January 2021 – Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews

MARY LLOYD-JONES: Lliwio’ Gair/The Colour of Saying

Mary Lloyd-Jones: Lliwio’ Gair / The Colour of Saying

Aberystwyth Arts Centre – May 2001

Introduction (2021)

In two previous reviews (Carol Bove and Shani Rhys James) that were written some time after viewing their respective exhibitions I had indulged in the unexpected relief, a mild catharsis perhaps, of being ‘better late than never’. After writing the Rhys James piece I recalled the second review I had ever written, which had not been published at all. This was in response to Mary Lloyd-Jones’ ‘The Colour of Saying’ at Aberystwth Arts Centre in 2001. I was an avid reader of Modern Painters magazine at the time and had submitted the review in the hope that Lloyd-Jones would receive some well deserved recognition in a major publication. Alas, the piece was not accepted, but as the review had been word processed I retained a copy that migrated from computer to computer. On a hunch I searched for it and found it almost immediately. So, if one can write about an exhibition a year or two after the event why not publish a review written 20 years ago?

I have not changed anything in the original text, except to split one lengthy paragraph into two. It was tempting to re-write some of the passages, but I resisted the urge. It is also worth noting that, in this time of the Covid pandemic, an uncanny atmosphere of absence was prevalent on road journeys. Hence a reference to MAFF – the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. In 2001 there was a widespread outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK and access to public rights of way across land were closed. This severely affected the tourist industry and people travelled far less than normal. The journey west from Shrewsbury, where I had been staying with my brother, was therefore very quiet as this is a well-travelled route to the Welsh coast.

The Colour of Saying

Travelling on a near empty A458 between Shrewsbury and Welshpool the warning signs about foot and mouth disease lend an eerie feel to an otherwise pleasant journey. The kind of journey one makes to escape from the hustle and bustle of life, at work or play, in the towns and cities of England. Thankfully, for now at least, the MAFF signs slowly disappear as the roads of mid-Wales wind gently up and down towards the coast on a bright April day. Making a small detour via Machynlleth for its near deserted craft shops (tourists are few and far between these days) I am reminded of a treasured watercolour hanging in my Sussex home. The colours and shapes of the painting in my mind become the actual landscape that surrounds me. I have arrived, in the land of Mary Lloyd-Jones.

The work of many landscape painters have become associated with the regions in which they operated and in Britain it is Constable’s Suffolk that will first spring to mind. Moving west to ancient Celtic lands, in Peter Lanyon’s West Penwith, the landscape fuses inextricably with the man. In Chris Stephens’ study of the Cornish artist, At The Edge Of Landscape, he quotes Lanyon – “I paint places but always the Placeness of them.” This claim could also be applied to Lloyd-Jones’ paintings currently on display in the new and spacious Gallery 1 at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Many, though not all, of the works are representative of locations around Aberystwyth – Pontarfynach (Devil’s Bridge), Ystumtuen, and Cwmystwyth in the Rheidol Valley and other areas of Ceredigion. Although place names, or significant features such as lead mines or spoil tips, are regularly used for the titles in her paintings, the sense of a place or location adds up to far more than a picturesque view. These places are immersed in history and the collective rural memory – and in these paintings Lloyd-Jones reveals and interprets more than the purely scenic facts. Indeed many of these locations would only be known locally, for the visitor on his travels may pass them by en-route to more well known tourist destinations. Knowledge of these lesser known places – disused quarries, remote hillsides – may invite more visitors to this sparsely populated area of Wales; but in a Neo-Romantic spirit perhaps they are best left to poets and painters to explore and re-discover.

The gallery is large, light and spacious, and the architect, Peter Roberts, has integrated an inverted barrel vaulted ceiling to control what could have been an overwhelming space. The carefully arranged paintings, of various sizes, create a comfortable intimacy and envelope the viewer with walls of colour-filled landscape images. Suspended down the central axis of the gallery an avenue of acrylic-stained canvas pieces hang, inviting the viewer to stand between these great walls of colour and script, and to move from one to another transcending the conventional one-to-one relationship with an image. It is this installation that demands the viewer’s attention on entering the gallery.

