Liz Graham-Yooll

I live in SW France in the little known " département" of the Aveyron which is part of the larger Occitanie region; this new name encompasses the two regions of Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrenées. I moved here from Tuscany, where I have lived for many years, just four years ago

I am principally a landscape painter and I love to work "en plein air", when I can.

With good reference from my painting experience outdoors, I also work my ideas up from my sketches, photographs and small oils onto larger canvases in the studio.

I used to always paint large canvases in situ outside, but I eventually found it was very good to remove myself from the view after a while, painting in a looser way using my visual memory of the moment. Apart from anything else, the weather would often change completely in the middle of my painting and I would have to finish it in the studio anyway.

Coming back to a painting in the calm of my studio, I feel I can get a better idea of the fleeting moment and treat the canvas as a painting and not a photographic image of what I had been looking at.

I also love painting still-life which I mostly do in the winter and these paintings also range from small to large canvases.

My recent exhibitions ...

After art school in Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, Dorset (where I specialised in animation) I went to live in Florence for a year in 1976, where I attended daily life-class as well as painting on my own account in the afternoons. I had the privilege of studying many aspects of Rennaissance art while I lived there and I really enjoyed working en pleine air.. The Italian climate was much more generous to working outdoors, compared to what I had known growing up in SW Wales.

I continued to live in Tuscany, near Siena for the next part of my life, until we decided to move to SW France four years ago. The landscape here is obviously quite different to Tuscany, but it is also a very beautiful unspoilt countryside, with many lovely ginger cows in the fields and wonderful woodland and trees.

I still regularly paint in Italy.

Mixed exhibition: "Through Foreign Eyes", La Fortezza, Civita Castellana, Italy 2012

Solo exhibitions: 54 The Gallery, London, UK 2009, 2012 and 2016

Previous mixed exhibitions in London, UK: RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Institute of Watercolour Painters, New Grafton Gallery, Sally Hunter Gallery, Stephanie Knight Gallery.