Verity’s paintings drawings and prints are mainly derived from her garden in southeast London where she has lived and worked since the 1980s. Her childhood in the countryside and residency in Italy shortly after graduating, have been a lasting influence.
I paint these things as they happen, inside or out. From the moment my brush touches a fresh canvas, I am keenly aware that although these trees are familiar, I don’t really know them. Standing on the same spot I spend as much time as it needs before the season moves on. Charlotte Verity
Whether working at a large or small scale, there is a sense of light and space. As she maps the ephemerality of her immediate surroundings evoking the cycles of nature, the viewer is compelled to look more closely. With her brush she seeks out the subtle shifts in tone and colour, or the exact line and curve of what is in front of her. Her handling ranges accordingly - from broad strokes to intense passages of fine brushwork.
Nothing in a Verity painting is ever motionless […] How Verity achieves this sense of movement - birth growth, blossom, decay, four seasons on a single surface -with such an economy of subject is what makes her a truly contemporary painter. Rachel Spence
Alongside her painting, Verity has been active as a writer. Her journal of the year at the Garden Museum is published in A year in Tradescant’s Garden and her account of the time painting in author Ronald Blythe’s Garden forms the Garden Museum Journal 35: In their Garden.
In 2016 on the occasion of her solo show at Purdy Hicks, a monograph was published by Ridinghouse. Ideas about life as an artist are discussed in a conversation with friend and collector the artist Garry Fabian Miller with additional texts by Edmund de Waal and Paul Hills. In 2021, coinciding with her two solo exhibitions at Karsten Schubert London, a booklet containing a response to the paintings by Rachel Spence was made. The same year Ridinghouse published Echoing Green: The Printed Year, bringing together Charlotte Verity’s series of nearly 100 monotypes made in the previous year.
Verity (b. 1954) studied at Slade School of Fine Art, London where she was awarded the Slade Prize and Boise Travel Scholarship. She has been a visiting lecturer at various art schools and is on the faculty of the Royal Drawing School where she has taught since 2000. Recent solo exhibitions include: Echoing Green, Karsten Schubert London (2021); The Seasons’ Ebb, New Art Centre (2019); In Their Garden, Garden Museum, London (2018) and New Paintings, Purdy Hicks, London (2016). Her work in public collections include Arts Council of England; the British Museum; Deutsche Bank; Garden Museum, London; the Government Art Collection, UK; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London and University College London.