Anne James is impressed by a sense of the panoramic at Oxford Art Society exhibition

In one direction stands Wittenham Clumps, in another the sea — and between them the eye takes in faces, architecture, animals, abstract forms. Like a true panorama, Oxford Art Society’s current show offers not just a landscape but new perspectives and vistas at every turn.

In Downland, Susan Kirkman uses acrylics to deconstruct her landscape, the long shadows in the foreground just starting to impinge on a road up to a harvested field and the Clumps, those iconic trees here providing both a focal point for and a destination within the piece.

By contrast Clare Drinkwater’s Summer Shade, a mixed-media piece in purples and greens, captures the end of a long hot day with a dream-like miasma that speaks of the cool inviting colours of summer shade.

In Autumn into Winter Muriel Gerrish celebrates the stark and sharp cold of that time of the year, depicting the dark silhouette of a pollarded willow surrounded by purple and blue scrub and undergrowth, both of which act as a foil to a sloping field of raw ploughed earth, its reddish clay laid bare awaiting the new growth of spring.

Caroline Mass’s Untitled (Flood Tide) is one of the few seascapes. Her clever use of etching and monoprint enables her to create an apparent overlay of pert little cobalt waves behind which sit two substantial barges, their bulk lightened by the delicacy she has brought to their contours and to a glimpse of the working port in the background.

Oxford Art Society’s latest exhibition is large, consisting of 90 pieces selected by a panel of members and an independent judge.

Johannes von Stumm’s Sphere provides one of the centrepieces. It’s a suitable place for this sculpture, first because of the piece’s own gravitas and second because von Stumm is the president of the Society.

Von Stumm’s love of experimentation has enabled him to achieve what his tutors at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich deemed impossible. That is the conjoining of steel, granite, wood and glass to achieve a fusion of the strong with the fragile; of intense depth and darkness with the tactile transparency of glass.

As demonstrated by Sphere, his pieces are beautifully engineered, allowing each element to play its part in creating a satisfying whole.

Also on show are two delightful pieces by Annie Wootton. She works in mixed media, her base material being newsprint. The Listener is an alert sensitive little horse who stands intelligent and clearly responsive to whatever is whispered to him. Brown Paper Girl captures an equally intelligent and sentient being, human this time, with a demure, demeanour and pensive downcast gaze that are both moving and poignant.

James Ort provides Stag Beetle: a funky chunky ceramic piece some two feet or more in length, cleverly hung under an grille in the gallery’s wall, towards which it is seems to be making its way as if in search of a quieter habitat. Jenny Lines is showing three engaging etchings.

Oxford Mail:
Delightful lino cut: Fishboy, Nicky Cooney

The Girls and Last of the Day provide a glimpse into a rural idyll: the former showing a group of gregarious chickens in front of their enclosure, the latter a tumbledown cottage set apart from the modern world by rhythmic waves of long grass.

Her White Door features a grand, substantial village house, preserving its separate identity courtesy of a high stone wall into which is set a firmly closed white door.

Nicky Cooney has contributed some delightful lino cuts. Busy Duck Pond features the whitest of preoccupied ducks, crowded into the greenest of ponds, greedily edging out both weed and undergrowth. Fishboy could well play homage to both Jonah and his whale and to the Green Man, as he stares almost impassively out from his piscatorial prison while seagulls frisk and frolic around the fish’s abdomen.

Oxford Art Society — Members’ Spring Exhibition
Oxford Town Hall
10am-5pm, Monday to Saturday until March 15
Free entry