Belynda Henry was born in New South Wales, Australia, and studied sculpture and painting at the Sydney College of the Arts. She first gained recognition as a leading landscape painter in Australia after being named a finalist for the Wynne Prize. Henry is now a multiple finalist for both the Wynne and Archibald Prizes, among other prestigious awards, and has participated in more than 30 solo exhibitions. Her work has been displayed alongside some of Australia’s most prominent and influential artists, including Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd, Jeffrey Smart, and Brett Whiteley.

Henry lives and works deep within a long, lush valley with wild escarpments to the north of Sydney. Here, she is immersed in the landscape and attuned to its rhythms, witnessing the transitions of ever-changing light, texture, and soundscape. She absorbs all of this, along with her boundless fascination with the land, into her paintings. Henry’s works express the internal meditative quality evoked by the landscape, illuminating these impressions in wondrous and imaginative paintings.

Henry often sequesters herself for an intense period to synthesize her rich body of fieldwork. In her paintings, she references the deep structure, shifting shapes, and pure colors of the landscape through a meditative state rather than a literal one. Her process isn’t limited to painting; it also includes photographing the landscape, recording sounds, making small sketches, and painting on paper with watercolors, gouache, and pastels as part of her daily studio practice. After experiencing the landscape during daylight, she returns to her studio with sketches, notes, and an openness to imagery, allowing the works to take shape at night. Henry says her process enables her works to “imagine themselves, like a dream sequence,” taking us to the precipice of total abstraction while masterfully engaging the viewer with sparse pieces of evidence caught within the work, innately fusing classic and traditional techniques with the modern colors and textures that are her signature.

Henry’s work has been acquired by private collections in the United States, Japan, Switzerland, Taiwan, New Zealand, Ireland, Hong Kong, Greece, France, and England. Her work featured in the celebrated Thames & Hudson tome on Australian art, “A Painted Landscape”. Findlay Galleries is proud to present the contemporary Australian painter’s third solo exhibition, which follows two successful exhibitions at our Palm Beach and New York locations.

Born in Chile in 1941, Gustavo Novoa made his debut as an artist in the early 1960s selling watercolors and works in crayon on the streets of Paris, principally Montmartre. His first one-man show was sponsored by the Chilean Ambassador at the Maison de L’Amerique Latin in 1961. The late Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain sponsored his second show in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1962. By 1965, he had become an adopted “New Yorker.” Like many others, he admits to having been lured by the American dream.

A successful partnership with Guy Burgos and, later, Lady Sarah Churchill led to the opening of the Burgos Gallery on Manhattan’s East Side in 1965. Novoa’s style had evolved into textured oils. By the late sixties, however, his subjects had changed into the gentle jungle denizens that were to be his trademark.

“Bonds with reality are very hard to shake once you establish them.”

With this premise in mind, Novoa constructed a dream-like new jungle where the lion lies down with the zebra. Panthers and pandas share the shade with African monkeys and American raccoons. The radiant colors of Novoa’s luxuriant foliage seem to wield a mystical power of bringing together predator and prey, the meek and the strong.

Gustavo Novoa continues to re-invent his menagerie in ways that both surprise and delight. From his black and white visions of his natural utopias, to the colorful opt-art compositions and everything in between, Novoa’s sense of color, his precise craftsmanship and his penchant for imbuing his animals with a sense of self, continues to capture the hearts of art lovers and collectors from many different generations and from all over the world. Findlay Galleries has exclusively represented Gustavo Novoa since 1971.

The first Painted Garden exhibition was a collection of works I had put together as an exhibition celebrating Rosemary Verey’s garden at Barnsley, Gloucestershire, and was presented by Astley House Fine Art. His Majesty, The King (then HRH the Prince of Wales) kindly opened the exhibition in May 1994, which was also attended by Rosemary Verey at the Museum of Garden History, Lambeth, London, in support of the Museum.

The painted garden theme has continued to celebrate prominent gardens in Britain. Over the past thirty years, it has included various gardens in France, Italy and the USA, including The Painted Garden at Highgrove House, His Majesty’s Garden collection.

From the outset and subsequent Painted Garden collections, the emphasis has been on exploring and depicting the relationship of owners of gardens and society with nature by participating as co-creators through gardening and engagement with the land.

