Local artist Joanna Dunham’s life to be celebrated at Peter Pears Gallery

Company news

Sep 29, 2014

A special exhibition will be taking place at the Peter Pears Gallery in Aldeburgh to celebrate the talented career of Suffolk artist and actress Joanna Dunham.

‘A Retrospective Celebration’ will be displayed from 26 September to 1 October, with a variety of Joanna’s still-life, portraiture and landscape pieces spanning from her early years to later life.

Joanna is perhaps better known as a TV, theatre and film actress featuring in the likes of George Steven’s epic Hollywood blockbuster ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’. Family influences and a natural talent for drawing also led Joanna to achieve a career as an accomplished painter with exhibitions held over the past thirty years in locations such as the National Theatre Gallery in London, the Aldeburgh Cinema Gallery, Ipswich Arts Society and at her own gallery at her home near Saxmundham in Suffolk.

Although born in Bedfordshire and educated at a boarding school in Hertfordshire, Joanna’s family lived in Suffolk and this is where she has returned to for her later years. Her Suffolk heritage is reflected through some of her most well-known landscape pieces, including oil canvas paintings of Walberswick Ferry, Framlingham Castle and Orford Castle.

Following her mother’s death to Alzheimer’s in 1992, Joanna became involved in the Alzheimers Research Trust by regularly holding art exhibitions and theatre performances in aid of the charity. Now aged 78, Joanna has Alzheimers herself and now attends Care UK’s Lehmann House Wellbeing Centre in Wickham Market. Her husband and family have arranged the art exhibition as recognition of her work and a celebration of the talented career she led as an artist.

Joanna’s husband, the actor and writer Reggie Oliver, said: “As this exhibition demonstrates, Joanna has bequeathed to us a considerable amount of varied and beautiful work.”

‘A Retrospective Celebration’ will be held in the Piers Feetham Gallery at the Peter Pears Gallery, 152 High Street, Aldeburgh from 26 September to 1 October 2014. For more information about the exhibition, contact the organiser Reggie Oliver on 01728 603160 or the Piers Feetham Gallery at piersfeethamgallery@hotmail.com.