple, joyful argument: that the life of the home, looked at properly, is subject enough.
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Ollie Tuck is fast establishing herself as one of Gladwell & Patterson's most distinctive contemporary voices. A still life painter of the everyday, she finds her subjects where the rest of us simply find lunch: a sardine from the fishmonger, a jar of jam, a red cabbage, a lobster fresh from the pot. Painted with a loaded brush and an unashamed love of colour and pattern, these familiar things are given the attention more usually reserved for grander subjects, and the reward is work that feels both celebratory and instantly recognisable as her own.
Tuck's path to painting is itself a story of the everyday transformed. Trained at Chelsea School of Art, she returned to the easel in earnest in 2020, painting at her kitchen table and taking whatever the household provided as her subject. What began in lockdown has grown into a fully formed practice: the Minis, small single subject studies each titled after the paint colour of its ground; larger compositions in which seafood, flowers and ceramics gather on patterned cloths; and most recently the rooms of the home itself, from a lamplit corner to a windowsill of forced bulbs waiting for spring. She has exhibited with the Royal Society of Marine Artists and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and her work has featured in The Artist and Artists & Illustrators.
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The exhibition opens from 2 October at Gladwell's Corner, Stamford PE9 2AL. Catalogue will be available shortly.