Mary Lloyd-Jones – Banners fron Lliwio’ Gair

The images hang in Bardic procession – the poetic reference is apt – for integrated with the strongly coloured banners are inscribed words from a variety of sources. From the earliest times the magical power of the word has been made concrete, the audible made visible, through mark and alphabetical system. To all but the most learned visitor these ancient inscriptions are without obvious meaning and we have to rely on the accompanying publication, that gives its title to this exhibition, for explanation. However, we are brought up to date by the use of quotations from contemporary poets, including Janet Dubé and Gillian Clarke. Lines by R.S.Thomas also appear and it was he, arguably the most important Welsh poet after Dylan Thomas, who found much inspiration from the environs of his native north Wales. Yet, as a Welshman who had to express and deliver his poetic vision in the ‘foreign’ English language, a dialectical tension would be present throughout his life’s work as a poet – where authentic pessimism jostled with spiritual redemption.

Painting, however, speaks a more universal language – the visual language of colour, shape, gesture and texture. Of the Bard, Mary Sara explains in her essay in The Colour of Saying:

“It is an ancient role which began with the member of the tribe who lifted his or her eyes from the task of survival and said Look! or asked Why? How? What if? – then shaped with their hands or said, or sang, a celebration or proposed an answer.”

In Lloyd-Jones’ paintings she re-affirms the task of the artist to communicate and show us those things, feelings and experiences worth having and knowing. There is great optimism and we see commensurate skills in the handling of oil, acrylic and watercolour. In the most recent works, for example, in ‘Rhosdir’, colour is both localised to earth, rock and field colours and enhanced by stronger, vibrant colours – the hues of interpretation and transformation. The viewer’s eye moves with these colours as paint is carefully applied in smooth, opaque layers or thin washes of semi-transparent colour. Oil paint is used with the consistency of watercolour with supreme confidence. In this composition there is a palpable sense of movement in space. Zigs and zags that relate to the characteristics of streams, trees, fences, posts, sheep paths – they allude also to the calligraphic script of words. The visual features are both fixed and rhythmical. Natural and abstract signs and symbols are derived from the landscape.

In ‘Iaith Cofio’, one senses, again, a personal colour palette derived from the artist’s predilection for strong colour, and from the richly coloured landscape of her homeland. She employs this intuitive and carefully observed use of colour to interpret and transform the subjects captured in her sensitive scanning of the Ceredigion landscape. For this is an image distilled from the whole area, from a landscape memory (‘iaith cofio’), not from a particular location. Integrating and superimposing the Bardic Alphabet and remnants of the Ogham script (an ancient alphabet found on stone monuments that could be used by the Celts for passing coded messages) this painting suggests an aerial view of a landscape delineated by stone walls, natural fissures or the scars of industrial activity. The word is imprinted in the land – as if to impress on the viewer the fact, for better or worse, of the cultivated, industrialised and ‘cultured’ environment that is inextricably linked to the ‘natural’ world.

However, Lloyd-Jones’ work is not reliant on a narrative tradition in literature or painting. Nor is it ‘insular’, for her work is clearly related, and indebted, to European (and North American) Modernism. One senses the intuitive spirit of Kandinsky in her use of colour on the brush; and another influence may derive, both technically and inspirationally, from Helen Frankenthaler’s stained and gesturally configured works. But in Lloyd-Jones’ work we are not presented with a limited and shallow Greenbergian expressionism – because here the content of the human and cultural place of landscape is signified. At first glance her paintings are expressionist – in style and temperament. One is aware of the act of the painted mark forged in the shapes and passages of colour on the canvas surface. These echo the patchwork of medieval field systems that, in topographic features, re-shape and define the land.

In another impressive painting, ‘Can Wyllt (Wild Sound)’, the title prompts the viewer’s memory to re-call the mixture of aural, vibrating and flowing qualities of the landscape. The painting’s aeriformed weaving and flurry of colour-shapes and blue-purple improvised layers, winding and scurrying as if in flight, takes the eye on a journey within the painting’s glowing and atmospheric space. This disembodies the viewer and takes the ground from our feet. To such a painting as this we bring our own memories and experiences – albeit unconsciously – and ‘Can Wyllt’ reciprocates by returning the human experience of exposure to the elements.

