The works in Hannah Brown’s first solo exhibition at Frestonian Gallery achieve a quality common in all truly successful representational painting, that of the captured moment in an immediately imagined wider vista. A constructed continuity of time and space evoked by the painting’s sheer sense of presence. In the case of Brown’s somewhat arcadian ‘Penton Lane’ series this wandering of the viewer’s imagination is particularly poignant. As the scenes which she presents are not incidental aspects of larger homogenous landscapes, but instead are small corners or highly specific viewpoints that have been carefully chosen to omit the intrusions of human activity and modern life that would otherwise disrupt the serene, timelessness of the moment depicted.
