AN AUCTION centre is set to host an international award-winning artist ahead of the opening of a major exhibition.

Tennants in Leyburn also has upcoming sales with the work of a high-profile Scottish artist.

The international award-winning artist Martin Kinnear will present a new selling exhibition of classically inspired contemporary oils of the Northern Landscape at The Garden Rooms at Tennants in Leyburn, North Yorkshire this autumn, ahead of a major exhibition of his work at The Bowes Museum which opens in the January.

Although better known for his colourful contemporary works, Kinnear has long taught classical oils to his students in his role as one of the UK’s leading painting tutors.

In this exhibition Kinnear brings a selection of inspiring Dales landscapes, full of vitality and with a hint of the sublime, all worked with Kinnear’s deft and confident touch.

Martin ‘Lefty’ Kinnear, is an oil painter from the industrial valley of Burnley and Pendle in East Lancashire.

His works about the people we have become and places we inhabit in post-industrial modern Britain, have won him international acclaim, including a prestigious Medaille d’ Argent at his first Paris Salon in 2018.

Martin has exhibited with prestigious societies including the ROI, the RBA, at the Discerning Eye, several Affordable Art Fairs, and most recently again by invitation, in the 2019 Paris Salon with the Societie Nationale des Beaux Arts.

In 2019 he was commissioned to create a solo show by The Bowes Museum to follow up their show by Hockney and their landmark retrospective on Norman Cornish. Kinnear’s show Regeneration will run from January to April 2022, having been delayed by the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Paralysed on his left-hand side by a stroke at the age of 34, Kinnear is actively and passionately committed to the role of art in therapy and regeneration. Describing himself as ‘possibly the best one-armed painter in Wensley’ he is a patron of several stroke societies and champions personal development through art in his capacity as founder of the Norfolk Painting School.

On October 21 at 10am, Martin will host a live painting demonstration at The Garden Rooms at Tennants, which will be streamed live on the Norfolk Painting School’s Facebook page (link: https://www.facebook.com/NorfolkPaintingSchool).

Visitors are welcome to come along and watch in person, but as numbers will be limited, please register your intention to attend by emailing info@tennantsgardenrooms.com or calling 01969-621146.

The exhibition is free to enter and will be open daily. For further details please visit www.tennantsgardenrooms.com.

Tennants will also hold a sale of some work by artist Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, who died on August 23 – just a month short of her 90th birthday.

Dame Elizabeth was one of Scotland’s most loved artists, best known for delicate, beautifully observed flower paintings and her place as the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy.

Now, an important work by the artist is coming up for auction in the Modern and Contemporary Art Sale at Tennants Auctioneers, North Yorkshire, on October 9.

‘Flower Studies’ – estimated to reach £18,000 to 25,000 plus buyer’s premium – was commissioned in 2012 by the then First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond to be reproduced on his charity Christmas card to mark the Year of Natural Scotland in 2013.

The painting was unveiled by the first minister at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, and was subsequently sold at auction to raise money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, Dyslexia Scotland, the Scottish Steelworkers Memorial Fund, and the Sick Kids Friends Foundation. Born in Falkirk in 1931, Blackadder developed a deep love of flowers from childhood, collecting specimens which she would catalogue and label meticulously with their Latin names.

Flowers remained a central theme throughout Blackadder’s life, from her childhood collecting to a lifetime as an avid gardener. Her flower paintings, such as the present example, go over and above the traditional composition of flowers arranged in a jug or vase.

She carefully arranged her flowers as individual specimens against a flat white background, at once lending an air of modernity and bringing her subjects to the fore and harking back to botanical specimen illustrations of an earlier era. Blackadder herself once remarked that “The space between flowers is as important as the flowers themselves”.

She continually returned to her favourite species – tulips, irises, poppies, lilies, orchids, and anemones, painting each once with a combination of scientific observation and a delicate lyricism reflecting her deep knowledge and love of her subject. Elizabeth Blackadder was awarded the OBE in 1982, the DBE in 2003, and in 2001 was appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland.

An illustrated catalogue is available at www.tennants.co.uk.