Mary Lloyd-Jones – ‘Rhaeadr Nant Gwrtheyrn’

In ‘Mwyn Plwm (Lead Ore)’, a recent and memorable painting, the handling of oil paint is light and refined, proving that with maturity the best painters continue to improve. The skill of painting is hard-won, crafted, and controlled with the focused devotion that this timeless medium demands. However, for me, the most outstanding painting of the exhibition is, ‘Olion(Remains)’. In her catalogue essay Gillian Clarke refers to the transformative experience of a car journey made through Wales that reminded her of R.S.Thomas’ poem, Bright Field. Lloyd-Jones’ ‘Olion’ is, essentially, an indigo-blue and purple composition, incorporating flying orange ribbons to provide a complementary counterpoint to the mass of earth and rock that commands the centre of the image. Within its atmospheric boundaries it holds a green field or escarpment that also reminds one of Thomas’ account of this, literally, illuminating experience:

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

the treasure in it …

This seemingly spot lit feature sits alongside a disused lead mine, an image retrieved from an industrial past. The painting contains the cartographers’ signs for various topographical features, incorporating both a bird’s-eye view and a multi-perspectival rendering of space, and is accompanied by an understated graffito of Bardic signs. As in the poem, this painting re-presents the image to be given freely to those who take the time to look. This commanding, delightful and sensuous canvas becomes a precious object to contemplate too.

A profound interest in the transformative powers of colour is reflected in the artist’s interest in India. In the accompanying publication Lloyd-Jones explains that her “… aim in visiting India was to immerse myself in a culture where the use of colour is fluent, spontaneous and sophisticated.” Thus, a large and exuberant patchwork of mini-colourfields is presented in ‘Jaipur’ III’, painted after one such visit to India. Pictorial space is more up-front and shallower than in the landscape work, suggesting a more spatially enclosed, claustrophobic, urban environment. It is interesting to note that the colour scheme is essentially the same as in the Welsh images – as if there is a cross-cultural link between Jaipur and west Wales. I sense this in the almost uninhibited and joyous use of colour found in Indian culture and echoed in the proletarian evidence of the colourfully rendered houses and cottages of west Wales. This dominance of colour also suggests a singular vision for painting that comes from this artist who imposes her visual language, her way of seeing, wherever she is – carrying a visual accent, or filter, to a foreign land.

This prompts the question – what is meant by foreign? Other peoples, another land, a different culture. In what sense is Wales foreign – particularly to the industrialised Welsh communities in the north and south who are essentially English speakers? What, and where, is their cultural identity? But Welsh art is a European and a British art too. In Lloyd-Jones’ work we see an unmistakably Welsh identity that is self-confident, undivided, and specifically related to the tradition of painting. She contributes to a living landscape tradition born out of her authentic rural experience and enriched by a European trans-national humanism. Landscape is proven to be a positive subject for contemporary painting. It is not an anachronistic genre but can deal with the here and now. In this instance contemporary, relevant, overtly political and wonderfully sensual and visual – from a geology over 400 million years old.

There are various dichotomies that can be distilled from the scope of this exhibition: of the relationship between Wales and Britain (England?); in the vestiges of ancient cultures in ‘modern’ day society – embedded especially in the Welsh oral tradition; and in the autonomous visual and literary expressive arts that sometimes link to enhance each other. Such questions are not necessarily intended to be answered here but a demand is made for reflection on such matters.

Lloyd-Jones’ work is, ultimately, a celebration. It is nationalistic in a positive and proud sense – it explores a collective identity, of a culture, a people through the landscape genre. We see to such powerful visual effect, the use of ancient and modern written languages linked to a heightened sensibility for employing colour with the language of abstraction. In her work and on her travels Lloyd-Jones becomes one with the genius loci – the spirit of a place. The landscape is transformed and interpreted in human terms – and we are invited to play a major role as viewers to verify her findings.

In conversation with Julia Brown, Helen Frankenthaler commented that, “True artistic creation of any kind is a very lonely process, a totally selfish act, and a totally necessary one that can become a gift to others. That’s when the painting finds its audience…” Mary Lloyd-Jones’ audience has grown steadily in the past few years and it is time that due recognition was given to her achievements by a broader public and on a truly national scale beyond the Welsh Borders. This exhibition in Aberystwyth is well worth the distance travelled.

Notes (2001)

‘Lliwio’r Gair/The Colour of Saying’ until 12 May 2001, at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

Touring to Wrexham Arts Centre, 7 July to 18 August 2001.

