Lydia Gifford – Fruiting Bodies 3 (2023) with viewer (270x200cm)
Painting is not only a physical endeavour for the artist, the maker, but is also a phenomenon for an audience to participate in an intriguing experience that the artist has recorded in their own unique way. This is partly what exhibitions are for. The artist is a gift maker. We should be appreciative and respond constructively.
Alma Pearl is a relatively new space, barely a year old. This was my first visit and I was enraptured by this display. There were just eight paintings plus half a dozen fabric/collage pieces (subtitled – sensitivefibres) that made for an exhibition within an exhibition. Despite generous expanses of white space between the paintings the walls felt full due to the visual impact of the works of various sizes. The curation, therefore, was just right.
I had not seen a Lydia Gifford painting in the flesh since 2015 when my eldest daughter took me along to the Laura Bartlett gallery. On that occasion I was impressed, though a little shocked, by the bareness and rawness of the mostly monochrome artefacts. The works were obviously paintings, but there was an element of sculpture, in the unmonumental sense, and of the expanded field aspect of contemporary painting. I felt primed for something even though I had only tasted a small selection from the artist’s oeuvre and I looked forward to seeing more. How time flies.
It was the final day of the exhibition at Alma Pearl and I had booked a place for Lydia Gifford’s interview with art critic, Tom Morton. My daughter’s here too. Before the discussion we had ample time to look at the work displayed on the walls. There were written notes to be made too as, inevitably, personal thoughts emerged from the looking. As viewers this is one way of participating. It’s not everyone’s practice but one legitimately connects to the visual and physical by recording reactions in this way. Others will talk excitedly with a fellow viewer (not my style) or will keep their thoughts to themselves. But there is undoubtedly a dialogue of some kind going on, which may well echo back to what transpired for the artist in her studio, out of doors in the countryside or in the urban environment. Either way, the experiences of the artworks are a form of an earthbound, quotidian transcendence for artist and viewer alike. The viewer must be as open minded as the artist and to make the experience of looking at artworks as active as possible.
I had not planned to write anything for wider dissemination than my own notebook, but here they are, amended a little and given the form of notes masquerading as free verse muddled with loose haiku. Part two includes quotations from Gifford’s responses to Morton’s questions, as well as my own notes that were very much prompted by what Gifford had to say.
Notes (1)
Materiality The paint substance Just as it is.
Read the mark Realise the surface Take it in.
Bound within a rectangle it’s difficult not to think ‘composition’ Movement Active.
Scrim as underlying material structure but mobile, unsteady, loose Or rather, in a slow state of flux Finding and losing.
Images return as the mind’s eye attempts to make some visual sense out of what might be a form/instance of chaos But the chaotic has structure too (Do I really mean chaos?)
Does one ‘see’ a figure or a compositional structure? A building or a scene of some sort A isualised subject matter (such as landscape).
Then the substance of the paint brings one back to its smeary constituency Stuff creating form Or denying form and structure to emphasise its materiality.
Earth colours, including orangey brown and gentle greens Straightforward marks and textures, as in not fussed about with A sense of fingers and hands smearing and pushing/dragging the paint around, over, into.
The works stop/are resolved just in time No nonsense or overstatement Intuitively created, acts of play.
Risk becoming manifested as confidence Or take it or leave it But maybe give some time, some attention, for this may make sense in a certain frame of mind that is more intuitive, yet everyday.
Here is a painting Chaos is only theory Join me in what I see and experience.
The title for the exhibition, Low Anchored Cloud, was taken from Mist, a poem by Henry David Thoreau from his Poems of Nature (1895).
Low-anchored cloud, Newfoundland air, Fountain-head and source of rivers, Dew-cloth, dream-drapery, And napkin spread by fays; Drifting meadow of the air, Where bloom the daisied banks and violets, And in whose fenny labyrinth The bittern booms and heron wades; Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers, Bear only perfumes and the scent Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.
March 21 to April 6 2024 (Closed Sundays / by appointment Wednedays)
Installation of In The Garden at Gallery 19a
Michelle Cobbin, a fellow painter at the Phoenix Art Space, interviewed Geoff Hands as he prepared to install his exhibition, In The Garden, at Gallery 19a in Brighton.
Install photographs by Rob Harris.
Michelle Cobbin – What was the first painting that had an impact on you?
Geoff Hands – A Camille Pissarro woodland landscape. I was 18 or 19 years old and on a Shrewsbury School of Art visit to Manchester City Art Gallery and The Whitworth. It was not a particularly large work, but the paint was quite thickly applied in that Impressionistic manner. It sounds naive, but I was so accustomed to looking at reproductions of paintings in books that I must have assumed that paintings were essentially ironed flat. Today we probably talk about ‘materiality’ but back then, in the 1970s, it was ‘surface touch’. A visual touching of course, which is one of those fascinating dualities of experiencing painting that might only truly be comprehended on a feeling level.
I should also mention two other paintings recalled on another art school trip a little later to Liverpool. These are Stephen Farthing’s ‘Louis XV Rigaud’ and John Walker’s ‘Juggernaut with Plume – for P Neruda’ that were selected for the John Moores exhibition in 1976. They employed a technique of employing collage within the canvas, which expanded the painting process. Collaging, in a sense, is more ‘hands on’ than painting with a brush.
MC – That is really interesting. Your recent work utilises unctuous and thick oil paint and collage plays a part in your studio practice. Would you say that the ‘materiality’ of making work is essential to your practice?
GH– I have always felt that the physical medium is a crucial ingredient in the realisation of the artwork. It’s experiential too, both for maker and viewer. There’s a symbiosis at work, which is material, physical and visual. Oil paint is a wonderful medium, just from a feeling point of view. If my painting is going well, on a subjective level, the oil painting process is still a challenging and discomforting experience. That’s the contradictory nature of painting for me, which has been appropriately labelled the ‘hard won image’. I’m sure that sounds rather old fashioned and romantic.
Oh, but the thick layers of oil could be thin too. And I love the term ‘studio practice’ as it implies a never-ending quest for something. The recent work being presented in ‘In The Garden’, particularly from 2019/20, really continues work from before but with an added realisation that there’s a singular pursuit to make a painting that was worth the effort. That’s why I called my show at the Phoenix Art Space in 2020, ‘It’s All One Song’, after a comment made by Neil Young to an audience member who wanted to hear a specific song but he launched into something else. My interpretation was adjusted to the notion of my own singular pursuit, engaged with as a painting student so long ago, that is still manifested in repetition of some kind of desire.
‘Garden (Pilgrimage) – After Watteau II (for PJ Harvey)’ 2020-21 (121x150cm) and ‘Garden (Pilgrimage) After Watteau I’ 2020-21 (121x150cm)
MC – That quote from Neil Young, ‘It’s All One Song’, you mention one way you apply that idea to your painting in that it is a repetition that forms part of your ‘studio practice’. Keeping with musical references I would suggest that you use a lyrical mark-making motif in many works that lead the eye from painting to painting in a rhythmic way. Are you conscious of that – is it deliberate or is it perhaps that you are listening to Shakey in the studio and the marks are spontaneous responses to the music?
GH – Well, I am conscious of a desire to create a feeling of movement and flow in the paintings. This starts with the looking and the observational drawing before the paintings are made back in the studio. This interest in rhythm, movement and atmosphere is concerned with consciousness, time and space. So there should be occlusion and fixed point too. This is everyday stuff, acknowledging the animism and agency of the here and now. The mark making can be described as ‘lyrical’ and I see it as an extension of the looking and the drawing but improvisation is key too, along with a journey into abstraction with colour.
I get the musical link too but I more often paint with some chilled ECM label jazz playing in the background. The occasional blast of Neil Young with Crazy Horse would be good to stop overthinking though!
It’s worth briefly mentioning that I am currently working with musician and composer, Tobias Wheal, on walking, drawing and painting with his music responding to my work and vice-versa. There’s a little poetry as well, but it’s still a little early to say much more as we are buried in the project at the moment.
‘Garden’ series, 2023 (25.5x31cm) and ‘In The Garden (for V.M.)’ 2023 (51x26cm)
MC – The project with Tobias Wheal sounds like an interesting collaboration, I look forward to seeing how that develops. Recently your work has referenced paintings by historic landscape painters such as Watteau and Gainsborough. In particular I was drawn to the large painting inspired by ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’. What drew you to riff off that particular Gainsborough painting?
GH – Between two of the lockdown periods I went to see the Titian show at the National Gallery and took a walk around the permanent collection. Gainsborough’s painting is one I know well from many visits there and it never fails to impress. I always expect it to be bigger than it is and his paint handling is astonishing. It’s a loaded image of course, not just from a feminist perspective concerned with the implied male ownership of the female partner, but it is also an unintended glorification of capitalism and land ownership from its early history of development in England. For anyone interested in the English Landscape tradition in painting it can’t be ignored either. All of these political frameworks are important and remain relevant today, but I think that we can look at paintings for what they are without having to add a societal context every time.
Anyway, at the time (during the pandemic) I was incorporating elements from paintings from the past into my own work. I was initially looking at a Ruben’s composition (‘Landscape with St George and the Dragon’ 1630-35) and adjusted a small series of my own paintings to include compositional references. This lead onto ‘appropriating’, the artist’s term for stealing, various elements from Titian, Watteau and Gainsborough to add to my own imagery. Some of the content from these painters has been intermixed, especially from Watteau’s, ‘The Embarkation for Cythera’ (the version in the Louvre) that has become a bit of an obsession. With the Gainsborough I have found that I can enjoy painting towards abstraction. The image just seems to lend itself to this painterly and colorful direction. All of this has been happening since about 2020 when I was becoming a little disillusioned with where my work was going, or rather, it was stuck in a groove that needed changing somehow. My forthcoming exhibition (In The Garden) at Gallery 19a will show a small selection from this quite large body of work and I shall have an opportunity to distance myself a little from the paintings so that I can see it from another perspective.
‘Andromeda’s Garden’ 2023 (145x200cm) oil on canvas
MC – As I think about you preparing to select paintings and curate your exhibition ‘In the Garden’ I wonder about titles of individual paintings and whether titles are important to you. As a whole you say the work is ‘all one song’, how does that effect how you title individual works?
GH – Well, there’s an obligation to title work but it’s useful. Just numbering works does not feel right for my works – although as I work in series there will be a roman numeral somewhere. A title is something of a portal, an entrance into the work for the viewer. With the works that reference another artist it seems ethically correct to add their name to the title. As for the importance on a personal level I often reference the source of the painting. This is often a particular location where I have typically visited with a sketchbook to draw in. The untitled option is always there though, and if I am looking at someone else’s paintings in an exhibition I generally avoid reading the wall label at first. The song reference is more of an acknowledgement of a lifetime’s quest or project.
The exhibition title for my show at Gallery 19a is deliberate reference to the feel of that particular song by Van Morrison. It’s quite personal, and perhaps only relevant to myself. The garden reference is also an allusion to the painting studio, especially during the pandemic lockdown periods, and an even more oblique reference to images of Mary in the Garden from the Gothic and Renaissance periods in art history. I like to think of this as a poetic decision, inviting the viewer to make whatever they wish from the references without any clear answers from me.
Paper has been around for ages, maybe 5000 years, especially if we include papyrus from ancient Egypt. Artists love this material. Even digital images end up being printed on it. Just as there will never be a paperless office, there will never be a paperless art studio.
Abstract art may have been around even longer than paper – I am thinking of pattern-like marks made on the body with mud or blood, or in the sand with a stick – before any notion of symbolism or figuration advanced visual language. Today abstraction continues to interest many painters and in Brighton we have been fortunate enough to see a good range of the more geometric, non-objective formulations in the H_A_R_D_P_A_I_N_T_I_N_G shows at the Phoenix Art Space in recent years.
When I first heard about plans for the H_A_R_D_P_A_P_E_R exhibition a few weeks ago I was pleased that drawing and collage – maybe even 3D forms too – might get a look in alongside the painting that I assumed would dominate this project. I wasn’t wrong.
Paper can be passive or add agency – by way of an effect of literally underlying subtlety or more overtly pronounced and structural. In this exhibition there are examples of a suggestively drawing or print-based approach as well as monochrome or limited palette imagery. As expected from geometric abstraction, linear grid-type configurations, systems based structures through to colourful, almost (dangerously) painterly imagery is included. Just over fifty artists have contributed works that they selected themselves. Perhaps this was a risky decision not to completely control and steer the selection by the four H_A_R_D_C_U_R_A_T_O_R_S (my tongue-in-cheek term for Ian Boutell, Patrick O’Donnell, Philip Cole and Stig Evans) as they went for the light touch and allowed things to happen. Based on a first impression I felt that the decision had worked well enough and, as with the previous painting shows, the viewers are given a little taster to seek out more from these practitioners.
An alternative point-of-view, however, might demand a much tighter range and a smaller group of participants, with far more in common linking the cohort. This has certainly been my feeling after a third visit as, for if there is an argument being promulgated, it is possibly diluted through diversity. That desire to see more from several of the artists, and to make a tighter and less assorted grouping will not go away. Another personal quibble could be even more paper related in that the surface and structures of the medium could have come more to the forefront. Seeing works unframed or breaking free of the rectangle might also emphasize the paper aspect. At this more critical level, a viewer (or a selector) might well insist on an elevated role for the choice of paper as a support and/or main material feature in all of the works. Admittedly, some works, such as several of the paintings could have been applied to a smooth canvas and appeared much the same except for a paper edge or floated mount showing up. Several works adjust or undermine the expected rectangle and hint at an expanded, or extended, field arena for painting. The painting media are, understandably, wide ranging. Some works are closer to drawing, or employ gouache, ink or watercolour. The acrylic medium was present in eight works with some use of oil. Although the unifying factor is paper, even if subservient to the applied medium at times, there could be an argument that demands a less collegiate approach to the final selection in which participants from the second show invited an additional artist to contribute something.
There are so many works on display that I am reluctant to single out a favourite piece. There were three works that remained strongly in my memory after the first visit, but three others after the last. Some works exude expertise and decades of experience, whilst others suggest an experimental attitude or even a sense of humour or play. Three works could loosely be categorised as sculptures – and so I wanted more. For the curators I would like to think that this showing inspires another paper-based show in the future – or even a H_A_R_D_S_C_U_L_P_T_U_R_E survey. But it must not become gimmicky or too broad. They might return to the desires felt for the first exhibition in 2018, which produced a highly memorable show. On this occasion the press release explained that works on display would be: “Painting that is hard edged, non-figurative and abstract / Painting that endures / Painting that is a complex and esoteric distillation of ideas”
On a very positive social note the Phoenix was jam-packed on the open evening with over 400 attendees and when I visited again over the first weekend there were many more visitors than usual. On my Thursday afternoon visit, often a very quiet time, a steady flow of people were turning up. If it’s a sign of the times, and of an interest in contemporary art, we need more artist lead shows at this primary Brighton venue.
