New paintings by Cumbrian artist Linda Ryle are on show at Kendal’s Abbot Hall gallery.
The ten recent oil paintings fill the wall reserved for contemporary art in the gallery’s shop and all are all for sale. The display will run until the end of January.
Linda made her name in the 1970s making belts for celebrities. She went on to develop an extensive and unusual career including craft work and different periods of painting. A major retrospective, Time Regained, was staged at Grasmere’s Heaton Cooper Studio two years ago.
Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Linda trained at Goldsmiths’ School of Art, London in the 1960s, and now lives in Cockermouth. She is married to the painter Julian Cooper.
She designed and produced leather belts for the shop Ace on Chelsea’s Kings Road (and later at Covent Garden market) whose clientele included singers, actors and celebrities such as Elton John, Lulu, Bianca Jagger and Brit Ekland.
As a painter her work included farm animals and cats, some of which were published as cards, but by the mid-1980s she had diversified. There was, for example, a series of small canvasses based on dreams, after she had become immersed in the ideas of Carl Jung, the analytical psychologist.
Linda’s first solo show was in 2004 at the Percy House Gallery in Cockermouth. The paintings of trees, river and beck had begun in the late 1990s, inspired by the sound and movement of wind through leaves and branches, sunlight on pebbles, the drag and flow of reeds.
The new display in Kendal, interior objects, are oils painted on linen.
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