About Lynette

Picture of Lynette Hemmant
by courtesy of Marianne MajerusLYNETTE HEMMANT spent her childhood in South Wales and Australia, eventually going to St Martin’s School of Art in London shortly before her sixteenth birthday.

Until 1979 she combined freelance book illustration with occasional portrait or other commissions. She featured in Best Children’s Books of the Year listings, and her work was used for TV story-telling and schools programmes in the UK and elsewhere. She worked for numerous publishers, but latterly mostly for the Heinemann Group. Books included classics like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as well as modern authors.

Encouragement from an Italian landscape painter, Bruno Guatamacchi, led to her first solo show (1979) in Bellagio, on Lake Como, Italy. Subsequently, she restricted illustration to work outside the book market. Commissions included a Reader’s Digest cover, a set of postage stamps and, in 1982, a commission from the Unicover Corporation of Wyoming to paint the twelve months of the year in the English countryside, for a set of collectors’ plates.

She worked for American book publishers and the children’s magazine Cricket (for which she has done several covers) and its sister publications.

Since 1989, commissions have included two large (approximately 4ft x 7ft) paintings for an eighteenth century house in London, and drawings, subsequently engraved on glass, for the 10ft x 6ft model theatre in the Queen’s House in Greenwich, London.

She paints gardens on commission and her own – obsessively.

In 1995 her demonstration paintings for the partwork, The Art of Drawing and Painting, were published by Eagle Moss.

From 1984 paintings done in England and Italy have been shown in shared and solo exhibitions in London (including the ROI) and the south-eastern counties of the UK. She has sold work in galleries in the UK, Australia, USA and Italy, and her work is in private collections throughout the world.

One woman shows include Willoughby Memorial Gallery, Corby Glen, Lincolnshire and the Museum and Art Gallery, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

The constant observation of natural forms has inspired large imaginative paintings in which plant life and architecture predominate. Her garden is a constant source of images, as is the time spent in Venice and other parts of Italy. This work is not 'conceptual'; the only agenda is the pursuit of beauty and harmony, as legitimate to-day as it ever was, as the renewed interest in nineteenth and early twentieth century painting testifies.

Lynette Hemmant has been interviewed and her work photographed for Country Homes and Interiors. Other publications include The English Garden, 25 Beautiful Gardens, Woman's Weekly, Saga, The Evening Standard and, in the USA, The Garden Shed. She and her studio were also the subject of a short television slot.

She is a featured artist in Windsor & Newton/Rotovision’s book on landscape painting and an Eagle Moss publication on pen and ink drawing, for which she was a demonstration artist..

She accepts commissions and welcomes visitors to her studio, which is just three miles south of the centre of London in the district of Camberwell.

contact Lynette...