The artists:
Mohammad Ali Talpur, Richard Bell, Biggs and Collings, Helen G Blake, Katrina Blannin, Isabelle Borges, Ian Boutell, John Bunker, Matthew Burrows, Belinda Cadbury, John Carter, Cedric Christie, Nina Chua, Philip Cole, Deb Covell, Gina Cross, Matt Dennis, EC, Henrik Eiben, Stig Evans, Catherine Ferguson, Martina Geccelli, Della Gooden, Richard Graville, Dom Gray, Charlotte Winifred Guerard, Alexis Harding, Rupert Hartley, Pete Hoida, Zarah Hussain, Ditty Ketting, Roman Lang, Jo McGonigal, Matthew Meadows, Johanna Melvin, Mali Morris, Morrissey and Hancock, Jost Münster, James William Murray, Patrick O’Donnell, Tim Renshaw, Giulia Ricci, Carol Robertson, Sonia Stanyard, Daniel Sturgis, Trevor Sutton, G R Thomson, David Webb, Lars Wolter, Eleanor Wood, Mary Yacoob, Jessie Yates.
Michael Clarence – ‘Devily Dyke‘ 2024. (30X21.3 cm) Oil on board.
Don’t go looking for the punctum. It will find you, only you. Not just in photographs, as Roland Barthes explored in the now classic ‘Camera Lucida’ nearly fifty years ago, but in any visual situation.
I am expanding this compelling theory of Barthes’ beyond its intended scope within photography as I attempt to ascertain why one painting in a small exhibition made a connection that did not rely on it standing out from the other works as bigger, better or more beautiful. Its title is irrelevant (to me at least, for now…) and, for the record, it was possibly the second or third smallest work on display. Maybe there are eight works, or nine. There was ample space for double or triple the number. Overfilling a space is easy. Just getting it right is an impressive skill.
Mind you, if I could fully understand and explain why this one particular oil painting ‘hit the spot’ I would be venturing into the studium as not only the language and form of an explanation would betray the impact of the singular act of seeing something, but I would be obliged to discuss (in general terms) figuration and abstraction in painting. The present day, an aspect of the historical moment before it is truly placed in some kind of past, would oblige a discussion of identity politics too (in specific, contemporaneous terms, no doubt).
Sometimes we should allow ourselves the thrill of the extended moment and should, or at least can choose, to put aside the societally inflicted art appreciation straightjacket awhile. Such an act is difficult and might be achieved in some act of play or weariness. It may happen by chance, just once in a while. The cultural obligation to look at, and judge, ‘art’ with an overburdening requirement to apprehend a painting whilst looking through the lens of current ideology can be challenged. I admit a form of blasphemy here, but I do not regret such a stance, however brief I might be able to hang on to it. There is surely an elemental and unsophisticated rawness to seeing some phenomenal aspect of painting without a framework that might impair judgment that relies on the theory and the concept that the painting must necessarily serve. This painting did that for me (I say ‘did’ because I don’t know how it will greet me when I next see it, probably tomorrow) and I have some reluctance to stress over understanding why. I suspect it’s something to do with the use and application of the paint medium, the simplicity of the composition and the colour combinations. But I have said too much already.
The work in question has been selected from paintings made during 2023 in Michael Clarence’s role as the Freelands Foundation Studio Fellow at the University of Brighton. He explores themes surrounding identity and a sense of place, situated somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Full Catastrophe Painting at the Phoenix Art Space fulfills the culmination of this fellowship before the artist returns to his native Glasgow. Many people will see this exhibition when they turn up to see three other shows that are also open at the Phoenix. How fortunate we all are, sometimes.
Newhaven Art Space, 24 High Street, Newhaven, BN9 9PD
21 September to 2 December 2023
Sadly, the empty shop on the high street is a phenomenon exacerbated by the economic decline that characterises present-day Britain. It’s also hardly surprising now that we buy so many of our goodies online too. So an alternative reason to visit a town centre site might be to see and experience contemporary art. Why not? Newhaven Art Space is a gallery and community project venue supported by Arts Council England and the Newhaven Enterprise Zone and was set up by artists Helen Turner and Nicholas Marsh just over a year ago. They invited Glasgow based, Karla Black, a fan of such spaces, to install an exhibition of her work. It feels like a gift to the town and has hopefully brought in visitors from across the county.
I have arrived four weeks after the opening. I have to mention this fact, as I regret not attending sooner. ‘Karla Black’ is evidently a show that should, ideally, be revisited as the materials used to create many of the works have a life of their own. There is constant change going on, at a slow pace. If you are already a fan of Karla Black’s work you will be aware of her preference for the non-conventional, or just unexpected, type of art material. So perhaps you will expect to see Vaseline, lipsticks, bath bombs, blusher balls and helium balloons in addition to oil or powder paint. But the time aspect is crucial too, as the various materials will be smearing, melting or, in the case of helium filled balloons, degrading and deflating. Ideally it’s a show to visit day after day, or at least at the beginning, middle and end.
But my partner and I have arrived at long last and we enter the premises prepared only by a few images from social media. Good old Instagram. This point is made, as I am not aware of coverage from the mainstream media, which is a little surprising considering that the Turner Prize is currently being held at the Towner in Eastbourne. Plus various shows and activities are taking place in Charleston, Lewes and Hastings (though sadly very little in Brighton), which are frequently featured in Sussex media outlets. We did, however, meet a couple from London that had visited Karla Black’s recent exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall and so the awareness is out there.
When Karla Black has intervened, you know you’re in for some fun. She has conjured a sculpture installation that has a pronounced impact on the viewer, even if it is initially one of surprise at the materials chosen to make the sculptures. Or it could be the ephemeral nature of most of the works displayed, for they have been made for the occasion and the space rather than the art collector’s vault. The front windows of the former shop have something pink and sticky looking smeared onto the glass alongside the Vaseline. Hand written smudges revealing the artist’s name take on a watery, flowing presence on the glass surface. Here today, gone tomorrow might be the sub-theme. The window decoration must have looked neat and tidy on day one, but a month later transformation has set in. Soapy pink blocks and blusher balls hearts have melted down the inside surface of the glass in the early autumn sunlight, which invokes natural processes on artificial mediums. The glass façade is strangely alive, albeit in slow motion.
The premises have been treated as a ready-made space with the potentially monotone grey floor of the larger of two rooms covered in a sandy looking substance, light pink plaster powder, which creates a landscape of sorts for four Barbie-standard pink heart shaped balloons and a row of blusher balls – one of which has unexpectedly but gently exploded at some point. The balloons, attached to a polythene dustsheet, must have moved around more obviously when first placed on view. The very slow motion of this raft (of sorts) is affected by air movement, and I assume the vessel gently decelerates as the helium diffuses from the balloons. A passageway has been left to one side for the visitors to stand in then walk further to a small back room with more deflating sculptures. En route are half a dozen or so small configurations of Vaseline, paint, blusher balls, lipstick, metallic thread and eye shadow affixed to the wall surface, attached by their inherent viscous tackiness. Again, impermanence is on display in pink, slimy glory. But these small and intimately configured compositions engage the viewer nonetheless.
There are small works on the walls in both rooms. They look like something, a process, is being tried out or tested. But this application of materials is a mode of sampling that is intentional and purposeful. The exploration and configuration of materials with the hand and eye is primary. Think what you wish afterwards.
How might a viewer react to this exhibition? There is equal potential for joy or sadness. On a colourful surface level there’s a child-like playfulness on display. But things come to an end. What does one read into materials that have, for the most part, changed their purpose? Or perhaps the conventional or typical use of any one medium (such as a party balloon) is only a limited starting point. Karla Black applies imagination and invention to materials. The materials are the key, whatever they are made of. In an interview for the New Art Gallery Walsall she considers materials as pre-linguistic. Our very distant ancestors had to deal with materials and processes before names and concepts were made up through a language medium. We are still conditioned to material processes, with language being far more expendable.
This exhibition lingers long after returning home. Days later I am still pondering about that sense of change, of a kind of indefiniteness, of the nature of time and duration, which opens the door for thoughts, for wordy language I guess. But no materials: no thoughts. The human condition is forged by play with materials. As children still do.
The Turner Prize 2023, the world’s leading prize for contemporary art, arrives in Eastbourne this year. It’s the centrepiece of Towner Eastbourne’s Centenary year. No doubt the Towner organisation, Eastbourne Borough Council and East Sussex County Council will be pleased with hosting such a thought provoking and exciting exhibition that aims to promote public debate around new developments in (contemporary) art. The Towner has been transformed, with an exhibition of work by Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker, that displays the broad nature and range of (contemporary) art. *
No, no, no. Don’t start in this predictable manner and beware of repetition. What’s the angle? What’s the thematic hook to grab the reader’s attention and to keep them reading until the end of your piece?
Angle #1
Towner, Eastbourne.
Note to self: Focus the first paragraph on Eastbourne, the brilliant Towner and the contemporaneous by extracting some lines of text from the website and the press release. (See above) *
It’s possible that other commentators who write about the exhibition will start in this way. Eastbourne, like so many other impoverished coastal towns in the UK, needs the media attention to encourage tourism to support employment and the local economy. But don’t mention party politics or the mismanagement of the UK economy in this context. (Note: Eastbourne has a Tory MP who probably won’t want a photo opp. with the Windrush imagery from Barbara Walker.) Maybe politics, broadly speaking, is implicit in the works on display anyway. I think I have quickly slipped into dangerous ground. But it would be an opportunity to use the term quagmire… and who reads this anyway…
Angle #2
Tradition and medium specificity?
As the annual Turner Prize (with thanks to J.M.W. Turner) comes round again to remind us that, despite the appropriation of the name of the famous English painter, painting (and to some extent sculpture), is now no longer the paramount art work medium. Installation and the ‘expanded field’ are still in vogue though, and there’s film, poetry and performance. How very Postmodern, with or without irony. But this might make me sound like a grumpy painter…
Angle #3
Emphasise the shock of the new, (with thanks to Robert Hughes).
If there’s an opportunity for shock value in the visual arts, then the Turner Prize will often please the tabloid newspapers. Jesse Darling presents a fascinating sort of junkyard with many found materials, wherein dysfunction functions. And Ghislaine Leung requires the gallery organisation to create the artwork based on her simple instructions. Is this the advanced, aesthetically inclined gig economy at work? Actually, who’s shocked anymore? The shock of the old probable lurks somewhere.
Angle #4
We’re all in this together, (with thanks to David Cameron and George Osborne).
The contemporary artist is no longer required to be a troubled outsider or aloof in any way. It would not be difficult to identify with or understand the plight of the Windrush generation, represented by Barbara Walker. Ghislaine Leung works in an immediate kind of ‘here and now’ in terms of space, sound and labour. Jesse Darling appropriates, reconfigures and transforms objects we see we see regularly. Rory Pilgrim’s RAFTS film emphasizes the requirements of community and common humanity: dangerously socialist principles, perhaps – with a strong hint of Christian belief that is comforting on a humanist level.
Angle #5
Get with the program: Community. Identity. Inclusion. Socio-economics. Feminism etc.
These are the themes of the moment for so many arts organisations and how are they represented in the finalists’ work? Aesthetics have been out for decades, after all. No more art for art’s sake nonsense. Themes dominate just about all forms of contemporary art practice today, irrespective of the visual. That’s rather simplistic.
Angle #6
Get outside of the box (with thanks to Henry Ernest Dudeny).
The impact on the critic and/or the viewer is always implicit but what about the artwork’s point of view? The thinking, feeling, non-sentient being takes the stage. Could I explore notions of materiality taken to a higher level – encompassing hints of Artificial Intelligence? This would be a challenging exercise for a Creative Writing student, I’m sure. Been there but didn’t do it…
I don’t think angles are working for me, but, maybe:
Angle #7
Just blurt it out, then tweak for detail.
I arrived a day early, but returned for the press preview the next day. The staff greeted me kindly and someone gave me a goody bag of information and a stick of rock. She smiled as if to say, you’ve been here before, but I won’t embarrass you. The queue for coffee was so long, I went without. But that was good, as so many people have travelled to Eastbourne who may not have been here before. I already know the place quite well as I taught here for five years (in the 1980s), when the original Towner was in the Old Town area. It’s quite a different organisation now, but built on the same principles for offering art to the general public.
There was an interesting and informative introductory session with four speakers, including Joe Hill (Director and CEO of Towner Eastbourne); Heather Sturdy (Head of National Partnerships at Tate); and Gyr King from McGaw and King the sponsors. In the audience was one of my favourite contemporary poets, Sue Hubbard, and so was someone else I chose to avoid (not an interesting story), but the place was packed. Pen and notebook at the ready. The final speaker, Noelle Collins (Exhibitions & Offsite Curator, Towner Eastbourne) rounded off the formalities by preparing us for the four artists who presented “remarkably different practices” but who were all responding to the world around them. She stressed humanity and vulnerability.
First stop was the introductory ‘Welcome to Turner Prize 2023’ area on the ground floor with video monitors showing short introductory films about the artist. Fortunately they were subtitled, as two pairs of headphones were inadequate for so many visitors attending this space. Then into Ghislaine Leung’s display on the same floor. The main feature is a water fountain but I am drawn to a graphical, wall painting that is the same size as the artist’s home studio wall. It shows a grid representing 168 hours of the week with two blocks of seven hours filled in to represent her available studio hours. To be fair, I am not quite tuned in to the exhibition. At this point introductory videos don’t do it for me so I decide to get around the whole show fairly swiftly as I normally choose to do and then return to individual sections.
Swiftly didn’t happen but for a positive reason. The next section on the first floor is about to show Rory Pilgrim’s film RAFTS. My usual experience of film/video in art exhibitions is for most of the coming and going audience to hang around for a couple of minutes and then to move on, irrespective of the length of time required for the whole screening. There are approximately fifty of us in attendance and 1 hour 6 minutes later virtually all of us are still there, plus half a dozen latecomers. We were transfixed, whether we were seated or standing. In the same room some paintings by the artist and three characters that appeared in the film are displayed. It was difficult to look at these works in the semi-darkness. They seemed to work as installation pieces that were secondary to the filmed performances encompassing the spoken word and commentary, dancing, song and a short prayer.
Next were the second floor galleries, the best space in the building, to see works from Jesse Darling and Barbara Walker. Darling’s sculptures had been almost crammed into this space but left enough room to walk around to inspect each piece. It is a brilliant installation feat, where the space is used to the max without going overboard. One of the sculptures, ‘Corpus (Fortress)’, is placed at the entrance to the section occupied by Barbara Walker. Here the visitor will see nine huge framed drawings illustrating three British citizens from the Windrush generation who had been denied their immigration status by the Home Office. Their portraits are integrated with drawn versions of documents, some official, that would surely be evidence enough for them to be welcomed to stay rather than harassed and hounded by officialdom. In the same space, a massive wall drawing depicts five people drawn directly onto the wall. They will be washed off at the close of the exhibition next April. I felt that some of the washing away could have started at the outset of the show to add impact, but the message of incredulity about Conservative government inspired Home Office actions was still there. I hope that the work celebrates these people.
Then it was time to go back to Ghislaine Leung’s display. I could focus on the installed ‘Fountain’ now. It’s sound ironically cancelling sound. Without understanding why, this was quite beautiful. I also read the wall painting as a minimalist-type grid (echoes of Agnes Martin). Whist the medium might be the message, in a certain frame of mind the message is the medium. That’s what makes all of this art and not mere propaganda or a secondary form for the ideas that have generated the practice.
Who will win the Turner Prize? Why not have four winners as there were in 2019? For what it’s worth I would choose Jesse Darling today, but tomorrow might select Ghislaine Leung. I would guess that the public would nominate Barbara Walker (for the subject matter, not the drawing). So, of course, it will be Rory Pilgrim – his works will cheer us all up. I really don’t think it matters.
