Len Tabner was born
in South Bank on the River Tees near Middlesbrough. His father had been a
merchant seaman and Tabner remains fascinated by the grim grandeur of the
industrial northeast. He lives a few hundred yards from the highest cliffs in
England, at 650 feet above the sea, and near the potash mine in Boulby—the
deepest mine in Europe.
It is a landscape
of extremes and frequently of violent weather, but Tabner is not an artist to
stay huddled indoors in his studio. He is to be found on the beach with his
easel weighted down against the wind or, like Turner, on board ship in the
middle of a gale. His is an elemental art, visionary in its scope. Due to these
conditions, his paintings are produced with a sense of great urgency, with a
rich variety of materials combining and competing on the surface of the paper.
It is a question of evocation rather than description, although the paintings
are definitely rooted in specific locales.
Despite working
from the Falkland Islands to Japan, Tabner demonstrates that we can understand
the whole by knowing one small spot extremely well. His home territory has been
transformed in his lifetime - enabling him to chart the death of mines and
shipyards and record the birth and heyday of North Sea power.
Tabner tries to capture the feeling, the essence, the experience of the landscape
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