MARIA YADEGAR
LIFE IN COLOUR
“Maria Yadegar’s landscapes capture the essence of nature through spontaneous brushwork and a deep, personal connection to the land. What results are paintings that share a memory and emotional resonance with a place.”
-
On entering Maria Yadegar’s home, I was immediately aware that this is not a collection of paintings but a deeply personal dialogue between the artist and the landscape. Her canvases do not simply depict scenes; they distil experience. They are, in the truest sense, acts of remembrance and renewal.
Having grown up among the very fields and woodlands Maria has portrayed in some of the artworks, I found myself transported by her work. The heady scent of wild grasses, the faint musk of lambswool, and the deep, earthy perfume of bluebells after rain all rose unbidden. Such sensory memories remind us that the landscape is not merely a visual subject but a full, embodied experience. Maria’s work vividly captures this, not through laborious detail but through the energetic immediacy of her brushwork and her instinctive grasp of light and colour.
Maria works primarily en plein air, employing the alla prima technique. This method involves painting directly and swiftly onto the canvas without preparatory sketches. This method demands technical mastery and an attuned sensitivity to nature's fleeting moods. Her paintings possess a freshness and spontaneity that many strive for. Still, few achieve the balance between fidelity to the moment and the emotional resonance that comes only from deep familiarity with their subject.
In a time when much contemporary landscape painting veers towards abstraction or conceptualism, Maria’s work stands apart. It neither retreats into pure representation nor seeks to intellectualise nature. Instead, she occupies a vital middle ground: her paintings are both a record and a revelation. They remind us that art can be, as Wordsworth wrote, ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, an act of both memory and transformation.
The purpose of art has long been debated: Is it decoration, narrative or critique? Maria’s work suggests another possibility: that art can serve as a vessel for the personal and collective unconscious, a time machine capable of awakening the dormant landscapes within us all.
A Life in Colour is more than a celebration of the British countryside and the Spanish Coast; it mediates the enduring bond between place and self, between the external world and the internal life it fosters. It is with great pleasure and my own sense of kinship that I welcome Maria Yadegar to our gallery and invite you to step into this luminous, living conversation between memory, nature, and art.
Hester Baldwin - Managing Director, 2025
-
Maria Yadegar was born and grew up in Essex but has lived in Hampshire for the past 26 years where she mainly paints. She is constantly inspired by the landscape where she lives on the edge of the South Downs, although she is also interested in capturing flowers in both their natural environment and as part of a still life.
A self taught artist, Maria painted for many years around a full time job, but now paints full time. Painting full time has enabled her to really focus her craft and improve by constant practice painting mainly plein air on location.
Maria is influenced by the Impressionists and would describe her work somewhere between impressionism and figurative. Her work is often described as colourful with loose and impressionistic brush work.
Maria mainly paints plein air within the landscape where she tries to capture not only what she sees, but how she feels in that place, at that time, trying to capture a fleeting moment using all of her senses.
Maria mainly paints on small to medium boards as she works quickly and intuitively on location in one session. Larger pieces of work are created in her home studio, where she will often uses her plein air studies, sketches and memory to inform her painting.
Maria has taken part as a ‘wild card’ in Landscape Artist of the Year in 2019 and 2020.
In 2022 she was shortlisted for the RA Summer Exhibition and the Hollybush Painting Prize (now the Women in Art Prize).
In 2024 her painting ‘Rainbow Tulips in the Studio’ was selected for the RA Summer Exhibition.
Maria regularly exhibits at the Mall Galleries, including with Art for Youth, London.
Maria and her work have been featured in several publications over the past 18 months including, House and Garden magazine, Beautiful South Magazine and Hampshire Life magazine.
Displayed Here are a selection of Artworks. Please visit the Exhibition to see all works; alternatively email us at thegallery@greenandstone.com to request a full artworks list.