FOUR British women artists celebrate the arrival of spring in Adze Gallery's exhibition of contemporary landscape and female figure paintings.

Works by Christine Spencer-Green, Margret Steigner, Krista Taylor and newcomer Janine Baldwin are on show at the gallery in Gillygate, York, until April 30.

David Durham, the gallery director and curator, says: "Spring is a time of birth, life and growth; this selling show of celebratory paintings reveals four women painters' individual celebration of life - and a shared revelry in colour and use of paint. These women love life, and we hope that you, too, will share their exuberance and enjoy these works."

Christine Spencer-Green's abstract oil paintings can be seen in several Cornish galleries and are being shown in a northern gallery for the first time. "My work is concerned with reduction and exaggeration and is influenced by my life and surroundings in Cornwall," she says.

"By building up layers, wiping off and scratching into the surface, paintings hold glimpses of past processes. Paint is applied with consideration, though at times allowing the accidental to challenge the work to move on in new directions."

Margret Steigner's richly layered series of works evoke the light and rugged beauty of West Cornwall, where the artist lives and works. "When I've experienced a landscape, I paint to capture its essence," she says. "I don't start out with a finished work in mind - the paintings emerge through the process of making them, expressing feelings and memories."

David Durham has brought her work to York for her northern debut. "Poised on the edge of abstraction, Margret's paintings resonate with the extraordinary light and wild beauty of the landscapes of Cornwall's Atlantic coast," he says.

The third northern gallery debutant from Cornwall is Krista Taylor (although she is a Lancastrian by birth). Her series of bold, large canvases in oil and acrylic explore the female figure and psyche through personal experience and feelings. "Krista is not afraid to introduce intense colour and brightness to an intimate scene," says David. "Painting in acrylics and oils, her work has ever-shifting influences which keep it fresh and moving: remembered images and places; impressions and atmospheres; subconscious wisdom; love and humour."

To counter-balance all that Cornish creativity, Yorkshire art is represented by Janine Baldwin, a recent graduate of Scarborough Art College now showing for the first time in a commercial gallery.

This promising young painter's semi-abstract Yorkshire landscape oils celebrate the essence of place through simplification of form. "My work is in response to the atmospheric land and seascapes of Yorkshire. Using oils on canvas, I combine gestural marks with an evocative use of colour to capture the essence of the landscape," she says. "Constantly reworking the paintings and recomposing elements, leads to a tactile surface, with the painting becoming an abstract image in its own right."

A Yorkshire artist she may be, but Cornwall has made an impression on her work. "I'm influenced by the Abstract Expressionists and the St Ives artists - notably Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon," Janine says.

Adze Gallery is open 10am to 5pm, Wednesday to Saturday.

Updated: 08:52 Friday, April 01, 2005