Gertie Young RWS

Gertie was born in Nottingham in 1950.  She began painting as a child, inventing comics, pretend photos and imaginary maps. At 18 she went on to study at Hornsey School of Art. Over the years she held a variety of business focused jobs but she always continued with her secret love of painting; filling a whole series of ‘scribble books’ with bright, imaginative abstracts and reflections. Following retirement and with more time available to her she started entering and winning various national and other open art competitions finally successfully becoming a member of the Royal Watercolour Society.

She describes each of her paintings as a little unplanned journey. Images emerge from her subconscious based on emotional memory, imagination, pattern and observation. She uses whatever medium will give her the effect she wishes to evoke: be it watercolour, gouache, acrylic, oils, pencil, pastel, scraper board or Lino cut. Collage is a favourite medium of hers – shapes of thick board emerging from below the surface or patterns or sweet papers. She often sketches odd, out-of-the-way observations and sometimes they find their way into her paintings. Eventually all these random elements seem to arrange themselves around that central point where opposites meet – the natural meets the man-made, the mundane meets the celestial, the near meets the far. The hopeless meets the hopeful.

Gertie has exhibited her paintings in a number of venues: The Royal Academy, Linden Hall Gallery, Royal Society of British Artists, Royal Institute of Watercolour Painters, Royal Watercolour Society Gallery, Society of Women Artists, Women in Art Fair, Bankside Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, ING Discerning Eye exhibition, NEAC, Masham Gallery, Holt Gallery, Cambridge Contemporary Art gallery, Chelsea Art Society, Green and Stone Gallery.  Her paintings are held in collections in the USA, Canada, South America, Europe and the Middle East.

Prints of some of her paintings can be found on iCanvas, as well as on cards from the Dry Red Press the Mall Galleries and Cannsdown Press and book covers.  Articles have appeared about her work in House and Garden, The Artist and Artists and Illustrators magazine.