Light is artist Alice Mumford’s essential subject - she creates paintings that bathe you in the lazy heat of summer or the white light of a crispy winter’s morning.

Belgrave St Ives is pleased to announce the painter's sixth solo exhibition to be held in the gallery, for which thirty-four works have been especially created.

The artist asks the viewer to study and celebrate with her the importance of colour and how it can be used to picture the everyday ordinariness but also wonder of life. In one of her painting courses, she has explained that people make the mistake in thinking that a photograph is a true depiction of something; she alludes to the fact that it is just one reality.

Her work reflects the seasons. Here, Summer Heat on the Patio, Lesceave, Cornwall summons the optical effects of high summer, the way that motes swim and things momentarily appear to shimmer and dissolve as one narrows one’s gaze as it moves from shadow towards the glare of the sun. Frost and Early Morning Sun is equally though differently dramatic, its raked wintry light causing long bluish shadows whilst making hues in a bowl of fruit sharper.

Alice is a painter who is entirely focused on her craft. Following training at Dartington, Camberwell, Southwark and Falmouth Colleges of Art, she has become one of the most accomplished painters currently working in Cornwall. After early successes with Cobra & Bellamy, Julian Lax and Badcocks Gallery, she has been represented by Belgrave St Ives since 2005, during which time she has established herself as a pre-eminent painter of still life interiors that draw heavily on her own domestic life. Sansom and Co published a first monograph of her work in 2015.

Strategic Colour by Alice Mumford will be at the Belgrave St Ives from September 11 to October 2.