Catalogue: ‘The Colour of Saying’ (Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion), £19.95.

Mary Lloyd-Jones also exhibits at the Martin Tinney Gallery, Cardiff in September 2001.

Notes (2021)

Images

The images for this review have been scanned from ‘The Colour of Saying’, with the exception of the Banners which appear in ‘Delweddau O’r Ymylon’ by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (pub. Y Lolfa, Talybont).

‘The Colour of Saying’, edited by Eve Ropek (Gomer Press with Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 2001) was the first major publication on Mary-Lloyd Jones.

Martin Tinney Gallery – Mary Lloyd-Jones profile page

https://www.artwales.com/artists-detail-mtg-en.php?artistID=32

SHANI RHYS JAMES: TEA ON THE SOFA, BLOOD ON THE CARPET

SHANI RHYS JAMES: TEA ON THE SOFA, BLOOD ON THE CARPET

Wolfson Gallery, Charleston, Firle

(1 February – 19 April 2020)

Shani Rhys James – ‘Two Gourds’ (2017) 100x100cm
Courtesy the artist and Connaught Brown

A comment pops up on Shani Rhys James’ Instagram feed from newforestmutha asking if “…the Charleston show will be repeated?” This was in reference to ‘Tea on the Sofa, Blood on the Carpet’, staged in the Wolfson Gallery adjacent to the Sussex farmhouse where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant set up their home in 1916. By chance, I had mentioned to my daughter just the day before that I still regretted not writing about Shani Rhys James’ show almost a year ago. I also recall coming out of the exhibition and announcing to my companions that this was the best painting show of 2020. I was not joking. This was on 1^st February, the opening day, less than five weeks into the New Year and the exhibition be prematurely curtailed just a few weeks later.

Later, in June, after the first lockdown and the closing or limited opening of galleries, I had indulged in writing a retrospective account of Carol Bove’s sculptures at David Zwirner from 2018. This provided a fascinating experience for writing about, and reminiscing, an experience I assumed had gone by and for breaking with the convention of reviewing exhibitions whilst they were still ‘live’. The delay had also allowed time for thoughts to maturate a little, an indulgence of sorts that has been especially opportune with Rhys James’ works that have lodged in my thoughts throughout the past year. As the anniversary of ‘Tea on the Sofa, Blood on the Carpet’ approaches, I feel compelled to write my review at long last.

Installation view. (Photo – James Bellorini)

Starting with an overall impression, there was a sense that the work could have stayed in the Wolfson gallery space permanently. It somehow felt ‘at home’. A display of 13 paintings in a fairly compact space, one large elongated rectangular room that felt like three, as there are 11 walls, made for a powerful and emotionally impactful experience. The works were hung close together under strong spotlights that emphasised a chiaroscuro effect on works that featured bold colour and distinct tonal contrasts. In whichever direction one turned, and with any of the individual paintings selected, the viewer would be confronted by powerful imagery from the whole composition and, by stepping closer to get a sniff of the paint, details from small sections of the canvases were just as absorbing and captivating.

‘Boy and Bouquet’

Take, for example, a close-up section from the vase of flowers in ‘Boy and Bouquet’. Before arriving at these few square inches of canvas and paint that renders the top half of the vase, a mass of colourful blooms virtually fill the composition, brashly commanding and demanding attention as a child might. The vase in the foreground stands firm beneath this explosion of colour and painterly texture, perched as it is on a narrow white band of white linen on the tabletop edge that forms a counterpoint to the much larger black square of silence behind. In the bottom left hand corner of the composition a young, plump-faced boy stares, it would appear, at the implied viewer – or he may substitute the artist herself confronting the observer. His face, especially the eyes, acts as a focal point in the composition but one could be equally drawn to the row of yellow flowers that form a horizontal band across the mid-centre of the canvas. But with a swift movement the observer’s eye could swoop down the drooping stem of what might be a yellow tulip falling over the top half of the chunky looking vase. Here the eye could stay awhile to explore the surface of the canvas, slipping down further to an indistinct landscape on one of the facets of the ceramic form. The paint handling could be considered crude, but knowing when to leave a section as (apparently) unpolished as this is no mean feat when enough has been said. What is spoken, visually and materially, is quietly of itself. Nothing beyond flower forms, observed from real or decorative surface pattern by the artist, is to be elucidated.

