The Lemon Timers are a talented group of Wiltshire-based artists who exhibit widely in London, Salisbury and across the South of England. The group derived their name from regular life drawing workshops in the form of minute-long poses timed by a lemon-shaped kitchen timer. Tricia Webb says of the group “the life drawing sessions bind us together, but it’s our artistic diversity which makes us interesting”.

Fisherton Mill is delighted to be hosting the Lemon Timers' fifth show at Fisherton Mill and whilst they have been bereft of life models during the pandemic, they have drawn upon their great wealth of visual memories to build a body of work captured from the mind to line. Restricted in movement but not in imagination, the group are excited and happy to show these new developments in their work.

Tricia Webb and Margaret Gill share a love of the abstract, painting in several styles and using many different types of media with lots of free mark making, layers of paint, a limited palette and much enjoyment! Margaret describes the process as "a joyful surprise as the painting ‘told me’ what it was going to be". Ann Ballantyne creates atmospheric landscapes and is enjoying the liberation of creating her own paintings after a long career of strictly disciplined work, conserving medieval wall paintings. Anne Tompson describes her work as “a sensitive appreciation of light and of the landscape”.

Debra Sweeney is a Salisbury based figurative artist using mixed media in her paintings to emphasise light and composition. Her limited palette and simplicity of form re-imagine the landscape to create mood and atmosphere. Susan Wiltshire's work portrays a wide range of subjects particularly the human form, landscape and still life. She paints mainly in oils and uses charcoal and pastels paying particular attention to colour which is a strong theme within her work. Caroline Curtis works in both acrylics and oils, painting abstracted landscapes of the places she loves such as the Cornish coast and the wild open countryside of Yorkshire, where she is from.

Peter Ashton also creates landscapes, painting in watercolour for most of his life. His main interest and motivation in this has come from trying to capture the often fleeting effects of light in the landscape. Watercolour is especially suited for this. Peter's view is that watercolour itself will do most of the work for you, if you let it. After a career in the army, Martin Wright spent 10 years managing Law Partnerships in the City of London before leaving the City to devote himself to his life-long passion for painting and sculpture. He attended regular life classes to improve his understanding of human anatomy and studied movement and dance at Central St Martin’s college of Art and Design in London.

Meet the Artist - One of the Lemon Timers group will be stewarding at the exhibition each Tuesday and Saturday of the exhibition.