I made wonderful discovery today, I'm a little surprised I haven't found them before but I think sometimes these things come to you just at the right time, at a time when you're in a place to understand and appreciate them fully. It all began with discovering the picture below, I'm a big fan of Peter Blake and I love his Pop art work ,so I was browsing Peter Blake images on Google. I have never seen this painting before and it really struck me, as it's so beautiful, so following the link to the Tate website I discovered Blake painted it during his time with the ' Brotherhood of Ruralists.' This is what the Tate site had to say about them.

Group of British artists founded in 1975 around Pop artist Peter Blake, after his move from London to the countryside near Bath. The full name was The Brotherhood of Ruralists and this, combined with the original number of seven members, gives a conscious echo of the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which the Ruralists deeply admired. The members of the group were, in addition to Blake, Ann Arnold, Graham Arnold, Jann Haworth (Blake's then wife), David Inshaw, Annie Ovenden and Graham Ovenden. The ruralists aimed to revive and update the vein of imaginative painting of romantic figure subjects in idyllic rural settings, in a style of high precision realism, found in the early work of the Pre-Raphaelites. The painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais was a talismanic example. They also looked to the earlier visionary landscapes of Samuel Palmer and the Ancients. The children's book Alice In Wonderland and its illustrations by John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham were another source of inspiration. Blake, Hayworth and Inshaw left the group in the early 1980s but it continues with the Arnolds and Ovendens. '

Now as I said before I'm surprised I haven't discovered them before, I spent two years on a art course but we never got past Cubism as the history of art teacher had an obsession with it, there is only so much Braque and Picasso you can take. In fact college thoroughly dampened my enthuiasm for all art, making it and appreciating it. I suppose I should have used my own intiative more but it wasn't so easy in the days before the internet and the college library was dire (also having been to an all girls school I was some what distracted by the presence of boys at college!) Anyway I'm straying off the point again, I'm extremely excited to discover this group of artists, there doesn't appear to be a great deal about them on the internet except a site here; http//:ruralists.com/ and a few links from this site. If you go to; http://ruralists.com/artists/annieovenden/aoprofile.html there are some lovely paintings by Annie Overden
with accompanying poems about trees. And there is also a link to a blog, rosemarylane.blogspot which is a fantastic blog about rural life on the Isle of Wight. The internet is a wonderful thing sometimes!!!!!!