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Green Pebble Magazine
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Articles> Gill Thomas
Suffolk Dozen, Artists at Work will be showing at Peter Pears Gallery, High Street, Aldeburgh, Suffolk from 10 - 14 April. For more about the artists featured, visit or contact them on:
Mark Beasley; Laurence Edwards; Judith Foster; Lindsay Harris; Claire Lambert 01473 787157; Richard Pinkney; Kate Reynolds; Paul Richardson; Richard Scott; Gill Thomas 01473 723923; Mark Titchener; Jevan Watkins Jones; Hugh Webster 07787516233
As part of her prize for winning the University Campus Suffolk Alumni Award in 2009, Gill Thomas will have a one-woman show hosted by UCS from 8 - 30 September. For more details, please call Gill on 01473 723923.
Upstairs, overlooking the rear of an early 1900s terraced house in Ipswich, Gill Thomas has her studio. It is a modest, tidy room where the light is good and where there is space for a single canvas at a work table.
At first glance it isn’t similar to the twelve busy, sometimes messy, always intriguing artists’ studios she has spent the past year chronicling, but as she discovered going from studio to studio, every studio is a fascinating reflection of the artist’s personality and interests; and no two are the same.|
The winner of University Campus Suffolk’s Alumni Award 2009, Gill graduated from art school in 2008. Recognising that it would be all too easy for her to ‘fall into despondency’ when she left college after an eight-year part-time course in fine art and the history and theory of visual art, she started planning this project before she had even left college.
Gill had a bit of a heads-up on the other graduates. Aged 76, she had initially trained at Birmingham College of Art 50 years ago, and had spent 43 years married to artist Ray Thomas. ‘I knew I would miss the structure and the stimulus of college life,’ she explains. ‘I knew I’d need something really interesting and demanding to do. And it’s been wonderful.’
The twelve artists she has chosen for Suffolk Dozen – Artists at Work are all personal friends and are linked in some way to the Ipswich Art Society. Gill painted oil portraits of each one, followed by meticulous watercolours of their studios. She plans to publish her illustrations of each artist at work, together with their artists’ statements, in a booklet to accompany her show.
‘What really fascinated me, apart from visiting my friends and painting their portraits, was to see their work spaces. I love to see where artists work. A studio is a very intimate place because they’re not often on show, and even if an artist is part of Open Studios, for instance, they tend to rearrange their studios for the occasion. I was allowed to see the studios as they really are. Very often artists have pictures tacked up on the walls and small objects they like. You can see many different strands of the artists’ interests. It’s like a treasure trove, really’...
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