Celia de Serra

Celia de Serra was born in Canterbury, Kent. She studied Fine Art and English Literature at Exeter University, graduating in 1995 with a First-Class Honours in Fine Art. She spent her childhood in rural Kent and West Dorset. Celia says “In the late 1970’s I recall my father pointing out hidden wayside flowers in the Kent country lanes where we lived. I was entranced. Tree climbing and tree house building followed, forming the backbone of my early life. My sketchbooks teemed with drawings of plants, animals and people if they sat still long enough. Later in the 80s, stories of acid rain destroying forests alarmed me, the early indicators of global warming. I remember a particularly disturbing drawing I made of a grotesque dissolving tree throwing its arms into the sky in distress. These trees were characters I thought, emblematic of the natural world at large, beautiful, wild, essential and under threat. Now into the 2020s, I am still roaming around woodlands and moorland. My drawings are labour intensive, involved, layered and erased, consuming and time-consuming. I lose myself when I make these pictures, just as I lose myself in the woods.” She continues to embrace the disciplines of drawing, photography & painting, as a means to document the places she knows and cares about before they are lost. “In finding an image that might resonate, and through remaking it, I hope to reconcile my engagement and love for the natural world with an increasing sense of horror at the ... show more

Celia de Serra was born in Canterbury, Kent. She studied Fine Art and English Literature at Exeter University, graduating in 1995 with a First-Class Honours in Fine Art. She spent her childhood in rural Kent and West Dorset. Celia says “In the late 1970’s I recall my father pointing out hidden wayside flowers in the Kent country lanes where we lived. I was entranced. Tree climbing and tree house building followed, forming the backbone of my early life. My sketchbooks teemed with drawings of plants, animals and people if they sat still long enough. Later in the 80s, stories of acid rain destroying forests alarmed me, the early indicators of global warming. I remember a particularly disturbing drawing I made of a grotesque dissolving tree throwing its arms into the sky in distress. These trees were characters I thought, emblematic of the natural world at large, beautiful, wild, essential and under threat. Now into the 2020s, I am still roaming around woodlands and moorland. My drawings are labour intensive, involved, layered and erased, consuming and time-consuming. I lose myself when I make these pictures, just as I lose myself in the woods.” She continues to embrace the disciplines of drawing, photography & painting, as a means to document the places she knows and cares about before they are lost. “In finding an image that might resonate, and through remaking it, I hope to reconcile my engagement and love for the natural world with an increasing sense of horror at the

abuses we have and continue to inflict upon it”. She continues to say “I spend much of my time exploring the landscape, looking for inspiring places. Light is particularly important, the way in which it can transform something small or illuminate a place in a curious or dramatic way. Always a painter, I returned to drawing some years ago and that has become my current medium. I love the directness of it, the marks, the tonal variations and the capacity to build up layers and depth without the confusion of colour”. In 2013, Celia was a founding member of “The Arborealists”, a group of like-minded artists who exhibit together whose primary focus and subject matter is the tree. They exhibit in galleries throughout the UK and some venues in France and have to date, produced three publications, each of which illustrates some of Celia’s work. She says “woodlands are crammed full of visual ideas. They are dynamic spaces broken by chaotic forms and shifting light, a curious sense of stillness and movement, space and enclosure. Like a photograph, the image is a fragment preserved”. Celia is based in the Welsh borders in the hills near Offa’s Dyke, nestling in the foothills of the Cambrian mountains. She goes out walking with her sketchbook and camera and then spends months working in her studio recording her favourite and fragile places. Her work is absorbing with its immense detail which she builds up layer by layer. The detail is staggeringly beautiful and is a true statement and record of the natural world in all its majesty. She uses graphite pencil and charcoal (compressed/willow charcoal and conte depending on the image). Returning to a favourite place at different times of the year to experience changes in weather, mood or light is also very important to Celia. It is like visiting an old friend, as these places are held close to her heart. Celia has received several awards for her drawings from the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust. She has exhibited widely in galleries in the UK, notably the Silk Top Hat Gallery in Ludlow, now Twenty-Twenty Gallery, The Art Stable, Child Okeford in Dorset and numerous art fairs in London. She has had many solo & group exhibitions. She opens her studio during Herefordshire Art Weeks (usually the first week in September). Celia has completed commissions for both Somerset and Dorset NHS Trusts where a collection of her paintings now remain on permanent display. Her work has been sold into many private collections in the UK and Europe.