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Val Archer is a British painter who is known for her meticulously composed still life paintings.

Val Archer was born in Northampton, England and was educated at Northampton High School for Girls. From a very early age she painted; in her teens she attended drawing classes at Northampton School of Art where her tutors’ knowledgeable passion for the Italian masters proved to be inspirational. In her final year at school she obtained a scholarship to Manchester College of Art and Design. A wide-ranging pre-diploma year was followed by a three-year painting course. When she graduated Archer moved to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art where she obtained her Masters and was awarded a major painting prize . At the RCA she found herself amongst a generation of students and teachers who would transform British art and design. Amongst her tutors were Carel Weight, Roger de Grey, Peter Blake and Sandra Blow. Over the next three years themes and subjects began to appear which would feature in her work for many years.

Upon leaving the Royal College she was immediately taken up by a major London gallery and the appeal of her work to European as well as UK audiences was noticed straightaway. Her first solo exhibition was in Stuttgart, Germany and later she would have sell-out shows in London with CCA Galleries and with Noortman in Holland. The exhibitions demonstrated her love and observation of particular texture and detail. Paintings of clothes and fabrics were followed by work that recorded the seasons as she found them expressed in plants, flowers, fruits, vegetables and fish. As one critic noted at the time “what Val Archer so carefully manages to avoid is the story-telling quality which bedevils so much of contemporary still life painting which, however skilled, turns it finally into more than brilliant illustration. People like art to tell a story, of course, and her rejection of this easy option is brave.”

During the 1970s, 1980s and the early part of the 1900s Archer was a visiting lecturer and teacher at a number of arts schools including the Crawford School of Art in Cork, Cardiff College of Art, Chelsea Art School, Goldsmiths' College, Sheffield and Wolverhampton Art Schools. She also created illustrative paintings for Good Food and Taste magazines as well as the food pages of the Saturday Telegraph newspaper. Archer illustrated and published two books on fruit and flowers, A Basket of Berries in 1992 and A Basket of Apples the following year. In 2006 Archer co-wrote an illustrated travel and food book about Italy called The Painter, the Cook and the Art of Cucina with Anna Del Conte.[6]

For the past 16 years she has also divided her time between her studios in London and Tuscany recording and acquiring commonplace objects from nature, especially food, flowers, plants, rocks and shells. Also, man-made items especially the crockery and fabrics that are used every day in the home. For as long as she has been showing her work Val has been offering the fruits of her observations: “I’ve always loved looking at things…it’s like eating with your eyes.”

Regular exhibitions of Archer's work have been staged by the Chris Beetles Gallery in London for the past 23 years.

Roger Jupe (talk) 12:08, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

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