It is appropriate that in Peter Brown’s first solo exhibition since he was elected President of the New English Art Club last year, he should have taken his palette and easel to Suffolk. It was this coastline, around Southwold and Walberswick, that Philip Wilson Steer, one of the NEAC’s founding figures and a brilliant early British Impressionist, helped make popular as an artistic destination in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Whilst Brown’s recent interior paintings, a new and prominent feature in this exhibition, are worked on over many days and sometimes weeks, out of doors he aims, like his impressionist predecessors, to paint – as he puts it in – ‘one hit’, if he possibly can. Peter Brown's new works have a freshness and spontaneity that capture the breezy sunlight of the east coast of England – but they are paintings based on years of hard work, careful observation and constant practise.
In the age of phone photography and Instagram, Impressionism provides a perfect counterpoint capturing