Each collection has sought to express the particular and unique narrative of the garden by interpreting the process initially as abstract thought, through vision, to the actualization of those intentions. Each garden can be realized as a manifestation of creative expression borne out of philosophical and spiritual perspectives.

The Painted Garden Highgrove is an interpretation of the gardens within the estate created by collective advisers along with His Majesty’s ideas, plans and underlying philosophical viewpoint of life and its relationship to the natural world. The creator of a garden, particularly over a long time of engagement, is an ever-evolving process and a personal journey resulting in a transient created space. Effectively, this collection is an internalization of the created spaces and their ambiance, which I responded to in new terms of reference and visual language.

The overall approach to compositional narrative portrays the philosophical and spiritual emphasis, wherein particular spaces within the gardens are painted as distinct themes by focusing on their uniqueness.

The Terrace Garden, Kitchen Garden, Lily Pool Garden and Carpet Garden have a common element in the form of water sources. In each case, the movement of water is a central dynamic. Water is presented as a slow, constant, quiet source, which can be seen as a spiritual symbol of constant replenishment to life. The peaceful sound and its constancy of flow affect a source of reassurance in life, giving power and energy.

In each of these garden designs, the layout radiates from the central element of a water source. This pattern represents a symbolic manifestation of the emanation from Divinity, the ‘Undisclosed One.’ It is similarly depicted in the Rose Window designs of the great Medieval Cathedrals of Europe and equally in the Eastern Faiths in the form of a Mandala, an abstract formulation.

The planet and its present and future state depend to a greater degree on whether human thought is constructive and sympathetic or destructive and dismissive of nature and our inextricable relationship with the earth.

In each garden, His Majesty the King expresses His alignment with nature through nature-related object metaphors rather than highly stylized forms of expression within the garden themes.

The experience of the gardens at Highgrove and, hence, the overall ambiance of the estate leaves one with a distinct sense that the creator of Highgrove’s gardens has a deep connection and holistic view of the natural world, along with its rhythms and sacred being.

– Charles Neal

Cynthia Knott is an acclaimed painter recognized for her luminous, horizon-focused seascapes that recall the ethereal qualities of J.M.W. Turner and the color fields of Mark Rothko. Working primarily in oil, encaustic, and metallic pigments, Knott’s work explores the interplay of light, atmosphere, and the shifting dynamics of the sea and sky.

Cynthia Knott was born March 20, 1951, in Newark, New Jersey. Knott studied at Washington University in St. Louis, initially, she pursued marine biology but found herself more drawn to illustrating what she observed under the microscope. After a semester, she realized her passion lay in art. She subsequently earned her B.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1971, followed by a B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1975, and an M.F.A. from New York University in 1989. Early in her career, she worked as a printmaker under Robert Blackburn and studied gravure with Louise Bourgeois.

Her paintings, deeply rooted in personal history and an ongoing fascination with the sea, stem from childhood experiences with her Irish Great Grandfather, a former sea captain. His storytelling and maritime adventures instilled in her a profound connection to water, a theme that continues to define her artistic practice.

After moving to Springs, New York, Knott embraced plein air painting, capturing the transient qualities of the ocean and its changing light. Her technique involves layering oil paint, metallic pigments—including gold, silver, and lapis lazuli—heated beeswax, damar varnish, and linseed oil, then repeatedly scraping and reapplying, creating what she calls a “skin of memory.”

Knott’s works have been widely exhibited in solo and group shows across the United States and internationally, including New York City, the Hamptons, and Japan, she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant twice. Dubbed a “horizonologist” by her friend and former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Knott is deeply inspired by poetry and has collaborated with writers such as Collins, whose poem “Paintings of the Sea (For Cynthia Knott)” was dedicated to her work. Her paintings, often devoid of a signature on the front, allow the viewer to fully immerse in the vastness of sea and sky, with the horizon line serving as her true signature.

Beyond her studio, Knott has participated in prestigious artist residencies, often selecting locations near water, such as Fogo Island in Newfoundland, the coasts of Maine, Ireland, and Scotland. Her work continues to be a meditative exploration of the sublime, capturing the ever-changing, boundless nature of light and water.

Findlay Galleries is proud to present Cynthia Knott’s luminous and poetic paintings for the first time in her maiden show with the gallery, Stirring the Horizon.

Education
1989 M.F.A., New York University, New York, NY
1975 B.F.A., School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
1971 B.A., School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA