Ned Hoskins (1939-2021)In the early 1980’s, when painter Ned Hoskins returned to the UK following a year spent living and working in the States, he was struck by the lack of visual arts in the Brighton Festival. His solution was to open the whole of his Brighton home to the public instead, an unheard of concept at the time! Over the years the Brighton Artists Open House concept has grown exponentially and today is a thriving festival in its own right. His solo exhibition ‘Fractured Landscapes’ at 35 North in 2019, featured many new works painted in his studio at the top of his during his later years. The exhibition name was derived from Ned’s very particular way of viewing landscapes, the result of the actions of a very unorthodox art teacher who threw his papers into the air and cried ‘There you are, draw that! Draw the wind’. As the papers rose into the air in a rhythmical, visual description of space, Ned grasped that the landscape is just as much about space as substance and that space can be realised only when something happens.