It’s Saturday evening and I have spent part of the afternoon in Kemptown, the eastern quarter of Brighton. Sapele Neon Boy is the first show I have visited since attending the Turner Prize press preview in Eastbourne a couple of weeks ago. My review of the Turner is written but I am not happy with it. The show or the writing. But this small selection of works by Joshua Uvieghara at KOOPProjects has woken me from my slumbers. I am going to write this in one draft, check the grammar and publish with a few of my iPhone snapshots. Be damned.
Painting. Thank goodness someone is still painting. I mean, making really good paintings. Producing paintings that grab you and demand your attention. It’s a tough ask these days as visual artists work in so many media. Maybe some ‘alternative media’ artists are really painters at heart, but trends and expectations have taken them off course. For a while, at any rate.
Joshua Uvieghara has been painting for many years. His work should be seen more. Much more. Why? You may well ask. As a fellow painter I am hopelessly biased towards painting. So I know about the relentless challenges and frustrations, including the dangers of repetition and lying in a safety net of satisfaction with what’s okay. And I know that painting is nothing new. It’s been around for so long, after all. But painting is inexhaustible even though it has had to assert itself from modernist decade to post-modernist decade. Painting involves the application of paint onto a surface, often canvas. Paintings never really work on the computer or iPhone screen. There’s no true texture, the size is wrong and the exhibition context is destroyed. The human sense of visual experience and reception is curtailed by digital technology, as technologically clever as it is. Uvieghara’s paintings, like many others of course, have to be seen in the flesh. They should also be seen more because they are, actually, more than visual imagery.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘The Cascading Wall’ 2018
Uvieghara’s paintings often visually unsettle. His tactile combinations of out of the tube colour can appear crude and raw. He uses all six primary and secondary colours – often on the same canvas. Going crazy with colour can create one hell of a mess – but not in Uvieghara’s work. The viewer must hang on in there when first looking at one of his canvases – or fourteen or so at KOOP. Thank goodness there is still somewhere in Brighton that displays quality contemporary painting from time to time. The city is full of artists, but there are few places to show work. Hopefully the situation will change before too many people have left for pastures new. But I digress.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘Magodo Gate’ 2018
In Sapele Neon Boy figurative imagery jostles with the expressionistic abstraction of the twentieth century. Indications of landscapes, places and people coexist with paint applied, sometimes, in a hurry. But always with hard won experience, and certainly with self-confidence. Colour clashes; paint is laid down and left as it is. Paint sometimes drips, but mostly just sits there. The colour combinations could be enough for pure abstraction, but there is subject matter of a highly personal nature too. If there was nothing personal there would be no reason to paint, I suspect. This vicarious nature in/of painting is clearly intended. Taken into the illusionism of space and time, but soon (abruptly) brought into the present by the physical and visual qualities of the painting, Uvieghara’s paintings evoke a living body that is both coming into being and tragically disappearing into the past. Through incompleteness, or imagery taking hold of something concrete, there is a sense of searching too. The work is autobiographical yet universal. Identity is cultural and geopolitical as well as individual. The artist’s personal, familial history, linked to Nigerian and Dutch heritage, will encompass so many cultural and political facets – but there’s enough leeway for the viewer to consider their own sense of selfhood, individuality and identity. At least that was the effect the work had on me.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘Head as Firmament’ 2022
I found some of the portraiture almost emotionally painful, despite the use of bright, gorgeous colour and even gold leaf in one work. Maybe ‘painful’ is too strong an expression. Mirrors and photographs reveal so much and so many people. Uvieghara’s portraits have this unfathomable quality. I was reminded that our pasts are present, even if not always across continents: even if remaining a mystery. The science of DNA has opened doors to the past. We are individuals who know that we are not totally so distinctive and unique. But so many stories are forgotten, secretly hidden or just too distant to recollect. Painting can reconstruct: even as simulacra, as substantive new territory as real as the forgotten or submerged real. Whatever that is.
Visit this exhibition if you can and watch out for any future shows from one of Brighton’s pre-eminent painters. Painting is alive and, well… available to conjure something for the restless imagination.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘Fragments On a Riverine Ocean’ 2019
Founded in 2022 and based in Kemptown, Brighton, Koop Projects is a neighbourhood gallery with an international outlook.
The gallery believes in Contemporary African art and artists as a dynamic source for learning and change, promoting sustainable art practices through an interrogation of materiality and the contexts in which artists across Africa make and show their work.
We support our local art community through the gift of space. Opening doors for artists, curators and creative people with stories to tell, by providing them with space in which to realise their projects.
In the future, the gallery hopes to develop connections and conversations between creative communities in Africa, Brighton and beyond.
“Denise’s current body of work explores memory, loss and place using the rituals of the Seven Sacraments that marked the milestones of her family’s life-events and gatherings. These memories are then re-imagined with the additional knowledge that is acquired. This work is about exploring the loss of her mother to head and neck cancer. Each of the seven sacraments has a narrative, a memory. When exploring old photos and family memories, her relationship to these images change according to life experience, what was once a fleeting memory suddenly becomes a treasured and precious embrace that can now only be experienced in her thoughts and on her canvas.”(Phoenix Art Space website)
Entrance to Phoenix Art Space – Poster image ‘Baptism’
Why visit a painting exhibition? For pleasure, to be inspired, to engage in a sort of communion, to be challenged even? This is human behaviour best explained by an anthropologist, no doubt. I suspect we have performed this ritual in different ways and contexts for a wide variety of reasons, in many forms, since the era of the cave painting. Closer to home, and today, the introduction from the Phoenix web site (above) succinctly sets the visitor up for something more than a superficial aesthetic experience for Denise Harrison’s thought provoking exhibition, The Seven Sacraments.
I was able to initially see the seven paintings and two small mixed media works in advance of the official opening and before those last, final tweaks with wall labels and the switching on of a video player. This was usefully raw as the final polishing for display was still a day or two away. I had previously seen some of these works in progress in Harrison’s Phoenix studio over the past few months. But here they were, finally resolved and ready for viewing as a group rather than as singular items in various phases of completion. Perhaps the studio is the notional cave from which the work emerges, requiring a suitably lit and formal viewing context. There is no more disappearing into the depths of the earth to celebrate or ritualise through what we now call ‘art’. This is a truly powerful set of oil and acrylic paintings that carefully balance colour impact with emotional content. This is certainly not mere (contemporary) wall decoration made for interior design purposes; it’s a visual witness statement conjuring the moving, melancholic and sometimes distressing subject matter of religious expectations and obligations for the family – yet I believe reveals a thoughtful and affectionate reflection on the presence of love within a family across generations.
Denise Harrison – ‘First Communion’ – acrylic on canvas (120x90cm)
My first impressions were divided between a reading of the powerful narrative in the series of paintings, including a reconsideration of the notion of time, and the visual impact of the colour combinations and paint handling that pulled in the eye as well as the mind. The memorial content, based on individuals and familial groupings – from ten parents and children in ‘First Communion’, pairings in ‘Baptism’ and ‘Wedding’, to a rather sad looking ‘St Bernadette’ displayed in the annex of the café – connected the works as forms of portraiture and stage settings. There are Shakespearian echoes here as we may well eventually realise that, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…” But the players here of course are set in a religious, Catholic context. As an outsider to this faith I cannot really comment knowingly on the lived experience of adhering to the Seven Sacraments or of being directly involved in what appears to be a range of disturbing experiences for one particular family. The priest in ‘Ordination: Fr. Shannon’, the centrepiece of the display, doesn’t seem to represent any spiritual joy for himself or for his flock of seven red-clad females. As a counterpoint to any notion of spiritual exultation another emotionally moving image is ‘Last Rites: Despair’ where the ailing mother/grandmother appears alone despite the presence of three younger but ghostly figures in the foreground. The content sounds harrowing, but its production ultimately feels strangely rapturous. This reading is, admittedly, personal and intuitive on my part, but I think it has something to do with the painting and this sense of love that I mentioned above.
Denise Harrison – ‘Ordination: Fr. Shannon’ – oil on canvas (90x152cm)
In a more general sense there is a sense of time as well. Of duration rather than moments, despite the imagery being derived from family snap shots, and the artist’s memory. This time aspect might be more strongly felt by the older viewer, although the younger visitor will ‘get it’ intellectually. The implied presence of the camera is here too as the imagery is akin to looking at a photograph, or a photo-album. There could be a desire to know who, where, when and why but art works on universal levels as well as with local, specific histories. Although it’s not the case here, one might have found the original photographic prints (not on display) in a house clearance but the treatment and editing of the information is clearly specific to the artist’s own history. A story now shared to expand from the individual and the familial to the communal. Paintings cannot escape this fate once they become public and face scrutiny.
Denise Harrison – ‘Last Rites: Despair’ and ‘Confession: Sinners’
Still ruminating on this sense of time it struck me that as we age, time and memories collapse in a sense. Some degree of linearity remains but as we can all look back at our own histories through time we also belong to a family, like or unlike the one recorded here. This may not necessarily be nostalgic in a truly celebratory sense – this sounds too rosy spectacled. But the filters are removed decades on, or perhaps replaced by something at least a little clearer. You have to be outside and beyond to look in, sometimes feeling like a stranger or third party. But you’re still in there, somehow, and this forms identity broadened beyond oneself. Paintings can present contradictions that we can allow ourselves to go with. Paintings are poems, not screen plays.
With regard to painting the viewer might be struck initially by Harrison’s use of glowing pinky reds and airy blues in addition to the strong figurative content representing facial features, especially the eyes and the expressions of the mouth. The various colour shapes morph with their surroundings producing a dream-like, visual connectedness that forces, or frees up, the figurative confines of the photographic content to flow and expand by use of the paint medium. With its various aspects of selection, composition, colour choice, painterly application and materiality the paintings somehow challenge the original photographs to attempt to say more than a superficial reading might offer. A painting, a good one, might read more like a poem that does not explain all. A straightforward story will need some openness for the viewer’s own interpretation and meaning to arise. Narrative is potentially unsteady, open to interpretation and unavoidably filtered and synthesised by the onlooker. Meanings might change from one gaze to the next. Or at the very least we might adapt the various scenarios to our own histories and experiences as a way of dealing with trauma that is beyond the individual, residing in the family and across generations. I am aware that I am probably getting carried away here, beyond the intentions of the artist, but a visitor could not walk through this space without exchanging a ‘look’ with the various individuals depicted and possibly find an echo in there.
An affirmation of painting is also powerfully and skilfully evoked by a suggestion of the purposely unsophisticated veering on apparent clumsiness. For example a limb such as a leg that is too straight, or a head too big or childishly bulbous. This somewhat unfair attribution emerges as there is clearly something of the lens-based / photographic record in the visual language that sparks an expectation for some category of the photo-realistic. But this combination somehow works. The apparent distortions and simplifications are deliberate. The colour is sometimes acidic and contrasts are crudely intentional. Detail, for example, is reserved for eyes and mouths, whereas bodies and surrounding forms and spaces tend towards a more abstract language as backdrops from the theatre of the everyday to make the imagery emotionally real. These people are us, vulnerable and loving, lost and found.
Visit this exhibit if you can. Support for artists is about engagement with their works and ideas. Be baffled and be sure. Participate and trust. We need to share our stories and painting does this so well.
Geoff Hands
Denise Harrison – ‘St. Bernadette’ – oil on canvas (66x46cm)
Scarlett Segal’s exhibition, A Sense of Place, is briefly on display at Green and Stone in Chelsea. Before the show opened I enjoyed a visit to her studio in a village nestled in the South Downs, not far from the Long Man of Wilmington and equidistant from Seaford and Eastbourne.
This location is worth mentioning for its varied and quick changing geographical diversity of well kept fields, ancient patches of woodland and dramatically shaped, grass covered chalk hills. Within a short day’s wandering a healthy walker could find themselves enclosed by thickets of ash, beech and oak trees, tripping on stony ground or slipping on soaked grassy banks. There are plenty of dark, leafy copses, leading on to more open local vistas that coax and challenge further investigation. Steep stretches of smooth hillside that beckon the traveller upwards towards local summits can be enclosed in mist or clearly contrasted against clear blue skies. These climatic changes can take place within a day, let alone from season to season. For those who reach these various hilltops the views of the South Downs will stretch far and wide to invite aerial perspectives and to scale up vision. To the south, where the gaze can detect the sea view so surprisingly close by, there is a big enough hint to confirm the island upon which we can still sometimes lose ourselves in – a place of safe solitude, perhaps, despite the recent pandemic. To the landscape painter it’s a small paradise that can stretch as far as the eye can see, to beneath one’s feet, or to the finger-tips in search of the distinctively tactile.
We first spoke to each other after a presentation of Julian Le Bas’ paintings exhibited at The Star Gallery in Lewes. As with Le Bas, if you live in this wonderful corner of the county and you have an interest in painting, you cannot avoid the land and sea as subject matter. Historically Eric Ravilious, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (at Charleston) plus Jean Cooke and Harold Mockford, amongst many others, have responded to and extracted and invented something from this chalky Downland that engages with the English Channel, or should I say La Manche, as Segal is a French citizen who will therefore not take this landscape for granted.
Meeting in an artist’s studio is always a special pleasure, and, with an interview a handy precursor to a formal exhibition presentation. Many of the paintings for A Sense of Place had been unwrapped and temporarily displayed in the library, mostly perched on shelves in front of the art books and French novels. The paintings were simply but effectively framed in white moulding which more than adequately served the purpose of completing the works for hanging in future homes. From seeing some of these paintings on the gallery website beforehand there was a degree of familiarity with the imagery, but the digital image can never substitute for the real thing. Colours and surface qualities have to be considered in the flesh – and a composition such as ‘Path in the South Downs’ came across as far more varied in painterly and scratchy, drawn textures and subtle tonalities than on the computer screen. At just 26X34 cm it is quite small, but the composition and paint handling evoked sensations of both the physicality of the terrain and the implied movement of the walking observer who will perceive the changing scenery as a time-based phenomenon.
I was intrigued by the art history books, but was curious as to how Segal had found herself in East Sussex and, as a painter myself, in her daily working practice.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Before the Storm’
GH: You originate from Paris and have lived and studied in London, so how have you found yourself in rural Sussex?
SS: I needed a change of scene literally and a reset button. I am a big city person at heart but the lockdown took the advantages of city living away. The culture had gone overnight and so did the possibility of socialising with friends. I have always liked to replenish in the countryside. My family had a country house in Normandy, which we always went to at weekends and on holidays. I also lived and raised my family in Surrey for many years. It did not feel rural enough and therefore I took the leap. Sussex is gorgeous with its hills and the sea nearby. It is a stones throw away from London. And it has its perks. I have also discovered the Towner and the glorious Charleston Trust. What is there not to like? I once wrote in a journal years ago that I needed to be in isolation in the calm and quiet to build a brand new body of work. And I did just that here. I am very adaptable and flexible. If money were no object I would live between London and here, and between England and France. I could certainly do with more sun and blue sky!
GH: What is your way of working? Do you have a routine?
SS: I am very self disciplined and a hard worker which does not prevent me from having fun and procrastinating somehow. I justify it as my thinking mode. I work most days and even on walks I look and sketch and think. I would read on a train journey. For me art is a way of life and thanks to it I learn valuable skills such as problem solving and perseverance. There are skilled artists. Talented ones even, but in order to make it, it is sheer hard work and resilience. I am fortunate that I can now devote my time entirely to a passion that originated in childhood. And even though I came to it later on in life I can now put all my energy and life experience into it. So yes, I draw most days and paint relentlessly. No routine as such but I make sure I go to my studio every day. To paint, to read, to tidy up. To prime surfaces which I love experimenting with. Boards are my favourite at the moment. I love being there. I love the smell of the various media. I feel time stands still except when there are important deadlines. I find solace and the more you do the easier it gets. I paint in both acrylics and oil and want to experiment with mixed media. But for landscapes I definitely prefer oil paint. I use very high quality pigments because it makes life easier and the process is so much more enjoyable. I use a limited palette and mix all of my colours.
GH: There must be ‘off days’?
SS: Of course – some days are just not meant to be. There are also the happy accidents and the times when everything falls into place. It is an ongoing learning curve. I feel so fortunate I can do what I love and express my emotions. If viewers are moved or reminisce or travel through my work then I am a very happy artist indeed. I never quite know what the next work will be and this makes the process exciting. The dream I have is to make a difference and collaborate with community projects.
GH: Art History is clearly important to you, as you have studied at Christies, Sotheby’s, The Courtauld Institute, and continue to do so at Charleston. Does this academic background affect and inform your painting practice in any specific kind of way? Does it help, or is it an academic hindrance?
SS: It certainly does help. I think the discourse is changing drastically right now and it is very exciting for female artists who have been so cast aside for centuries. Somehow I don’t think it had ever been questioned before Linda Nochlin’s essay (“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”) in the 1970s. Since then, we have had women such as Judy Chicago, Siri Husvedt and Katy Hessel, among others, to thank for that. When you think that widely read and influential art historians such as Vasari and Gombrich could only name one woman each! So, yes, history of art informs my work through research but like all artists I am a magpie and will study real masterpieces in order to use what appeals to me. I love visiting galleries and I am sure I must be irritating to other museum goers as I love standing close to understand how a certain effect was achieved. I must confess that it can take the fun away which is why I tend to go to exhibitions often more than once if I can and take friends too. You cannot learn from books reproductions or art critics. And to see the brushstrokes of Cézanne or Morisot in the flesh brings tears to my eyes.
I am very aware of all the arts movements and their historical context. I wish I knew more about cross disciplines such as literature and music. I remember a splendid exhibition at the V&A a few years back called Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. The curator (Kate Bailey) had done just that putting all the facts together per city, where there was an opera house, on a blackboard. I remember thinking this is the way we should be taught before being taught the formal way of analysing works of art and the themes to look out for. It feels forced to some extent but you need a toolkit.
Cézanne, the Father of Modernism, is one of my favourite painters and we are so fortunate that his works are so easy to access. I also love Corot and Turner. My work is inspired mostly from Modernism, including Abstraction, and as such it is inevitable to have a very good understanding of what happened before, since Modernist artists pushed boundaries and endeavoured to break all the rules.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Autumn Reflection’
GH: Your exhibition at Green and Stone, A Sense of Place, has essentially a landscape theme. Are you moving on from your geometric/abstract work or do the two practices work alongside each other?
SS: Yes, it is actually all landscapes but not only – hence the title of the show. The works are painted in a varied style or language. Some move totally towards abstraction even. It comes back to what I was just saying. It is difficult to justify that you can do both and want to do both. Galleries will accept that you paint portraits and still lifes, or still lifes and landscapes, but not representational and abstract. I find this infuriating and short sighted. I think the explanation lies both in the difficulty of branding different looking aesthetics, or what could commonly be referred to as a “Jack of all trades”, and the classification and hierarchy of genres imposed by the Academies.
In the history of art timeline, artists evolved towards semi abstraction and abstraction from the 20th century until now. Very few reverted back to representational art. Vanessa Bell did try it all. The need to label and compartmentalise everything is a sign of our times whereby instant gratification and ready-made explanations are sought. But this is exactly what artists have always done (think of the Bauhaus or the Bloomsbury Group) and must carry on to do. Anyhow, conventions and limitations have always been imposed. Think of Gainsborough who painted portraits for a living but only ever wanted to be a landscape artist. Nothing new. Artists have free rein to express the way they see the world and seek to make a difference.
So to answer your question, yes I would like to find a way of making the two practices co-exist and look coherent. In my eyes they already are and show an evolution from Space to Place. This is just commercially difficult to explain.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Gone is the Long Man, Wilmington’
GH: There is quite some emphasis on water in many of the paintings in this new exhibition, with the Cuckmere river, streams and the coast nearby this is inevitable for a landscape painter living in this part of the county. Plus there’s snow in ‘Gone is the Long Man, Wilmington’ and ‘White Stillness’, plus mist (‘Misty River’) and the loaded, soaking, atmosphere in ‘Before the Storm’. Should the viewer read anything into this?
SS: I find water soothing. Its noise. Its rhythm. Its fluidity. And I love swimming. I am drawn to reflections, as I also like how it changes our perception of what we see above. It is like being confronted by two realities, one more transient that the other. I have also always been fascinated by the myth of Narcissus. I see water as a mirror of our soul.
GH: I am also intrigued by several of your titles, particularly ‘Let Go’, ‘Looking Up’ and ‘Serene Promise’. It suggests to me that a sense of place is more than a view or visual record. I feel a sense of time, particularly on a personal level, where one might acknowledge that sense of a lifetime journey. Am I reading too much into the titles?
SS: No you are not at all. It is true. Some works are drawn to certain memories and are very personal. Landscapes can be self-portraits too. I actually think you can dig deeper and express more this way without being obvious and imposing a reading of the work. I am a strong believer that once you finish a painting you need to let go and accept that some people will perceive other emotions than the ones you intended. Hearing the explanations given to some Old Masters’ and contemporary works sometimes make me laugh. I think of course that was not the intention, but who knows? If it gets people thinking and talking this is a great thing! I like the openness in a way. I dislike pedantic talks about art though. Art should not be elitist. It should be accessible to all. But knowledge is power in any field.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Serene Promise’
GH: A serious and a tongue in cheek question: Why not just photograph these landscape locations? Isn’t the genre of landscape painting quite outmoded nowadays?
SS: Well if you want to look at and frame a photograph then you can. It is a work of art in its own right. Photography has in fact forced painters to paint differently. Would the Impressionists have existed without its invention? Most unlikely, or not to that extent.
GH: Well photography probably created Realism (in France), from which Impressionism developed that sense of the now and the everyday. Monet is the classic example. I don’t equate your paintings with the camera at all.
SS: Even though I use my own photographs, I do not paint directly from them. I would find this boring and limiting. There would be no creativity. One could use grids or paint by numbers! Joking apart, I always work on compositions through sketches, and rebuilding photographic worlds in Photoshop or Procreate. And I really think my heavily constructed abstract geometric works made me work this way. Nothing is random or completely organic. I see myself as an architect of worlds. By contrast, the landscapes start with a mapped composition but evolve organically with shapes of colours. So no, a photograph could never achieve this in my view.
GH: As I said earlier, your work suggests a sense of place and the experience of perception in that place – far more than a view or visual record.
SS: I personally see shapes and colours dancing in front of my eyes all the time. I thought everyone did. It certainly makes drawing easier. It might be a form of synaesthesia or something else; I am not sure what the correct term would be. This perception informs the way I paint. Painting for me is recapturing the experience of seeing and feeling.
But I should add that I do not think that landscape painting is quite ‘outmoded’. Quite the contrary, in fact. I think landscape painting has a very long tradition for sure but that its ubiquity has been sidelined by more spectacular art forms such as Conceptual art, Installation art, Performance and Land Art, even. But I have noticed a resurgence of interest for landscape painting as demonstrated by the latest publications on contemporary landscape artworks. I find the works by David Hockney, Peter Doig (exquisite show at The Courtauld by the way), Anselm Kiefer and Luc Tuymans, to name but a few, very current. They have all reinvented the idea of landscape according to their artistic needs and the times they live in.
GH: That’s an extremely positive point to end on, to acknowledge that landscape related art is continuously reinvented. Thank you, Scarlett.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Stormy Stormy Weather’
Links:
If you miss the show you can contact Scarlett Segal directly via her website – https://scarlettsegal.com
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now.”
Giorgio Morandi – ‘Still Life’ 1936
Visually primed from visiting the Cézanne exhibition at Tate Modern the day before, it was surely appropriate to move on to the Giorgio Morandi show the next day. Through his work Cézanne may have been saying, stop and look at the world (often the landscape) and construct it directly through the dynamic act of perception – but take your time. Calmly experience what is in front of you, he may have added, with the incomplete narrative of the here and now. Morandi appears to take this lesson from the master of modern art and subsequently devotes his painting mission to this, his unrelenting lifetime project.
The literature on Morandi confirms that he was interested in Cézanne’s work (especially in Morandi’s own still lifes of 1914-15 onwards) and the viewer will sense it in many of the examples from future works in this marvelous show at the Estorick Collection in London. The exhibition has travelled from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Mamiagno in northern Italy – not so far from Bologna where Morandi lived and worked for the whole of his career. Normally for the UK based artist or keen gallery visitor, to see and contemplate Morandi’s works the opportunities are severely limited as there appear to be less than a dozen paintings in public collections. Outside of London, visits would be required to such places as Norwich, Birmingham and Edinburgh but one would only see individual works. The best and most obvious option is a weekend trip to Bologna to visit the collection in the Museo Morandi, part of the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna (better known as MAMbo). Fortunately, as the Magnani-Rocca Foundation undergoes some refurbishment, the Estorick has the honour of displaying seventeen paintings and 33 works on paper, including etchings, for four months.
Oddly, as I felt compelled to write about this exhibition I also had a contrary sense of there being no necessity to do so. What more can one say about such a relatively straightforward range of imagery. Morandi’s works, especially the oil paintings, are so matter-of-fact painterly that they are surely just what they are, no more, no less – or as Dan Flavin the American minimalist sculptor once said: “It is what it is and it ain’t nothing else”. So I hesitated for a couple of weeks or so, during which time I happened to read Italo Calvino’s ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ and came across some ideas that could be applied to considering Morandi’s paintings – most especially the still life compositions. For example, Calvino writes about the transition from word to image and vice versa as a crucial aspect of writing for novelists. So I wondered if Morandi, perhaps instinctively, takes the viewer from image to image, but in the same work. That is, as an inseparable combination, conjoining the material object (the oil painting) and the mental image (the viewer’s) as one phenomenon. Referring to St. Ignatius, Calvino also wrote of the “…visual contemplation or meditation”. This viewing approach is crucial for any work of art, but especially so for Morandi. This point also reminded me of Giotto’s frescos in Assisi and most especially to the palette that Giotto had access to. This link, however pertinent or not, was realised as I flicked through an old copy of ‘Forma e Colore – Giotto Gli Affreschi di Assisi’ by Roberto Salvini (1965) that a friend had recently passed on to me. There’s probably more detail in Giotto’s work, and a clear religious narrative of course, but the overall sense of the essence of form and a restricted palette renders an insistence on contemplation, both spiritual and commonplace for both of these pre-eminent Italian painters.
Giorgio Morandi – ‘Still Life’ 1953
In a more modern sense (post Freud and Jung), Calvino brings psychological experience and time into the creative equation: “…to the individual or collective unconscious, for example, or to time regained through sensations that rise up from lost time, or to epiphanies or concentrations of being in a single point or moment.” Such experiences may be rare unless programmatically sought through meditation and so do we learn from Morandi that time, by extension, returns the viewer to a concrete notion and an awareness of now? His still-life paintings appear to acknowledge the past as present, even beyond his own lifetime. Or, to put it another way, Morandi realises the metaphysical nature of perception of the world without recourse to limiting or tying himself to the illustrational or imaginary aspects of Metaphysical artists such as Carlo Carrà and Giorgio di Chirico, both of whom he knew personally in his formative years. Morandi’s imagery is utterly solid and direct: he sees the wood for the trees.
Morandi must have dedicated countless hours of actively looking whilst painting, just as Cézanne did. We might wonder what Morandi may have been thinking about his restricted subject matter that was essentially local to Bologna and to his studio tabletop for so many years. Perhaps many days were necessary to make one small work, one more little addition to all of the pictures in the world. But the apparent narrative of the imagery, as there is always a context, returns to the moment when, typically, a group of objects that have been arranged to be studied, for no other reason than to make a painting that replaces the original objects, the lighting conditions and the local colours. This may suggest a very limited artistic programme, bordering on the absurd, for recording the instant in paint at least, requires great time and effort even to conjure something so simple. Would a photograph have sufficed? The problem with a photograph might be that it is, literally, an instant, albeit a split second, but a painting comes loaded with at least a notion of commitment to a long-winded task that can appear ridiculous considering the time and effort required to reach some kind of conclusion – again and again.
Giorgio Morandi – ‘Flowers’ 1942
Painting can be unashamedly romantic too. Does Morandi seduce the viewer? The artist is doing no more than selecting, composing, looking, recording and painting his direct experience with an implied narrative of light, colour and form overtly realised in a particular arrangement of an apparently small collection of very ordinary objects – though sometimes a small bunch of picked flowers will appear. But Morandi shows us that the human gaze can rest upon something as simple, as pedestrian and as everyday, as a few mundane bottles, jars, and vases – and utterly captivate the viewer. Anticipating Object Orientated Ontology and contemporary metaphysics, Morandi’s paintings might be convincing the viewer that these objects and/or the paintings will exist eternally whether we are there to witness them or not – despite the contradiction that the paintings, his collection of domestic items and the occasional building from his window views were designed, made and contextualised by humans in the first place. The sound of the falling tree may not need a witness after all.
Returning to Calvino, pictures are starting points (imagined or real) and he makes reference to the playwright and author Samuel Beckett “…reducing visual and linguistic elements to the bare minimum…” This reductive tendency could equally be applied to Morandi’s imagery. His still life paintings in particular need no extra content than that which has already been selected, arranged and recorded. The viewer can look and wait knowing that Godot will probably never arrive after all. But we are here with the painting, nonetheless.
Giorgio Morandi – ‘Courtyard on Via Fondazza’ 1954.
Just before, eventually, writing this essay I had the speculative thought that Morandi’s work might be of interest, his paintings in particular, because there is no overt or political narrative? Due to the omnipresence of the media and rolling news streams, notwithstanding the politically correct themes and causes that arts organisations have to embrace to secure funding, the curator and the viewer might sometimes lose sight of the aesthetics of the image? This is not to suggest that issues and contemporary subject matters are unimportant or unnecessary, but I sometimes fear that the immediacy of the painted image, including its inherent materiality, the appropriate choice of physical application and visual content becomes secondary to a particular narrative that ticks a societal, and therefore political, box.
The viewer might find some unexpected joy in visiting this exhibition. Luigi Magnani, the collector of these works said himself that Morandi’s “…works have no content”. So by not fulfilling a manifesto with which to frame the work Morandi does not appear to take sides or to insist upon a message. The work has to speak for itself, or as Stefano Roffi writes in the catalogue: “Just like angels, the works Magnani chose had to possess a soul, be characterized by essentiality, purity, formal perfection, a lack of agitation, of vain philosophizing; to convey silence rather than clamour, peace rather than anguish.”
