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Articles> Serena Hall
Image published
with permission of the artist
Visit
any of East Anglia’s coastal galleries and there will be no shortage
of paintings, sculptures and craft arts inspired by the sea, beach huts,
waves, holidaymakers, deck chairs and seagulls. But of all the artists representing
this region, there is one in particular who has taken these much-loved themes
and injected them with such a bold array of colour that they virtually punch
out of the canvas.
That artist is Serena Hall, whose paintings bear her distinctive ‘big
paintbrush swatch style’, whose palette is bright, and whose shapes
are iconic. So iconic, in fact, that she has expanded into retailing with
a gallery bearing her name in Southwold, Suffolk, and a second company,
The English Seaside Company, promoting her strong iconic images on an array
of fabrics, chinaware and in 2009, a range of wallpaper.
Serena’s story, although bright on canvas, is a bitter-sweet one.
She moved to Southwold from London as a child of 12 with her father, journalist
Derek Hall, and mother Val Hall, but tragically Val died three years after
the family moved to Southwold and Derek fell ill when Serena was just 22.
Theirs was a ‘very happy family’, Serena says from her studio
on one of Southwold’s industrial parks. ‘My parents were so,
so important to me. But at this point, it was a case of having to start
again, really.’
By the time her father died, Serena had completed a two-year general Art
& Design course at Lowestoft College, followed by a Contemporary Crafts
Bachelors degree at The University of Cumbria. ‘I’d had to decide
whether to do Fine Art or Contemporary Craft, but because my father and
mother had been self-employed, they had felt it was important that I had
a business and technical skill as well.’
Pursuing this pragmatic approach, Serena went on to study design at Edinburgh
University. ‘I don’t regret it because it certainly helped me
to start a business,’ she explains. ‘As long as I could keep
painting.’
And much to her tutors’ frustration, that is precisely what Serena
did. Instead of focusing on a repeat pattern design suitable for fabric,
she created large paintings. ‘Art college tried to stamp this out
of me. Textiles are very flat. That’s why my tutors used to get so
cross with me, because I used to build layer upon layer, and they wanted
to know how on earth I was going to translate that into a textile design.’
She gives a smile. ‘I made it work for me.’
‘Making it work’ involved using some 16 different screens and
25 colours when creating the screenprints for her end-of-year show. ‘I
did butt heads with my tutor, no doubt about it. And it cost me an absolute
fortune having the screenprints made and my tutors had no sympathy whatsoever,’
she admits. ‘But when it came to the degree show with people walking
past, a lot of [my fellow students] had one- or two-coloured fabrics, lots
of creams, lots of coffees, and I stood out and got much more interest.’
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