Stories Behind The Art – Hester Berry

From a sustained fascination with colour to a growing engagement with the ecological and cultural significance of the landscape, Devon-based painter Hester Berry approaches her work with both curiosity and tenderness. Her paintings distil fleeting light and ever-changing atmosphere through expressive, economical mark-making, rooted in close observation and time spent in nature. Increasingly, her practice balances playful exploration with a deeper awareness of the natural world and its fragility. Here, she reflects on three works that document these evolving interests.

“I love making smaller paintings, because you can just play with the light using relatively big brush marks. Detail disappears, and you can just have fun with colour and light. This was a very frosty morning in a place called Lynton on the North Devon coast. It was very, very cold and the air changes then, and so the colors and the light change. Playing with contrasts made by colour rather than by tone, by light value, was interesting. I really loved this piece as an exploration of colour theory. I’m really interested in colour science and colour perception. I’ve been learning a lot about colour theory through Joseph Alba’s writing and visiting exhibitions of post-impressionists and pointillism, exploring how each person sees colour differently, and where your brain might jump to conclusions about colours, and how colours can flavour each other when they’re next to each other. There’s a really good podcast, actually, by the National Gallery, called Stories in Colour. Several speakers come on and talk about, again, colour perception, pigments, how we reproduce different colours. Anyway, yeah, I could talk about colour for absolutely ages, I find that’s the most fascinating thing.”

“I’ve always loved painting trees, so it’s kind of easy just to be led by instinct and by what you’re interested in. I painted this beautiful place in Somerset with these really lovely beech trees. They just had such character, it was just nice being there and being in this gorgeous space and trying to capture that feeling in the work. The light was amazing as well, because it was such thick foliage, it was filtering through this green light, and it created shadows and silhouettes and interesting textures. That was fun to try to get to grips with and I think, I hope, it came together in the end You get these fleeting colours and effects of the light that you notice in your peripheral vision, so trying to catch them as you’re looking towards the light is a really interesting challenge that I really enjoyed with this one.”

“At the moment, I’m really interested in temperate rainforests. Currently I’m spending a lot of time in forests, learning about where temperate rainforests might be, sketching in them, making paintings of them. Temperate rainforest is something that a lot of people don’t know that we have in the UK. You think of rainforest as a tropical thing, but all down the west coast, certainly in Scotland, that’s where the remaining stronghold of temperate rainforest is, because the rainfall is so high, it’s suitable for rainforest, and there indeed was rainforest in the past. If you look at our culture, folklore and music, there was so much emphasis on deep, dark forests, and unfortunately, we’ve lost quite a lot of them, and we still are losing a lot of them. There are fragments in Devon and Cornwall, and Wales, and the Lake District. It goes by different names as well, so ancient woodlands and arboreal forests. I think people’s awareness of it is a bit disconnected. Sometimes you just see it as a bit of neglected wood, where actually it’s this incredibly wonderful, important, ancient habitat. From an environmental point of view, it’s really important. From a cultural point of view, it’s really important. There’s the idea that a lot of people are coming across now about forest bathing, and spending time outdoors, and the importance of being around nature, and being in green spaces. I just find it fascinating, and it’s beautiful, and it’s terrifying what we might lose so I just feel the need to be around it as much as possible, and then inevitably, it creeps into the painting more.”

Visit these stunning paintings alongside the whole collection as part of Hester Berry’s headline show ‘Where The Light Falls’ in the gallery until 3rd May.