Giorgio Morandi – ‘Still Life’ 1960
In writing this purposely ruminatory essay, and in not being bound by a publisher’s deadline, I was also able to ponder and let the work sink in further, albeit from my own photographs and others kindly provided by Alison Wright (PR) on behalf of the Estorick. As a painter myself I have a conscious bias of concentrating on the paintings in the exhibition, but I chose not to discuss any particular work on display in this instance. But as I check my scribbled notes from the day I visited, I am reminded that I returned to view three works on paper before I headed for the bookshop to buy the catalogue. Each titled, ‘Still Life’ (from 1963, 1959 and 1963) they verge on the edge of abstraction with a minimalist aesthetic. The viewer could indeed start from the final works and study Morandi’s visual journey in reverse chronological order to find that he was a proto-minimalist after all. As, perhaps, Cézanne was too.
Notes:
Review title from: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to be acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.” (Sylvia Plath, letter to Eddie Cohen, 1950)
“Plein air painting on a large scale has heightened my sense of involvement. My use of colour is instrumental in expressing my feelings about form and light within the landscape. Inspired by some new subjects, a shift in my work has transpired.”
(Julian Le Bas, 2023)
In preparation for Julian Le Bas’ much-anticipated exhibition at the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes, I was asked by Sarah O’Kane (Sarah O’Kane Contemporary Fine Art) to write about Julian’s work, as she knew I was a follower of his career and had written about his show at Berwick Church for Lewes Artwave 2022. I made a visit to his studio last November to talk to him and to see completed canvases and a few works in progress for the exhibition in Lewes. Some of this new text has been included in the catalogue for the show and a suitably edited version is published on her gallery website.
With Sarah’s approval, here is the full version of the exhibition:
A Studio Visit
Julian Le Bas is a painter, perhaps the contemporary painter, of the Sussex section of the South Downs. His work bares witness to this characteristically splendid and captivating geography of chalk hills, meadows, woodland and the adjoining coastline. The Sussex landscape possesses a subtle drama that does not provide the instant awe of, say, the Peaks of the Yorkshire Dales or views from Snowdonia, but the chalk cliffs that stretch eastwards from Brighton and Seaford towards Eastbourne are unique enough to provide a painted image with the visual impact of location not always provided so explicitly in other locales.
If you know Sussex reasonably well you will be aware of Chanctonbury Ring, Black Cap, Mount Caburn and Firle Beacon, and will recollect on how these geographical landmarks change in mood and appearance depending on the weather, the season and the time of day. On a more micro-level you will know that as you travel around, away from the A roads, you will expect to see characteristic churches in the villages, such as at Berwick and Southease. You will also know that there are marvellous trees in the various churchyards, or alongside the fields that produce crops or are home to the cows and the pigs. Look closer still with this consummate painter and, depending on the time of year, see the bluebells, snowdrops or a defiantly red rosehip amongst the winter brambles. In other words, there is no hierarchy of place or incumbent: be it animal, mineral or vegetable.
I wonder, also, if the paintings are a form of storytelling. Many of these visual tales will find their way to new homes, perhaps above the hearth, in a bedroom, a study or in a corridor leading to the kitchen. The point being that the paintings will find, literally, a home to prompt a recollection of a known and familiar landmark, embedding an internal conversation not necessarily or exclusively about rural Sussex, but also beyond to landscape revealed through the act of painting. Prompted by various locations, painting as gesture, as abstraction and as colour obsession – in an era of the digital and the virtual that can loose the immediacy of a physical and mental interaction with light, form and space.
These many places visited by Le Bas, often with the imperative ritual of walking to them, are invested with powerful colour effects and combinations of brush marks too. The viewer might be convinced that they are as improvised as much as they are consciously planned and controlled. Le Bas balances these two complimentary aspects of the act of painting, which is so important for what I interpret as reflection in action, as a matter of course. He produces visually potent and efficacious oil paintings that retain this sense of having a heart beat, of being visually fixed but alive somehow and which have to be authentically realised in situ. These studies can only be so faithfully achieved, by necessity, out of the studio environment.
For the uncompromising en plein air painter the idea of the studio is, potentially, a notional one, as four walls do not restrict the site of production. So when I visited Le Bas’ studio in the back garden of his home in Seaford I was not sure what to expect. At 12 X 10 feet the space was significantly more than big enough for the lawn mower, gardening tools and cracked flowerpots that one might normally expect to come across, although thankfully there were no such items stored here. But this was more than simply a storage area for dozens of canvases of various sizes. The wicker chair and cushion, just the one, was evidence enough to reveal a space for the artist to sit and ponder on his latest day’s work. Space too, to rethink and assess the necessity to return to a particular location to complete a canvas not yet considered fully realised, hence the provision of three viewing walls. I asked Le Bas if he sometimes continued the paintings here, away from the subject. A simple ‘no’ was the answer. I need not have asked, for his many collectors and supporters will know that he is a purist of sorts; passionate and uncompromising in the most positive sense and completely at one with the traditions associated with the landscape/seascape painter who will go out in all weathers to attain their goals – and to constantly surprise themselves at the inexhaustible range of subject matters and moods that wait to be seen and experienced.
Such an approach is Le Bas’ unspoken manifesto. He just gets on with the task in hand, albeit as a healthy compulsion loaded with drive and sheer enthusiasm. The work is so memorable that it speaks not only for itself, but also for the inexhaustible landscape related encounters that somehow await the viewer’s comprehension, though intriguingly via the work itself. The paintings may well function as signposts, imploring the viewer to get back out there and look again, but they are more than mere signage of course. The canvases, as carriers of physical imagery, embody lived experience and a sense of time, where to pin down the visual realisation of a particular place, set in some notion of the abstractness of duration, is reliant on the paint medium and its expert treatment. Time and light is fluid too, which poses a contradiction to the solidity of form, of the interaction of colours and the myriad relationships that constitute fixed composition. Le Bas’ works bring the observer and observed together so that the works also realise the shared experience of seeing, through the manifestation of consciously formulated structures constructed by this communal gift of sight.
There is an inherent democracy at work, wherein the drawing content, the range of mark making, the colour range are all carefully balanced so that if anything dominates it is the difficult to define ‘spirit of place’. Le Bas can apply such an abstract notion in any aspect of the landscape environment, whether nearby or far away. Interestingly, the historical picturesque can be discounted in his approach to composition and content, as there is an honest acceptance of what is simply there. What lesson we might learn from Le Bas’ life-long project is that every day and every scene presents a seemingly revived landscape offering a new vista, and a fresh encounter, with the apparently commonplace. These landscapes are tirelessly offered up, re-imagined, for continuous engagement and revelation, so long as the viewer will give over their own time to enjoy and contemplate the imagery.
Le Bas’ paintings celebrate, exalt and revere the various locations and unequivocally express awe at the natural world. The role of shamanic consort, expressing the elevating metaphysical aspect of the everyday through the ordinarily magical presence of the landscape is his task. The work continuously appears to convey this sense of the uniqueness of the quotidian and the local which changes in appearance, not only due to time of day or season, but is subject to the artist’s own crucial engagement at any particular time. This notion of self, however, is not selfish as these paintings help the viewer to see afresh and to experience beyond subject matter.
There is an extrovert inclination in these paintings and drawings, revealing an emotional involvement steered by rigorous and disciplined draughtsmanship. This engagement with the physical qualities of medium, from compressed charcoal or chalk pastel in his drawings to oil paint on canvas, Le Bas’ works are somehow a summation of perceived experience that lives beyond his initial encounters in the landscape. High key colour combines with earthy local colour. His engagement with the glorious power of colour reveals both a romantic and a matter-of-fact connection with the landscape experience.
There is, I suspect, some deliberate exaggeration in Le Bas’ practice. A visual proclamation in his use of colour and insistent mark making, which is intended to bring the viewer into the work, and to make a lasting impression, reminds us that the landscape is still a worthy and increasingly important genre. Not solely for the sake of decorating our walls, or as a reminder of those places we love to visit, but as ecological imperative. For, as our burgeoning awareness of environmental issues develops for all the wrong reasons, Le Bas’ representations of the landscape may be reminding us that Arcadia is on our doorstep and, by implication, we need to stop trashing it a.s.a.p.
“A work of art is a whole, and this whole contains many parts – the material out of which it’s made being just one of them. We could include the interpretive horizons of the art’s consumers, for example, and the contexts in which the art materials were assembled… In this way it’s obvious that there are so many more parts than there is whole.” (Timothy Morton)
Molly Stredwick
The chair in the art gallery has never been quite the same again since Joseph Kosuth presented, ‘One and Three Chairs’ (1965), in a Duchampian spirit of challenging the viewer to question representation in art. Subsequently we have learned, or been reminded, that everything is loaded with possible interpretations – especially when context is accounted for. A context that includes the viewer, of course.
Molly Stredwick (wall installation) and Becky Hancock (drawing and sculpture)
In 262 CHAIRS, currently installed in the Coachwerks exhibition space in Brighton, I find myself looking for a chair to sit on, as I need to rest awhile. Alas, this is not an option, which I find ironically amusing. But there are chairs galore in this warmly welcoming environment, thanks to the blazing log burner, which are represented in many drawings and two sculptures. Adam Spain, Exhibition Manager at Volt, Eastbourne, has neatly curated the exhibition, which may account for a certain ‘just rightness’ about a selective display that does not go overboard visually and presents enough physical content to engage the viewer.
The two exhibitors, Becky Hancock and Molly Stredwick (both graduates of Camberwell College of Arts) are presenting works that simply work well together. Not just because the apparent subject matter might be the same, but also because there’s an almost unassuming simplicity and innocence about the imagery as well as the means of execution. Though I suspect the content could be loaded.
Becky Hancock
Take Becky Hancock’s five drawings, for example, where each composition includes a pair of chairs placed at, what might be, a dining table. Domestic space suggests relationships, often about couples, and by extension, families. Here the furniture is, in a sense, naked. There are no figures directly represented, although the placement of, and spaces between, the various pairs of chairs are perhaps melancholy and at odds. The viewer might clothe these scenarios with their own imaginative interpretations or real experiences and any one of these drawings would be ideal to start writing a short story from in a creative writing class. The more visually dominant element in these drawings is the table, which distorts itself into angular hieroglyphs. The table might be a body that undergoes both voluntary and, as a domestic situation might dictate, forced distortions and poses – though not so much as a referee or arbitrator, but functioning as a victim of sorts. As sketchbook drawings, presented on the wall unframed, they might well function as studies for paintings or installations but they are intriguingly finalised statements that are impressive and compelling enough to be fully resolved outcomes per se.
Becky Hancock
Also on display are two 3D pieces by Hancock. At first sight the viewer might read them as adjusted ‘real’ chairs. But they are human-scale simulacra. A chair can be an idea, a model, a prototype, an image, a word or even a functional item. Whatever a ‘chair’ has the potential to manifest itself as it can also be a sculpture, of sorts. These two pieces take on an anthropomorphic presence with one leaning forward, as if in prayer, adoration of the deity or submission, the other sat back in picnic mode – engaged in déjeuner sur l’herbe, perhaps. Either way, both are fallen, making a melancholic and downcast presence at the viewer’s feet. Or telling us that they are not really chairs, whatever our automatic reading probably is.
Molly Stredwick
Co-exhibitor, Molly Stredwick, has commandeered the largest, most expansive wall, upon which 176 small drawings of chairs are displayed (selected from a series of 251). These are, for all intents and purposes, imaginary chairs. The perspective is sometimes distorted, conventional three-point perspective reversed, or appearing to be floating or rendered flat without surrounding space or objects included. Any resemblance to Hancock’s 3-D chairs is superficial, though creating a coherent feel and appearance for the exhibition. This wall of 11X16 approximately postcard sized drawings might be a catalogue of chairs, but each is surely the same one, or maybe not, for very subtle personality traits might distinguish each speculative rendering. Drawn on G. F. Smith paper samples with the same red Muji Gel pen there is a suggestion of the series or the genus with variety being sight. The manufacturer’s printed text functions as an internal framing device too, with the different numbers, paper types and weight information changing along with the colours and the visual and tactile presence of the material. So what appears to be repetition and sameness calmly explodes into huge variety. In effect, this wall of assembled drawings functions as an installation that can be viewed as a whole grid-type shape or as individual drawings that must attract viewers to any one sample or part, which is nevertheless complete in itself.
Becky Hancock
In his book, ‘Being Ecological’, Timothy Morton has explained that an ecosystem of parts and wholes is an environment of “just lifeforms and their extended genomic expressions: think of spider’s webs and beaver’s dams.” That’s what artists do; they make their respective webs and dams alongside and sometimes in collaboration with others (or curators make the connections). The viewer is part of the situation too; not so much caught up in the web, as one of its constructors.
Note: Both quotations from: Morton, T. ‘Being Ecological’, Pelican, 2018 (p.113)
Returning home from the Private View for ‘We Like The Taste of Certain Poisons’, I am compelled to write something immediately about this small but compelling exhibition of Richard Graville’s paintings at NoHawkers Gallery, which is situated in the Rodhus complex of studios and workshops in Brighton.
Richard Graville- ‘WIDE’ 2022 (60x120cm) Flashe & acrylic on canvas
Some sense of urgency (including the use of my iPhone photographs – so apologies to the artist) is due to the fact that the show is only open for two days and that if someone were to read this hurried review in time they might make it to see the exhibition. But another aspect of this impulse is due to my having spent a large proportion of the day preparing a teaching session, in which I shall ask my students to consider our shared human history of the landscape environment and might consider why this is still an interest for contemporary painters.
I had been re-reading Timothy Morton’s, ‘Being Ecological’, in which he posits the notion that:
“Picture postcards are descendents of what came before Romanticism in art, namely the picturesque. In the picturesque, the world is designed to look like a picture – like it’s already been interpreted and packaged by a human. You can easily see what’s what: there’s a mountain over there, a lake, maybe there’s a tree in the foreground… this is pretty much what humans saw in the savannah millions of years ago. Having a body of water nearby and some shade (those trees), encircled safely by mountains where you know there is water descending to feed the lake (for instance), is pretty handy if you’re some kind of ancient human. The picturesque is keyed to a fundamental human-centred way looking at things: it is anthropocentric.”
This seems strangely fortuitous, for although Graville’s paintings would certainly not be identified as landscapes as such (though they hold that possibility for a viewer who might be so inclined to wear their landscape-tinted spectacles), some kind of deep psychological and ‘pre-historical’ possibilities are pertinent to Graville’s project within a minimalist, systems/coding kind of approach to hard-edged abstract painting.
Richard Graville – ‘SOLUTION’ 2022 (100x100cm) and ‘CLEAR’ 2022 (80x80cm) both Flashe and acrylic on canvas
The last time I saw a Richard Graville painting (in the flesh, as opposed to on Instagam) was in H_A_R_D_P_A_I_N_T_I_N_G_x2 (Part 1) at the Phoenix Art Space in Brighton at the beginning of 2020. I wrote then that:
“Even Richard Graville’s pair of canvases, ‘Blushing Phantom’ and ‘Red Banded’, that come the closest to accruing accusations of painterly abstraction, have an aura of careful, premeditated control. That they echo the similar stripes on the workforce vans outside the building is either unfortunate or reminds us that abstract art is everywhere.”
This was my personal, uninformed but simplistically and naively honest response to two rather satisfying paintings. We search for meaning, some allusion, illusion or just good old subject matter in paintings. It’s habitual. That the red and yellow stripes on the Highway Maintenance vans had any connection with the natural world, as in animal colouration and patterning, I must admit was beyond me at the time.
