GEORGIA ELLIOTT AT CAMBRIDGE CONTEMPORARY ART

Georgia Elliott paints thick and fast. Or sometimes lightly and slowly. In either mode she was confidently content to have a cluster of Saturday shoppers spectate the genesis of her next painting as she deftly spread out her stall in the otherwise rather cool reserved atmos of Cambridge Contemporary Art in Trinity Street. Artists can be testy, temperamental and trying for their friends and family. In the attractive down-to -earth figure of Ms Eliot there is none of that.

“I normally have six or seven paintings on the go” she explained to her small audience of admirers, ‘Sometimes as many as twelve.’ On the day I watched her work she had five canvases which she whisked on and off the easel and laid on the floor to dry as she turned to another candidate for improvement – or inspiration. Where did it come from, I asked her, the concept of the painting?

“I don’t altogether know’ she confessed’ I am immersed in the painting and the ideas just arrive. With a large canvas it’s even hard to step back before you’ve done something with it. Something takes over.”

Georgia’s inspirations are very specifically in the natural world. She adores the Scottish coast ‘A fellow artist was telling me she found the peace and serenity of those coasts a great inspiration. For me, it’s the opposite, I like the wildness and ferocity of the waves, the roar of the sea, quite the opposite.”

Her parents used to go to Cornwall for holiday and she loves the West Country. We went to Devon last year, but I could not paint it until the very end of the vacation, then I had the entire idea in mind”.

And between answering questions about her Love of the Lake District and the decision to give up the ‘ product-centred’ enterprise of glassware, this artist did not cease to swtich the canvases before us around like a giant pack of cards. Gradually it was clear what she wanted. The light emerged, the darkness of a hastily mixed blue sea. Did she ever get to the stage ,rather like the Art teacher at school who would check on one’s effort after a final painterly flourish and exclaim “ Oh dear you’ve spoiled it now-”

Georgia recognized the syndrome,’ Yes, that can happen and when it does, there’s nothing you can really do about it”

We watched in wonder as this energetic artist threw herself into a rotation of real winners, natural scenes which appeard to emerge from her imagination. On the walls, the results.

“Make sure you have plenty of paint” she advised one enquirer who wanted to know where to start. But the main advice was to just ‘get going and stick at it”.

As it is in most of life’s projects, but usually not with such spectacular results.