A DECADE of artwork by a renowned painter is being displayed at a Manningtree gallery.

The North House Gallery is presenting a selection of paintings by Oliver Soskice from the past ten years.

He works in oil, on canvas, in still life and abstract landscape - with still life being a subject he has written and lectured about extensively.

Soskice was born in 1947 and comes from a family of painters, the best known of whom was Ford Madox Brown.

He read English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and after several years in publishing has painted full time since 1972.

He lived in Oxford from 1974 to 1988, and was a founder member of the Oxford Artists’ Group.

Since 1988 he has lived and worked in Cambridge.

He has exhibited in Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

He said: “The still life takes simple things for its subject matter – wine bottles, jugs, apples – civilian things found on tables in the ordinary run of life; there is a long tradition of distilling rare beauty from these things.”

While the still life paintings are clearly within the tradition he has studied, the abstract landscapes are in a style that is uniquely his own.

He said: “The landscape paintings are derived from time spent painting and drawing in the flat countryside around Cambridge where I live and the abstract paintings follow on from the landscapes; they are not directly descriptive of the elements of landscape but should recall and suggest such things as the ground, the hedgerows, distant lines of trees, clouds and their shadows.

“They are more bound up with the light of different times of day and the stages of the year.

These works are abstract in the sense of being drawn from the visible world, even built around the depth of landscape.”

The exhibition is running until June 23.

For more visit north housegallery.co.uk.