Richard Graville – Studio view
From this solo show of ten new works by the artist (plus several more in his studio on-site) an information sheet presents this comment:
“Humans were once able to navigate and track subtle clues in nature. Now flat signs in primary colours tell us which way to go and what to do. I continue down that path to see where it leads.” (Richard Graville)
Hence my connection with Morton’s view on the picturesque, in that we humans create systems of understanding to navigate and understand the environments we live in – as do the other animals. Morton’s observations reference a perception of the world from a clearly human viewpoint (the anthropocentric), although also in the book he makes it clear that a worm’s experience of an apple is somewhat different to a human’s. Nevertheless, on all sorts of levels, data is interpreted, via various access modes, to be acted upon.
A wall mounted information display adjacent to the exhibition room tells the viewer that animal colouration systems, categorized as aposematism, inform potential predators that an animal is poisonous, venomous, or otherwise dangerous. All animals (which include us humans), to some extent, live (and die) by preventing attack (or not). Data requires interpretation, which is a form of code, taking us back to the work of the artist.
Not that Graville’s works could be categorized as ‘landscape’, but various painted arenas (canvases) are presented for interpretation and contemplation. Sensory input, from the simple act of looking, enables the mind to process information that we categorise typically as colour, size, shape, texture and finish or sheen. Each composition is relatively simple and geometrical and often references (purposely or not) windows and road signs. The colour palette is always limited (sometimes monochrome), though sophisticated and astute enough to prompt some reaction from the viewer. Every work is immaculately and carefully composed, painted and visually constructed. I suspect that the paintings might feel different depending on one’s mood and known or unknown frame of reference at different times. If you can accept a minimalist type of simplicity, aligned to a deep interest in colour (for its own sake, never mind any aposematic coding or sign) try to see this show – or look out for the next opportunity.
Geoff Hands (October 2022)
Richard Graville – Studio view
Notes:
‘Being Ecological’ by Timothy Morton (quotation from pp.24/25 Pelican, 2018)
In a post-industrial revolution context the English countryside, for so long a subject for painters, can still be a strangely ‘other’ environment for so many. Nowadays this space we call the ‘countryside’ is a place of escape and rest, suitable for a day out or for a camping holiday. For the daily traveller going about their business the countryside is a fleeting arena placed in between centres of commerce and mass housing. Viewed from the train, bus or car window lack of access may even create tension. Despite being loaded with mythology, folk tales, notions of paradise (very much lost), agrarian history and, for the south of England in particular (arguably the birthplace of capitalism) a mode of enquiry for the contemporary artist continues on to the ecological crisis that now impacts our “green and pleasant land” (to reference William Blake).
Julian Le Bas is a painter, perhaps the contemporary painter, of the Sussex section of the South Downs and the adjoining coast. Le Bas bares witness to this typically splendid and beautiful geography of chalk hills and woodland as he engages with his, and our, local world on a journey that has been his indefatigable undertaking for over forty years. What lesson we might learn from his ongoing life-long project is that every day and every scene presents a seemingly revived landscape offering a new vista, and a fresh encounter, with the apparently commonplace. The landscapes from Le Bas are tirelessly offered up, renewed, for continuous engagement and revelation.
Paintings and drawings, made en plein air and in isolation as he travels alone, invite a congregation of onlookers in a small exhibition of paintings and drawings at Berwick Church for this year’s Lewes Artwave Festival. Le Bas’ paintings exalt and revere his subject matter – and how fitting that we see these works in a place of worship. This particular church might be considered a wonderful art installation in itself, purposely referencing the pre-Reformation model of the church as the historical forerunner to the ‘art gallery’, permanently containing murals by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, plus the recently commissioned altar reredos panels by Julian Bell.
The paintings and drawings from Le Bas, however, are secular in subject matter and intent but unequivocally express awe at the natural world. Le Bas is the epitome of the artist engaging in the role of shamanic consort, expressing the elevating metaphysicality of the everyday through the ordinarily magical presence of the landscape. It may take a leap of faith to accept such a purposely contradictory definition of this particular artist, but the work continuously appears to convey this sense of the uniqueness of the quotidian and the local which changes in appearance – not only due to time of day or season, but is subject to the artist’s own mood or degree of engagement at any particular time.
These paintings are of the moment – a duration measured in hours we might assume. Le Bas uses an English post-Impressionist palette where high key colour combines with earthy local colour. His engagement with colour reveals both a romantic and a matter-of-fact connection with the notion of landscape experience. But what does this mean if it’s a correct interpretation? I would argue that some exaggeration, a visual proclamation in his use of colour and insistent mark making, is intended to bring the viewer into the work and to remind us that the magical landscape is still a worthy and increasingly important genre – especially as it contributes to our burgeoning awareness of global environmental issues.
The personal capacity required of a contemporary painter, with an arguably dated assignment to record the landscape, and at first glance unshackled by what might be on trend at present, is necessarily blinkered to enable a deep focus on such a potentially numinous experience of landscape. A logical pragmatist, a post-modernist, might reject Landskip as relevant now (unless it provides a context for other, grander, socially and politically qualified narratives), but one role of the artist might still be to say: “look at what I have seen, see what is available to all”.
Or, to take most of the words of R. S. Thomas from the poem, ‘The Small Window’:
“… there are jewels
To gather, but with the eye
Only. A hill lights up
Suddenly; a field trembles
With colour and goes out
In its turn; in one day
You can witness the extent
Of the spectrum and grow rich
With looking…”
Like this poet, associated with the Llŷn Peninsula in north Wales, Le Bas is tuned in to the sheer visual experience of his own landscape, not withstanding its potential to transform our experiences. Le Bas reminds the viewer that this environment is bursting with colour as much as any city has to offer and that it has the indefatigable capacity to ‘move’ us and to provide space to think, to plan and reflect and to explore. On a trite level, even a small canvas of Le Bas’ in the urban home will break down the barriers between the town and the country; but also on a metaphysical level, based on concrete experience, a transformative understanding of the landscape environment is possible too. Perhaps usefully, we cannot seem to let go of our obsession with ‘the countryside’. Landscape as a genre, engaged with constantly by the Sunday painter and the obsessive, committed practitioner alike, persists in our culture – which is quite assuring.
Whilst there is a certain, expressionistic conventionality in Julian Le Bas’ paintings and drawings (which I say in a positive sense), the gestural yet restrained visual language, honed and perfected after years of hard practice and utter devotion, results in a compelling engagement with his subject matter. For some observers he may exaggerate colour and mark making at times, approaching a general expectation of abstraction, but this is the hook that pulls one in and presents the eye and mind with spatial conundrums of simultaneous senses of flatness and depth. The generally bold brush marks are laid in areas that intermix, overlap or abut, amounting to a distinctive patchwork of organic shapes. Local colour and colour in its own right – straight out of the tube, Fauve-like – or mixed on the canvas as well as the palette to create secondary and tertiary mixes, make a variety of colour combinations. Realised as mark and gesture as well as for their tones and values, these colour-shapes are at once based on responding to visual reality and to testifying to a daily practice that celebrates the act of painting, whatever degree of verisimilitude is sought. There is clearly an extrovert inclination in these paintings, revealing an emotional involvement steered by rigorous and disciplined draughtsmanship. This engagement with the physical qualities of medium, from compressed charcoal in his drawings to oil paint on canvas, Le Bas’ works are somehow a summation of perceived experience with an aspect that says, “look at this world around you and engage with your whole being”. This is very much a serious undertaking, where pleasure is often an outcome.
In Le Bas’ paintings the drawing content morphs, via the brush, into painted lines that delineate shapes and forms, often flat rather than rounded, but creating visual space on the canvas. Perspective is loosely reduced within the network of colour-shapes but an abstract, surface acknowledging, arrangement of colours and gestures there is also an essence of movement. The observer might detect a degree of improvisation too, as taking liberties with mark and colour is a strong characteristic in Le Bas’ work. The paintings are made from a totally immersive activity of looking at sections, and spatial passages where the eye has been lead in deep concentration, engaging with various parts, structures, surfaces and atmospheres that make up the whole. A ‘whole’ that actually includes the observer, for if the environment is captured in spirit, it also captures us. In these paintings there is a record of being that is symbiotic with ‘nature’ as, in a real sense there is no divide. If we learn to appreciate this environment, starting with the local, with what’s in front of us, we might start to protect it better and therefore see that Le Bas’ paintings are as relevant as any other contemporaneous projects that have a more immediately political purpose.
Philosopher and Ecologist, Timothy Morton has written:
“Somewhere a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead. You stop reading this book and look around you.” (‘Being Ecological’)
We might stop looking at paintings and look around too, but engaging with the art might be the doorway we need to see what’s in front of us.
This was an exhibition I had to visit twice and I may have been once more by the time this rumination has been written.
The Brighton Centre for Contemporary Arts is a relatively new gallery hub in Grand Parade and Dorset Place, which is situated at the University of Brighton. As such a large community of artists live in the city, many graduating from the university itself, the institution might now be expected to lead the way in highlighting contemporary themes and developments in the broad area of fine art. The Grand Parade gallery was reopened (and rejuvenated) in 2019 after several decades as a general gallery space that often showcased student work from the visual arts and design courses at the university. The last exhibition I saw there, at the beginning of this year, was Lloyd Corporation, a thought provoking (‘research lead project’) on material accumulation and social space, with the inevitable installation and slide show presentation. The show certainly made me review the garbage still stored in my attic at home, but as a painter who writes the occasional review, I have felt some disappointment in the possibility of new initiatives and expositions from the visually creative communities in Brighton to exclude, or at least downplay, painting. We appear to live in an age where issue-lead forms of ‘information’ and ‘message’ are a key requirement for supportive funding too. Video, photography, installation and text-based works, in particular, have been on trend for some time now. So a painting show, by an artist new to me, provided a good excuse to get out of the studio. A five star review of The Exile of Dionysus, the first major show of paintings by Bill Lynch in the UK, from Laura Cumming in The Observer was also a powerful prompt.
Bill Lynch: The Exile of Dionysus
“In these pictures everything is alive and communicating wildly. Lynch’s connection to subjects and landscapes, both in life and painting, was empathic: a flower or tree branch sings just as strongly as any bird; … and he listened acutely, transcribing their conversation so you could hear it too. Their secrets opened up to him. Everywhere is meaning. Surrounded by his work, you can’t help but be struck by this vibrant language; his sincere belief, his love.”(Michael Wilde, White Columns, September 2014)
Déjà vu: to my unexpected surprise, as I first wandered (and wondered) through this immediately memorable exhibition of Bill Lynch’s paintings, I was reminded of the viewer experience from the Brett Goodroad: Toe Buoy exhibition held at the Phoenix Art Space here in Brighton in 2018. In both instances a relatively unknown North American artist, for a UK audience at least, brought a fresh voice and personalised vision to picturing, and actively celebrating, the world around him. Both artists’ respective projects augmented and amplified ‘reality’ with a sense of reverie and submersive attachment to the subject matter. Goodroad often explores a drama of figures in landscape settings, whilst Lynch more often highlights aspects (and objects) of his environment, for example, depicting flowers, trees and birds from nature or bowls, fruits and vases from more personal spaces. He was deeply interested in Chinese ink drawing too, hence a clearly affected visual language and subject matter in many instances of his work.
Unfortunately, Bill Lynch is now deceased (he died in 2013 from throat cancer aged just 53) and had mental health issues (schizophrenia) and these facts may well add to the inherent pathos of the works. The viewer cannot help but be affected by some aspects of autobiography (van Gogh being the classic case) when seeing an artist’s work, even in reproduction. But whilst a certain amount of knowledge and context of an artist’s work is necessary to understand and find a way into their artwork there is an argument for going straight to the work itself – inevitably accompanied by one’s own contexts and prejudices. This purist attitude is not one to always prevail, and we might seek to eschew habit, but it’s a conscious way in – most especially to such directly affective and demanding imagery. Theses are paintings that are impossible to ignore.
No doubt, every viewer will be struck by Lynch’s use of salvaged plywood as support. It’s a common material to use in place of canvas, solid wood or aluminium panels. It’s far from usual to use this base as found material and form (hence a variety of sizes and an acceptance of imperfections such as bashed corners and cut intrusions) without a backing frame and carefully primed and prepared grounds. The use of paint and the visual language is raw too. But Lynch did use oil paint and the subject matter fits into the tradition of landscape painting, notably influenced by an eastern (Chinese) tradition that celebrated nature.
Installation view in South Gallery
There may be an unsophisticated irony at work here too, although I doubt it. Lynch was an art student in New York in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, although he lived “on the fringes” and did not succeed on the gallery scene. Irony, as a post-modernist conceit, came a little later, and Lynch’s work appears beyond parody or intellectual conceptualism. One reading might be that Lynch was (metaphorically speaking) sticking two fingers up to the art world establishment. The works certainly have a feeling of individual strength and reveal a desire to stay tuned to painting as a way of mediating with the world, and oneself, irrespective of fashion or gallery pressures. Perhaps painting was a balm for his personal troubles, a way of coping with and of celebrating being alive.
His imagery, whether influenced by Chinese painting or not, has that sense of direct engagement with the subject. This of course includes the imagination, based on a story-telling kind of attitude, alongside concrete experiences and observations. The works are unashamedly ‘rough and ready’. They look like first drafts, but go beyond sketches or rough plans. The physicality of application of the paint matches the honest acceptance of the medium too, as if to suggest the illusion of visual reality as being quite matter of fact – a form of philosophical irony steeped in Buddhist traditions.
Installation view North Gallery
The Exile of Dionysus is divided into two main spaces, plus a reading room at one end. The North and South Galleries house the works. The former has some suffused natural light, which was strangely welcome despite the noise of the traffic from outside. But from the main entrance into the building the visitor enters a high ceilinged space containing ten of the fifteen works selected. Here the internal walls are painted green, which oddly reminded me of the National Portrait Gallery in London. We are so used to white walls now that colour can come as a shock. But the works bedded in well and the green was congenial and not dominating. Intended or not, this gave a sense of being in a rather special, natural, kind of space. I mention this, as any gallery environment imposes an unavoidable immediate context for the work. White would have been okay, but the use of a colour brought the paintings together, whilst in the adjoining setting the five other works felt separate. As a space with the additional construction of surrounding walls the traffic sounds were heavily muffled. A chair or bench to sit and ponder Lynch’s painting would have been most welcome too, not only to discourage the common gallery walk through, but also to facilitate an even more contemplative experience. But, no matter, for the works will make the visitor stop and stare.
Once the shock of the materiality of the works is accepted, the imagery can come to the fore. In the South Gallery I suspect that the almost, but not quite, light-hearted imagery of a human skeleton in ‘Untitled (Skeleton)’ will stand out first. A white shroud, suggestively the beginning of applying a primer to the board, slightly foregrounds the serious looking skeleton that is accompanied by a flowering plant between its legs, with part of a tree trunk and branches behind. Not that perspective as a necessary element bothers Lynch too much.
Bill Lynch – ‘No title (Skeleton)’ oil on wood
To the left of this relatively large work is, ‘Emperor’s Erection’, which depicts a vase with two ghostly wings (linear depictions of four legged animals in fact) that levitates the form against the board that has a pre-painted layer of varnish from a previous life as a piece of furniture. The still-life reference of the found board, like a piece of Cubist assemblage, accommodates the rather beautifully painted vessel decorated with plant forms. Lynch tends to draw with the paint, especially when getting a little more detailed and specific.
Bill Lynch – ‘Emperor’s Erection’ (1988) oil on wood
Nearby hangs, ‘No title (Vase with Blue and Purple Flowers)’ which, despite almost hiding in a corner, demanded my attention as much as any other of the works in the show. A Rothko-esque cloud of colour fills the top right-hand corner of the composition before a rather scraggly looking vase of flowers demands more viewer focus and attention. These may have been cut-plants in need of water as the stems are beginning to droop. I imagine they may have once existed in Lynch’s studio, or wherever he painted. Dotted across the board are knots in the plywood layers that suggest planets to the imagination, though they are more ‘real’ than any painted representation of anything. Around the base of the glass vase is a pair of wing-like forms. Or perhaps they are clouds of unknowing. On one level, this scruffy little painting might be considered as superficially trite, but holds a galaxy of potential meaning and viewer interpretation.
Bill Lynch – ‘No title (Vase with Blue and Purple Flowers)’ oil on wood
Before entering the North Gallery the visitor will certainly be stopped in their tracks by, ‘Four Corners Sunset’ from 1994, one of only three works dated in the exhibition, and the largest. I wonder if Lynch was so pleased to obtain such an expanse of plywood that it invited a glorious sunset, worthy of the attention of a 19th century Hudson Valley painter, inspired by the implied sublimity of a J.M.W. Turner sunset. The red circular forms throbbing in a suggestively psychedelic pulse line across the horizon, like a row of coloured spotlights from a rock concert, contrasts with the dark cratered lunar-like landforms below and to either side of the setting sun. The world can be a strange place indeed, though we need painters to remind us sometimes.
Bill Lynch – ‘Four Corners Sunset’ (1994) oil on wood
Lynch’s work, however, seems to be appropriately and healthily placed in the often commonplace. In the North Gallery one of the outstanding works is one of the simplest compositions in the show. ‘No title (Bird on Branch)’ depicts a bird perched on a tree branch, with leaves above and below on a single stem. The leaves are gently modulated with tone and shift in sequence from being closed in the top left, to open (in the middle), to dropping apart in the bottom right hand corner. One might sense the passing of time in this small painting, as the bird’s weight holds the branch in a diagonal position within the composition. I assume that the bird was copied from a reproduction, not that it matters. It’s an image that far surpasses its simplistic representation and it’s no big deal that it’s not painted on canvas. It is just about the end of the show at this point, although the green glade behind will pull you back in for another look.
Bill Lynch – ‘No title Bird on Branch)’ oil on wood
Laura Cumming may have been purposely, and journalistically, provoking the reader for attention in suggesting that Lynch was “…the greatest American artist you’ve never heard of”, but she was correct when she stated that, “Bill Lynch’s paintings on salvaged wood transfix with their dual power of primitive joy and high sophistication.”
This really is a show to visit and the arts community of Brighton dare not miss the spectacle. Painting can go far beyond the provision of mere information.
Artworks have been borrowed from The Approach, The Bill Lynch Family Estate and several private collectors.
Note: In the Brighton CCA reading room a wall-based text has been written by the poet Vanessa Onwuemezi in response to Bill Lynch’s paintings. Hear her read it here:‘Lines of Chance’
Outer space is right here, right now. It’s in front of us and in us, one and all – for there’s an inner space too. In terms of individual consciousness the two may as well be the same. When we think, we travel too, even if we remain physically still. When there is nowhere left to go, when we are trapped, marooned or sheltering from the storm we can rely on mental space. Still, but adrift in time, when memory kicks in to take us out of ourselves there is a palpable sense of space as an extension of self. Such are the conditions of splendid isolation, afforded most recently during the early months of the global pandemic.
Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath In Breath Out V’, 2020
Kiki Stickl clearly made the most of her own experiences of her family’s six months spent in countryside near Munich during the first lockdown in 2020 when she produced her ‘Breath in Breath out’ series of drawings, several of which appear in Drift. Here she encountered ideal conditions for creativity: time and space, duration and environment – and possibly sound as well – especially when the world is hushed. In fact, as I awoke on the morning after seeing Drift being installed at the Phoenix Art Space a couple of days before the opening I was semiconsciously thinking of Stickl’s drawings as visual soundworks. Not necessarily apropos Cage’s 4’ 33”, but literally, and deafeningly, silent. Stickl’s drawings suggest small arenas of silent sound consisting of visual counterpoints, full of emptiness inviting a form of meaningful mark making as an abstract response to recalling time and space. These are drawings made as an end result as they are not subservient to, or necessarily leading to painting as might traditionally be the case. Stickl conjures drawings from a meditation in the everyday physical realm of being that amount to sensory, environment-based studies. From a landscape environment to the literal sheet of paper that she works on, the drawings map out themselves. Sometimes she cuts the paper to reference, literally, a sense of layering as well as amalgamating marks on the paper surface as a form of recording what has been seen and remains to be seen: Cartesian, with Buddhist overtones.
Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath In-Out (A Walk)’, 2020
Drift presents 19 works. One is a temporary wall drawing (employing paint); another is a painting (titled, ‘Lines of Disruption’); plus seventeen square format drawings on paper, simply but immaculately framed. The painting is placed in the adjoining coffee shop, but cannot be missed on the main show wall as a little taster of her painting practice. The wall-based work, ‘Drift’, at about two metres square, is the centrepiece in the long Window Gallery space. Composed as an essentially linear structure from two tones of grey paint on the white wall, with the addition of ground up glass beads applied to the lightest grey paint when it was still wet, the darker grey mass suggests a resting figure, perhaps in meditation pose. An ephemeral, time-based work such as this will disappear at the end of the exhibition later this month. This work, therefore, demands that we hold it in our memories, just as we may do from our personal experiences of places beyond the gallery.
Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath In Breath Out (Cosmic Matter)’, 2020
The bulk of the show consists of the drawings that have been selected from a much larger body of works, the aforementioned ‘Breath in Breath out’ series. From drawing to drawing, as they are arranged in blocks and rows, there is great variety of imagery and mark making. Subtle use of colour is occasionally employed, although they still read as essentially monochrome iterations. In many, linear rhythms consisting of scribbles, dots and short or flowing lines are accumulated suggesting light and weather conditions. Forms are deconstructed to some extent, invoking that sense of recall that does not rest, preferring flux and instability as performative, shorthand approximations. Imagery that might be solid is no longer fixed as a conventional photograph might replicate for the viewer. The paper cut-out sections present voids and absences, shadow and light, useful contrasts and visual paradoxes. Implied shapes and lively line is reductive though essential as imaginative remnants of remembrance celebrated. These are motion pictures, mapping the psyche as much as the terrain.
Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath Walk Dance’, 2020
Stickl is not so much taking a line for a walk (re: Paul Klee) as inventing and playing with accumulations, sometimes in counterpoint mode, un-egotistically presenting a notion of drift through time and space.
“This work does not conduct itself with grand gestures. The best of these paintings make themselves felt intuitively and structurally by measures quite human. They progress carefully, in challenging jumps and starts. They are full of free and varied thought, without self-importance, working towards new and distinct states of abstract reality.” (Robin Greenwood, AbCrit website)
After seven previous shows this is the first exhibition in the newly extended abcrit.org gallery in Bell Yard Mews near the White Cube gallery, showing paintings by EC. There are 24 works on display ranging in size from 30x20cm to 122x92cm, with various permutations in between. Five are square and others portrait or landscape format. For such a range of disparity in dimension this collection literally hangs together in unison. There is a sense of the ‘series’ about the selection, yet every work has an independent status and can be viewed as a discrete piece.
The various titles are intriguing too. They read like a list of poems. For example:“Your Exquisite Manners (Frankly)”; “Unforbidden Pleasure Seeker”; “It Takes Patience to Make a Disaster”; “Yellow Swing Yellow Swing”; and “All Trajectories are Unstable”. Although “PUNK JAZZ”, the only work titled in capital letters, pays homage to a Weather Report track from ‘Mr Gone’ (1978) in which, at the start of the composition, Jaco Pastorius launches his bass guitar expertly into an unforgettable percussive jazz fusion frenzy that is, nonetheless, totally controlled. Rather like EC’s works.
EC – ‘Strange Attractors’ (90x75cm) 2014-22
These mixed media collages, that we can call paintings, are typically busy, boldly delivering overlapping patchworks of fragmented physical elements, purposefully destroyed then re-worked, but never distraught. Painterly fragments (as if) from the studio floor or bin, or from managed intentions to destroy previously made compositions, are sensuously positioned over the surface of supporting canvases. There is a visceral sense of chaos controlled, or rather, accommodated as the natural order of things prevails. Asymmetric balances and compositional nous bring these paintings into the current period of abstraction as a breath of fresh air. For this is serious stuff. Not content with employing pretty colours, punchy but vacuous vistas or harmonious and undemanding safe passages of expressive playfulness arranged for decorating an interior space, EC’s project engages with hard-earned visuality and an inherent depth of thought. The works truly engage and demand attention so honestly that you can detect joy and frustration combined. EC is one of those artists who are not distracted by the whims of fashion, socio-political issues, political correctness or commercial endeavour. This makes her work all the more engaging, as it constitutes a somewhat precarious road to travel upon that does not seek a ready-formed market position for safety.
EC – ‘Bias Interruptor’ 2022 (122x92cm)
Is EC’s project Dada-esque in spirit? Not so much anti-art (which Dada never was, of course) but anti-comfort: deploying the punk impulse to rock the boat (before it was integrated into the mainstream) when challenges are required to wake us from our stupor. From a first impression the viewer might wonder if this is a chaotic mess – though even chaos has a hidden pattern and logic. After all, why not explore and present ‘mess’? Chaos eventually controlled or simply halted at a stage of completion that is subjectively felt, has lead to these captivating and provocative works in “Strange Attractors”. Yet in a painting such as ‘Bias Interruptor’, or ‘Sanity Project (Radical Will)’, by giving some time for the paint smears and splatters seemingly applied by chance some careful looking, the open distribution in the former or the painterly concentration in the latter, actually read as carefully placed and subtly balanced compositions that reveal an expert eye and an adeptness for composure. There’s the punk irony, which hooks the viewer with clattering surprise but cares passionately after all.
Notably, the colour black appears in all of these works, holding things together akin to the lead scaffolding in stained glass windows. A disparate framework unevenly dispensed at times gives structure to hold the roving eye. Amalgamated into and alongside relief patchworks, dynamic structures, colour-as-paint (and vice-versa), these seemingly accidental and fortuitous juxtapositions make for engaging visual judgements that are anything but flaccid or disorganised. In the previously mentioned ‘Sanity Project (‘Radical Will’)’, a fragment of black (ink) text appears unexpectedly. Maybe it is an oblique clue of sorts. The title page from an edition of ‘Styles of Radical Will’, a collection of essays by Susan Sontag has possibly been torn up, discarded and disclaimed. I want to doubt it somehow (show some respect!): but here it is, peeping through the collaged detritus close to the centre of the composition as a potential manifesto statement.
EC – ‘Sanity Project (Radical Will)’ detail
In Sontag’s essay, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ she writes:
“… art comes to be considered something to be overthrown. A new element enters the individual artwork and becomes constitutive of it: the appeal (tacit or overt) for its own abolition – and, ultimately, for the abolition of art itself.”
The text and the concept have taken visual arts aside far too much and must be subsumed within the work itself, not held part in judgement. I wonder if EC’s mission is to toy with this radical notion that favours a changing resolution of “the human situation” (Sontag) as a form or manifestation of “spirituality” (Sontag, again) as an ironically playful project in itself, creating (or finding) some sort of order in chaos. Do these works employ the abstract absurdity of consciousness and self; notions of reality and worth vis-à-vis the creative impulse – and the concrete materiality that is abstract art? It all adds up to everything and nothing. But it’s something most refreshing and attractive.
abcrit.org – Block K, 13 Bell Yard Mews, 175 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UW
Visit by prior appointment. Text your name and requested date and time to 07866 583629, for return. The entrance to Bell Yard Mews is opposite White Cube.
The Window Gallery at Phoenix Art Space in Brighton offers studio members an exhibition opportunity close to home and the latest show celebrates the abstract paintings of Michelle Cobbin. After an email exchange of questions and answers in anticipation of the exhibition I had the pleasure of helping her to hang the show and so literally saw the work very close up. I mention this, as a viewer would normally step back to view the larger works. But despite the apparent visual simplicity of many of her canvases the colourfield experience really does pull the viewer up to the surface and into an atmospheric, non-objective, realm. The weave of the canvas, however, reminded me that I was not floating in some sort of meditative dreamland but was experiencing concrete reality.
Michelle Cobbin – ‘Atmosphere’ acrylic on canvas (130 x 130cm)
I have often thought that abstraction in painting without overt reference to a particular narrative, scenario or specific space lends itself to a notion of timelessness, or of historical time collapsed into simply the experience of looking at and experiencing a work of art – something one might unashamedly describe as the aesthetic experience. This notion of the material here and now counterpoised by a more expanded sense of place is philosophically, as well as artistically, intriguing. Such an experience is not exclusive to abstract painting of course, as might paradoxically be seen in still-life painting (I am thinking of works by Giorgio Morandi and Peter Dreher) that both acknowledges a social reality and a particular time and place yet exudes a sense of ongoing visual engagement irrespective of the date on the back of the canvas. A kind of meta-reality embedded in paint and its various qualities.
Michelle Cobbin – ‘Atmosphere’ (detail)
In Cobbin’s oeuvre you will find that the landscape is implicit but not essential to identify and in this selection of six works the viewer will travel across the colour spectrum and from dark to light. The titles are generally broad and non-specific, although ‘Bridge’ and ‘In The Top Field’ keep our feet on the ground alongside ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Lament’, ‘Phosphorescence’ and ‘Hidden’.
To start the discussion with Michelle Cobbin I borrowed John Bunker’s first question for Peter Lamb from the new series of ‘Abstraction in the Now’ interviews from Instantloveland. “Can you remember the first abstract painting to make a real impression on you?” is a brilliantly simple gambit to open up a deeper conversation that delves into the past to relate to the present, and implicitly the future, in one’s practice.
Michelle Cobbin – ‘Hidden’
Interview with Michelle Cobbin (February/March) 2022
Geoff Hands – Can you remember the first abstract painting to make a real impression on you?
Michelle Cobbin – The first would be Tibetan Mandalas and Thankas that I saw whilst travelling in Nepal in the early 1990s. If you want a western fine art example it would be the Rothko room of Seagram murals at what we now call Tate Britain in the mid 1990s. I was struck by how much presence they had, how they made me feel melancholic and introspective.
GH – That’s interesting. I recall looking at reproductions of Mandalas in my studio on my degree course (late ‘70s) and being dissuaded by my tutor from doing so as I could not possibly relate to them. He would have been okay with Rothko of course. Your paintings invite a long slow look. A meditative state may not be necessary but I assume that you would like the viewer to take time to contemplate the imagery.
MC – I am interested in how people respond to colour and abstract imagery – I’m interested in how it makes them feel. So this could be an instant instinctual response. But yes, with contemplation the viewer may drop into their body and feel their response more fully.
Aside from contemplating an image in a meditative way I’m also interested in how abstract imagery and colour has been used to divine insight. For example Rorschach’s Inkblot tests, the Lüscher Colour Test and the Aura Soma system.
