Celia Montague

Celia Montague is a portrait and landscape painter based in Oxford and Venice. She graduated from St. Hugh's College, Oxford with an M.A. in Modern and Mediaeval Languages, then trained for and was called to the Bar. After a brief career as a barrister in London she left for drama school and became an actress. She worked widely on stage, television, film and audio books, while bringing up two sons, before training as a painter. Studies in life drawing over a number of years at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford led to her taking the Portrait Diploma for painters at Heatherley's School of Fine Art in London, and then life painting for a further two years at the Prince's Drawing School.

 

As a landscape painter in England, she finds the motifs that inspire her by exploring in her painting van, from which she is able to paint in most weathers. Otherwise she may be found painting on a French hillside or a Venetian fondamenta, contending with the elements in the old tradition.

 

As a portrait painter she works mainly to commission. She has exhibited regularly in England since graduating from Heatherleys.

 

Solo exhibition:

 

2012  "Eden" at The Gallery, 54 Shepherd Market, London W1

 

Mixed exhibitions include:

2016    Mall Galleries, London SW1 (Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize)
2015/16 Fosse Gallery Christmas Exhibition

2015  Iona House Gallery, Woodstock Summer Collection

2015  Venice in Peril, Osborne Studio Gallery, London      SW1

2014  20/21 British Art Fair, Royal College of Art

2014 AAF Battersea

2014 Cricket Fine Art, London SW10

2014  Chelsea Arts Club

2013/14 Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-Wold, Christmas Exhibition

2013 Browse and Darby, London W1, Summer exhibition 'Gallery Artists'

2013 Browse and Darby, London W1, Spring exhibition 'Gallery Artists'

2013 Fosse Gallery, Christmas Exhibition

2013 Fosse Gallery, Summer Exhibition

2013 Fosse Gallery, Spring Exhibition

2012 Fosse Gallery, Christmas Exhibition

2010/11/12/13 Swann Gallery, Woodstock, Oxon

2012  1 Essex Court, Temple, London EC4

2011 Oxford Town Hall

2011 Blackwell's Book Shop, Oxford

2011 St. Barnabas Church, Oxford

2009/10/11 Said Business School, Oxford

 

Her portrait of Colin Dexter, author of Inspector Morse, is on long term exhibition at The Randolph Hotel, Oxford, in the Morse Bar where the sitter himself is sometimes to be spotted…Her work is held in private collections around the world, in Britain, America, Bermuda and Singapore.