An observer could have simply enjoyed the painting for what it is. But with a glance to one side to read Rhys James’ additional caption for ‘Boy and Bouquet’ revealed further scope and potential for interpretation:

“A small boy is dwarfed by a giant bouquet of flowers. I had been looking at a painting Degas did of a woman beside an enormous vase of chrysanthemums. My grandchild said ‘boys don’t like flowers’.”

The connection with the boy is pertinent, and undoubtedly special, for Rhys James but she expands upon a particular familial event by invoking a work of one of the greatest of early Modernism’s painters by referencing, ‘A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers’, held in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Whilst Degas, from a pre-Feminist age, might be equating this ‘pretty young lady’ alongside the bouquet of dahlias, asters, and gaillardias, Rhys James is both cheekily and seriously planting this very young boy next to a gregariously joyful bouquet in her own home. Never underestimate, or take for granted, a bunch of flowers. Given an alternative reading they might offer some other commentary on notions of ‘maleness’ too.

Edgar Degas – ‘A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers’ 1865

This effective curatorial decision, to include an explanation from Rhys James for all of the works in the show, broadened a reading of the images out of sync with the majority of ‘white cube’ affected exhibitions nowadays. In the context of a rural location, imbued with the fascinating history of a well known ‘extended’ family of sorts, there might be something unwittingly progressive about the inclusion of this text, as if Rhys James was at your shoulder, feeding you benevolent anecdotes as an additional narrative. The artist’s commentaries punctuate but do not interrupt the flow of imagery throughout the hanging. They vary in length too, which eschews any sense of strict curatorial guidelines to restrict this alternative conversation with the viewer.

‘Black Chandelier’

The longest text, at over a hundred words, accompanies ‘Black Chandelier’, an un-domestically large canvas that invited very close inspection despite almost doubling as a wall-based installation. This canvas offers a fairly stark composition from the correct viewing distance, presenting a black chandelier suspended from the top of the canvas in the left half and a female figure dressed in black attire sprouting up from the right hand section. These two elements create a dynamic diagonal visual tension within the rectangular format that strongly suggests an implied narrative between object and person. But it’s the background of Edwardian style floral wallpaper that flattens out the implied interior space despite logically knowing that the chandelier, a pseudo-candelabrum, is placed in the foreground, with the figure just a step or two behind. The patterned and stylised flower forms, that with a feminist reading might represent vulvas, are regimentally repeated across the canvas as a visual manifesto.

The lengthy wall text references a literary source: “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, as about a woman suffering from hysteria who was placed out of sight… at the top of the house… The walls are covered in yellow patterned wallpaper. She loathes the wallpaper and imagines a small black figure…” and that “This was one of the first feminist tracts…” This is serious literary and political content and we might think again about symbolism, culturally assigned gender-roles, the home, family and individual existential reality rendered so straightforwardly in this and other works in the exhibition.

Shani Rhys James – ‘Glass of Water’ (2017) 183x183cm

‘Glass of Water’ / ‘Oil of Ulay 2’

A relatively small jug of water and a piece of cloth placed in the bottom left hand corner of Degas’ aforementioned painting balances the gravitational weight of the woman on the right. Likewise, in Rhys James’, ‘Glass of Water’, a similar prop occupies the top right hand corner of a composition that suggests a late, minimalist/abstract, Rothko painting. This intimation of colour-field abstraction is also present in ‘Oil of Ulay 2’, where a backdrop screen of red extends three quarters of the way down the canvas and then continues its journey in vertical rivulets. In this lower quarter a hairbrush and a bottle of Oil of Ulay (now rebranded, ‘Olay’) float like flat constructivist forms from the 1950s. The elderly woman’s resting hand adds a third visual element that transforms object to subject. The red void provided was one route into the composition, but it is most likely that a viewer would enter via the subject’s arresting stare. These examples, the most compelling images in the show, pay homage of sorts to the artist’s mother. She appears to be an indomitable character, worthy of celebration within her daughter’s oeuvre. Her pictorial preservation in these works is surely a testament to the bond between mother and daughter. The raw, brutal honesty is strangely beautiful, but Rhys James does not go in for sentimentality.

Shani Rhys James – ‘Oil of Ulay 2’ 2018 182x213cm
Courtesy the artist and Connaught & Brown

These two simple domestic tableau in ