James Ephraim Lovelock was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
Jan van Eyck was a painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting, though most now regard that claim as an oversimplification.
Sir Timothy Bartel Smit KBE is a Dutch-born British businessman who jointly helped create the Lost Gardens of Heligan, and the Eden Project in Cornwall, United Kingdom.
The River Mole is a tributary of the River Thames in southern England. It rises in West Sussex near Gatwick Airport and flows northwest through Surrey for 80 km to the Thames at Hampton Court Palace. The river gives its name to the Surrey district of Mole Valley.
Tree sitting is a form of environmentalist civil disobedience in which a protester sits in a tree, usually on a small platform built for the purpose, to protect it from being cut down. Supporters usually provide the tree sitters with food and other supplies.
The Brundtland Commission, formerly the World Commission on Environment and Development, was a sub-organization of the United Nations (UN) that aimed to unite countries in pursuit of sustainable development. It was founded in 1983 when Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, appointed Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway, as chairperson of the commission. Brundtland was chosen due to her strong background in the sciences and public health.
Compton is a village and civil parish in the Guildford district of Surrey, England. It is between Godalming and Guildford. It has a medieval church and a close connection to fine art and pottery, being the later life home of artist George Frederic Watts. The parish has considerable woodland and agricultural land, and the undeveloped portions are in the Metropolitan Green Belt. The village is traversed by the North Downs Way and has a large western conservation area. Central to the village are the Watts Gallery, the cemetery chapel commissioned by his wife for him, two inns and the parish church.
Alan Thornhill was a British artist and sculptor whose long association with clay developed from pottery into sculpture. His output includes pottery, small and large scale sculptures, portrait heads, paintings and drawings. His evolved methods of working enabled the dispensing of the sculptural armature to allow improvisation, whilst his portraiture challenges notions of normality through rigorous observation.
Jon Edgar is a British sculptor of the Frink School. Improvisation is an important part of his reductive working process and developed from the additive working process of Alan Thornhill. Final works are often autobiographical, perhaps referencing anxieties or pre-occupations at the time. His body of work includes many clay portrait sketches of eminent sitters.
The Cobbe portrait is an early Jacobean panel painting of a gentleman which has been argued to be a life portrait of William Shakespeare. It is displayed at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, a National Trust property, and the portrait is so-called because of its ownership by Charles Cobbe, Church of Ireland (Anglican) Archbishop of Dublin (1686–1765). There are numerous early copies of the painting, most of which were once identified as Shakespeare.
Felicity Philippa, Lady Scott was a British wildlife conservationist.
Mary Wondrausch was an English artist, potter, historian and writer, born in Chelsea. She trained as a potter at Farnham School of Art, latterly West Surrey College of Art and Design.
Richard Jefferies was curator of the Watts Gallery for two decades from 1985–2006. His role led to his becoming an acknowledged expert on the Victorian painter and sculptor G. F. Watts. Jefferies's uncle had been chief assistant to Mary Seton Watts in the last ten years of her life, and Richard was born on a visit by his parents to his aunt and uncle at Compton in 1945. He started as Custodian at the Gallery on 1 February 1969 after an earlier discussion with the then Curator, Wilfrid Blunt. He provides the foreword for Hutchings's book on Watts's sculpture.
The Lewis Elton Gallery was an art gallery at the University of Surrey's Guildford campus, which hosted exhibitions, lectures and events including sculpture, paintings and photographs. The Gallery was also responsible for the maintaining the University Art Collection and a range of special collections including the Lewis and Mary Elton Art Collection and E.H. Shepard archive.
The Compton Triptych comprises three terracotta portrait heads, plinthed together, which celebrates the parish of Compton, Guildford, and the diverse figures who have contributed to this Surrey community. Using local clay from the foundations of the pottery of Mary Wondrausch this was unveiled in November 2011 at The Human Clay exhibition, Lewis Elton Gallery, University of Surrey after sittings with sculptor Jon Edgar in 2010 and 2011. The heads include G. F. Watts expert Richard Jefferies, artist/historian Mary Wondrausch and community stalwart Jane Turner, selected by the artist after a local public appeal for suggestions for the third element of the Triptych. A triptych combines three formal elements more commonly used in painting, and this sculptural grouping was first used by Jon Edgar for the Environment Triptych of 2008, after the combination of three heads seemed to create a composition which added another dimension to the work.
Patricia Maureen Grayburn, MBE, DL has a long involvement with the arts in Surrey after moving to become Arts Administrator at University of Surrey in 1983.
Head VI is an oil-on-canvas painting by Irish-born figurative artist Francis Bacon, the last of six panels making up his "1949 Head" series. It shows a bust view of a single figure, modeled on Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X. Bacon applies forceful, expressive brush strokes, and places the figure within a glass cage structure, behind curtain-like drapery. This gives the effect of a man trapped and suffocated by his surroundings, screaming into an airless void. But with an inverted pathos is derived from the ambiguity of the pope's horrifying expression—whose distorted face either screams of untethered hatred towards the viewer or pleads for help from the glass cage—the question of what he is screaming about is left to the audience.
Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes is an oil-on-canvas 1963 triptych by the Irish-born British figurative painter Francis Bacon. It is one of a series of portraits he painted of his friends, at a time when his art was becoming more personal. Henrietta Moraes (1933–1999) was a close friend and drinking companion of Bacon's from the early 1960s, and became one of his favourite models. She never posed in person for him; instead he worked either from memory, or more often from photographs commissioned from his friend John Deakin.
Three Studies for a Self-Portrait is an oil-on-canvas triptych painting by the Irish-born English artist Francis Bacon. Two of paintings are signed and dated 1979, and the third signed and dated 1979–1980. The work can be viewed as a penetrating self-examinations undertaken in the aftermath of the suicide of his lover George Dyer, and as one of a series of inward looking self-portraits completed during the 1970s. Bacon was seventy at the time, but appears as ageless.
The Environment Series Heads developed from the Environment Triptych portrait sculptures by Jon Edgar in 2006. His ongoing series of terracotta clay portraits celebrates those contributing to a sustainable future on Earth. The sculptor observes the sitter on a rotating chair, working over seven or eight hours building up the head on a wooden peg using small pieces of clay. One sitter accounted "It is the most intense and prolonged physical scrutiny I have ever had from a friend. For hours on end."
