Oenone Hammersley https://oenonehammersley.com/  is a successful contemporary artist, who has been exhibiting since 1980 and her paintings are now being exhibited at Walton Fine Arts in Chelsea, showing Hammersley’s Art for the Earth-Water and Fire paintings on cut out wooden panels and canvas. https://waltonfinearts.com/

Her abstract and semi-abstract paintings in oil and mixed media on canvas focus on our natural resources in particular water and trees. Colour and light are used to emphasize a vanishing world of wilderness that implores one to take notice, appreciate the rare and raw beauty about us, and allow our imagination to roam about the abstract compositions symbolizing the unsettled and unsettling world in which man alters nature.

22^nd November sees the Oceans of Plastic 2023 day, which is a global campaign and awareness initiative aimed at addressing the pressing issue of plastic pollution in our oceans. It serves as a call to action to raise awareness, inspire change, and promote sustainable solutions to combat plastic waste in marine ecosystems. So as an artist who is passionately concerned about our environment and the global problems we are all facing, this is naturally translated and explored through Hammersley’s art and feels like a good time to view and maybe even buy artwork highlighting such important issues we are now all facing.

Oenone Hammersley draws on her training and experience in theatre design to present a wonderful array of visual stimuli afforded her during extensive travels. Known for her imaginative and distinctive use of colour and light, Oenone has progressed from painting wildlife on paper to larger more diverse images of nature in oil on canvas to fantastical depictions of water. Oenone has perfected a method incorporating hand painting with multiple paint pouring. Her mixed media technique uniquely embraces collage as a means to create texture. The water theme is further enhanced by a resin finish that produces an incredibly lustrous effect.

Water is the most important “element” ensuring our existence. Oenone’s water paintings are fantastical as she has perfected a method incorporating hand painting with multiple paint pouring. Her mixed-media technique embraces collage as a means to create texture. These unique and powerful works have won international awards and her most recent pieces focusing on water see her work becoming more textural in their abstraction, as the message to save the natural world is expressed with extraordinary power.

Many of her projects have particularly focused on our natural resources with water being one of her main concerns. We all take water for granted, that’s for sure from our stunning oceans to our wasteful dripping taps!

Her water paintings celebrate water from the beautiful ripples in the sea, to the dreamlike reflections in Venice to the poignant reflections series. Her message is hopefully clear, it concerns the problems we are seeing on beaches worldwide and the environmental impact plastic and litter is having on the water in our seas. The amount of rubbish that is thrown into the sea, in particular of course plastic is a huge problem as we all know and the banning of plastic bags is just the tip of the iceberg, there is so much unnecessary plastic use which we can all help to rid the world of to make our water’s so much better. The juxtaposition of the stunning blues and greens of the glittering sea lapping the sandy beaches littered with plastic and rubbish surely can’t be lost on anyone these days, it is an issue we all need to consider and do our best to improve across the world.

For a chance to view these artworks get to Walton Fine Arts, Walton Street, Chelsea SW3 https://waltonfinearts.com/