Elizabeth Blackadder: wintry Tuscan landscapes and pared-back still lifes

She may be best known for accessible paintings of flowers and cats, but a new exhibition in Hampshire focuses on chilly Tuscan landscapes and pared-back still life compositions. The show at the Jenna Burlingham Gallery in Kingsclere presents a less familiar side of Elizabeth Blackadder, with most of the pieces exhibited for the first time.

Earlier works include a series of Italian landscapes rendered in gouache and watercolour in the 1950s soon after Blackadder left art college. Anna Brady writes in the show's catalogue: "Based in Florence, Blackadder would take a bus out into the countryside to paint.

While we may have romantic ideals of painting trips to Tuscany, the reality of being a young woman, painting outside and alone, through a bitter winter in postwar Italy would have been altogether harsher. We can almost feel the chill on her fingertips in the group of inky Tuscan landscapes." The still life oil paintings are from the 1960s and 1970s, and personal objects such as a coffee pot recur.

elizabeth blackadder, tuscan landscapes, still life, jenna burlingham, kingsclere, hampshire, gouache, watercolour, florence, coffee pot