I title my paintings which may lead the viewer to see them in a particular way, but people read images based on their own experiences, likes and dislikes, which goes back to sensory responses again.
GH – You have made and continue to develop several series of paintings, which is a fairly common way of grouping paintings for artists today. Your website is well illustrated with examples from these various series where a viewer can see ‘Transitions’, ‘Gaia’ and ‘Terra Verde’ which relate to landscape experiences, or ‘The Breath’, ‘Semblance’ and ‘Sumptuous Contentment’ which are more specifically yoga and meditation related. I am particularly fascinated, but for different reasons, by the ‘Inscape’ series that summons up memories from East Anglia, with a minimalist Zen Haiku guiding principle, and ‘Kenshō’ which is more programmatically ‘abstract’, with a clear reference to Zen calligraphy. The sense of family history and landscape related impressions from childhood in the former and a more formalist expression of abstract mark making in the latter gives rise to quite stark imagery.
But I wonder if the notion that, if I can reference Neil Young, these “are all one song”, by which I mean that the series titles and subjects might fall away to reveal a process of expression and communication that ties everything together as a record of one voice – in your case a visual and intuitive, feeling sensibility that manifests itself as abstract painting?
MC – Yes, of course my work is ‘all one song’ in some respects. I am interested in keeping things simple both in how the work looks and in making things clear. I know that abstract painting can be difficult to relate to and I think by working in series and titling paintings it goes some way to bridging that difficulty.
Working in series also gives me boundaries to work within – that might be a particular palette, mood, or conceptual idea. It helps me to focus, but no I’m not suddenly going to start painting people or objects as that would deviate from the message or ‘song’ that I want to convey.
As you mentioned, I grew up in East Anglia, near the Fens. The ‘Inscape’ series was my internalised and perhaps nostalgic impression of that landscape. It was the first series where I began using a horizon line in my work. I was hesitant about this – blocky colours with a straight-ish line, I was concerned it would scream “Rothko!” Of course his work has been hugely influential upon me. I included lots of little scribbles in the ‘Inscape’ series to begin with, to make the paintings less ‘empty’. It took me a while to have the confidence and to find my way into accepting I’m influenced by but not deriving my work from anyone else.
My forthcoming show, ‘I’d Be Enlightened Now If It Wasn’t For You’, at the Window Gallery, Phoenix Art Space is, if we keep with your musical reference, going to be a Greatest Hits show. I will be selecting works from various series. The criteria will be size. It is such a great window – literally – into Phoenix, and out into Brighton. Personally, I want to use this opportunity to survey how my large canvases sit together and show how, to quote Bob Dylan, I “keep on keeping on…”
GH – I expect that such a selection would work well in a linear type space that necessitates hanging most of the works in a straight line. Not necessarily in a chronological sense but in taking the viewer on a short but visually loaded journey from period to period.
The experiential link to a particular landscape is, to some degree, an historically “English’ trait too. Perhaps, for many painters and viewers the landscape is a way into abstraction?
MC – Yes the show could be a short visual journey. That could be an inward journey provoking an emotional response. I like the idea of colour bathing: standing close to large swathes of colour and noticing what you feel. The arts are a gateway to our emotional life and a way of connecting to other humans. In my case, I do this through paint. I hope viewers are drawn in, intrigued, and perhaps, as you say, the landscape nature of some of the paintings might be a way into abstraction.
I think that being linked to a landscape experientially is universal. I took a course with psychologist Sharon Blackie on finding and creating myths in one’s contemporary and ancestral landscapes. It has certainly helped me to relate differently to the little bit of downland near to where I live as well as to draw comparisons with the chalk land of East Anglia where I have traced my roots as far back as 1600. None of my ancestors moved outside of a 30-mile radius. This research will underpin my next series of paintings.
GH – Thank you Michelle, there is clearly so much more to contemplate from your broad body of work and I look forward to seeing and experiencing your mini-retrospective at the Phoenix in April, and, at some future date, the following series.
Michelle Cobbin – ‘In the Top Field’ exhibition installation shot (early evening)
Michele Cobbin – ‘Phosphorescence’ in the Canvas Coffee Co. bar at Phoenix Art Space
Jane Campling: Studio Visitfor Time + Place at Cameron Contemporary Art, Hove
5 to 20 March 2022
Jane Campling is exhibiting recent paintings at Cameron Contemporary Art in Hove this month alongside the figurative painter, Amy Dury. In preparing a short text for Campling’s section of the catalogue I also extended the word count for these Ruminations as I considered her painting practice.
Jane Campling – ‘Beach Rain’ 2019
Jane Campling is a committed painter. Her practice involves walking, drawing, looking, painting and reflection – both in the South Downs landscape, on the coast or back in her studio at Brighton’s Phoenix Art Space. Intriguingly, when I paid her a studio visit recently she was at pains to stress that she does not identify as a ‘landscape artist’. As a fellow painter with similar interests this made sense to me but we wondered if her audience would. After all, she paints within the landscape tradition. But then painting is, or can be, akin to thinking in action and to invention and to discovering, whatever the subject matter. It’s also intensely physical – including moments of just sitting and pondering in between busy periods of activity. At a simplistic level we can separate walking, drawing and painting quite easily but as a practitioner (and even avoiding the term or label ‘artist’) these various aspects coalesce in lived reality to create a more holistic experience of perception and feeling which can be celebrated and shared through the production of paintings, irrespective of the availability of other media. Looking at the paintings, and some wonderful shorthand-type drawings, on the studio walls felt relevant and contemporary. Just sitting and observing quietly between periods of speculative discussion contained no vestige of painting being obsolete or outmoded.
Jane Campling – ‘Dune’ 2019
Campling makes paintings that can be viewed meditatively and purely for themselves as ‘abstract’ compositions, or with recourse to some vestige of landscape memories, special times and lived experiences from the artist or the viewer. If labels such as ‘landscape’ or ‘abstraction’ serve a purpose for categorisation that is fine, but a worthwhile challenge is to consider the works without these labels to get closer to what they are. It’s difficult for sure, as we have become so accustomed to learning ways of seeing and adopting forms of categorisation. We unavoidably read imagery and visualise from within traditions, but we sometimes need to remind ourselves that conventions can become distorting filters that close down rather than open up seeing clearly.
Jane Campling – ‘Still’ 2021
Campling’s project appears to be celebratory about a subject matter that is both external (ostensibly the landscape) and suggestively internal (the actual, visual/physical outcome that is placed within the rectangle and received in the guise of our own perception and adjudicated by our experiences and preferences). So we might have a sense of the fleeting visual reality of nature from her works, of the sometimes restless moment, and are coaxed into acknowledging the discord as well as the harmony of the physical world. Yet we are paradoxically given a fixed continuum of moments by the amalgam of brush marks, surface qualities and colour choices and relationships. Her work is characterised by a gestural form of shorthand, apparently quick decision-making, and working with the various properties and traits of the paint medium.
Jane Campling – ‘Fields’ 2021
Expertly, Campling knows when (and how) to hold back and not to over apply or to embellish within the painting process. She knows when to start as well as when to stop, employing a subtle expressionism that approaches a cohesive colour/shape minimalism. Surprisingly perhaps, her work is not decorative in the sense of being superficial, but is attractive and engaging nonetheless. Tonal qualities are as important as a clear interest in colour combinations. So too with mark making, whereby the drawn qualities of shape and line might provide contrast or harmony within a composition, especially when the linear content of lines and edges coalesce so well. Layered and woven colour shapes are consistently under control to provide depth and rhythm, so that the viewer’s looking is active.
Jane Campling – ‘Winter Sea I’ 2022
If you are fortunate enough to view Campling’s work in the gallery space or in the privacy of your own home imagine all filters removed. Her work evidences drawing into painting, seamlessly. Time and place as experience is here too, not only her own, but the imagery proactively coaxes the viewer’s memory bank of rural time and place, of the half-remembered scenery from a walk by the sea or even from the fleeting flashes of landscape from car journeys. Despite the unavoidable fixity of artworks made on paper or canvas, we know that time is not immutable but is defined by that unfathomable state of flux and flow. To define or fix would be to diminish the experience itself (which, of course is just another definition to eschew). The challenges of still images that represent in some way this notion of the impermanence of moments seemingly amalgamated and fixed invites reverie so that active looking is required, for the viewer is not a mere receiver. It’s a form of looking, thankfully, without too much effort. You can laugh or cry or just allow pure feeling without overt reaction. You could be elated or disinterested, I guess, for our moods constantly change. Campling’s paintings contain the potential to transform the mundane moment – but consider this experience potential normal and everyday – don’t get hung up on notions of the mystical or metaphysical. After all, the ordinary is extraordinary and visual experiences are preserved and developed by those painters, including Campling, who respond to notions of the contemporary in this digital age by painting even more, for there is something unique and timeless about painting. It’s an act of faith.
Exhibition poster with ‘Inflatable’ 2021 by Susan Absolon
“The stated aim of Contemporary British Painting is to explore and promote current painting. The subtext to this is giving voice back to the artist, the originator and source of painting. The real discourse around current painting is generated painter to painter and emanates from the studio and not from the boardrooms of institutions, directors’ offices, lecture halls or galleries. This prize is artists submitting themselves to consideration and selection by their peers.” (Simon Carter, co-founder CBP)
Tony Antrobus – ‘Narcissistic Wounds’ 2021 oil on board
A woman and her partner are standing in front of ‘A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge (‘On the Stour’)’ by John Constable. “Does he ask questions?” she reactively inquires. I think it’s a rhetorical question. It’s certainly a gift of a question and I now wonder, was the painting asking questions about subject matter; perception; time; self; the painting process or the fiction of imagery and invented composition? Constable also appears to have gouged his palette knife into the surface of the oil painting and it is an unsettling image. I doubt that the subject matter is merely a farmhouse or a landscape. Paintings have so much to offer and so much potential for interpretation, with endless ground to cover. It’s no wonder they continue to intrigue viewer and maker alike.
What happened (is still happening) within the history of painting? Thousands of years on from the cave painting phenomenon, as Matthew Burrows would remind his audience at the opening of the London leg of the Contemporary British Painting Prize, current practice might point to the fact that many artists believe that the journey continues because painting is so inexhaustible and adaptable. Selected survey shows such as this point to the fact that the painting continuum trundles on, regardless of other media, technologies and contexts that artists employ to make certain points or simply investigate as life choices. But the CBP prize acts as both a celebration of, and a manifesto of sorts, exclusively for painting. The mission statement is, perhaps, understated, as there is no one predominant style, genre or parameter for painting being proclaimed – although an exploration and promotion of current trends in British painting, especially from the community of the painters rather than the gatekeepers, is paramount.
Martyna Lebryk – ‘Sirens’ and ‘Three riders of my fate’ (each 2021, oil and oil pastel on paper)
Before arriving for the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021 – which consists of a selection of 15 artists’ work made by Unit 1 Director Stacie McCormick who had visited the prize show at Huddersfield Art Gallery a few weeks back – I had finally got around to jumping on a train, adorned with a facemask, to see a few London shows. The exhibition batteries had been running low, so the CBP show was ideal to touch base with some contemporary works and to see a few friendly faces. Beforehand, experiencing the Late Constable exhibition at the RA was bound to impress and, so too, was the Georges Braque show, The Poetry of Things, at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery that had fortuitously been extended to this very day. Both prestigious exhibitions might have overshadowed seeing anything else that day but it is always necessary, I believe, to put status aside when viewing the works of contemporary painters, otherwise there is a danger of being disrespectful to the endeavours of such an extraordinary community.
Sarah Poots – ‘Temporary Sculptures’ 2021 oil on canvas
The Unit 1 space had allowed for a selection of 27 works, including a small triptych set, depicting ‘Temporary Sculptures’ by Sarah Poots, without either being jam-packed or leaving acres of wall space empty. Arriving before the many visitors for the opening there was ample room to step back or to go in closer, particularly for the smaller and finely rendered paintings by Daisy Richardson. None of the paintings were inappropriately combined, which was testament to the careful hanging decisions. Some works were obvious to display together if by the same artist, such as Martyna Lebryk’s pair of drawing-type paintings on paper; Bill Stewart’s two commanding canvases and Jesse Leroy-Smith’s three compelling portraits. Other exhibitors had their respective works such as Gary Spratt, Tom Robinson, Zack Thorne and Donna Mclean interspersed with others, which enabled an overall cohesiveness to the selection and hang that clearly attempted to celebrate every participant rather than any one in particular. So, even the winner of the 2021 Prize, Susan Absolon, had her three works split into a small pair and one relatively large work, ‘Dugout’ intriguingly placed between Zac Thorne’s ‘The End Part XI’, a tight figurative work and Tom Robinson’s ‘Telmah’, one of the most painterly and abstract in the show. More object-oriented works came from Christina Niederberger (with a strong mimetic textile vibe) and Roland Hicks (constructivist, non-objective, found object become painting), whilst Tony Antrobus, Jan Valik, and Highly Commended Award winner Hannah Murgatroyd (with just about the largest canvas – ‘Night Mapping’ at 130x150cm on show), had just one canvas selected each, which perhaps left one wanting more.
Installation at Unit 1 with Thorne, Absolon and Robinson paintings
Hannah Murgatroyd – ‘Night Mapping’ 2021 oil on canvas and Jesse Leroy-Smith – ‘Father Figure’,‘Blowback’ and ‘Creator – Tricky’ (each 2021 oil on panel)
Picking out any one or two participants as favourites seems unfair in the context of this exhibition, though inevitably one will gravitate towards preferred visual languages or subject matter (though as an abstract painter I found myself gravitating towards Mclean’s ‘Cloud’ and Leroy-Smith’s portraits throughout the evening – yet still felt compelled to sneak of with Antrobus’ ‘Narcissistic Wounds’ that took a while to grow on me). The recommended approach to ingesting the show is to enjoy and be intrigued by this celebration of British painting. There is no overriding theme. Search for a subject if you wish, but do not establish a territory of preference. If works are resolved still see painting, generally, in a state of becoming and development, not only for the individual artists, but also for painting as an ongoing project.
Bill Stewart – ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘TheDancingTreesOfYellowstoneAnthemStandingVibrationWyoming’ (both 2021, oil on canvas)
The catalogue for the aforementioned Braque show added poignancy to the day as it contains what I believe to be art historian, Mel Gooding’s final essay. In the last paragraph he writes of Braque’s nature morte paintings:
“They are real, indeed, but their actuality is within the painting. They give the mind a reality to contemplate, one that doesn’t and couldn’t exist elsewhere: only here…”
If there are relevant contemporary narratives in British painting emerging post-Brexit they seem to be about time and place; history and self; inside and outside. But it is still too early to see, I suspect. There has to be an argument for painting though, best developed from the studios of the dedicated practitioners who live in every town and community on this tiny little island. The selected work supports this cause for we are all on the same side, even if we disagree or appear to live in different realities sometimes.
Jan Valik – ‘It’s About Time’ 2021 oil on linen
Gary Spratt – ‘Odd Legs’ 2021 oil on canvas
Donna Mclean – ‘Sarah Lund’ 2019-20 oil on canvas
Christina Niederberger – ‘Revue (after de Kooning)’ 2018 oil on canvas
Zack Thorne – ‘The End Part IV’ 2020 oil on canvas
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 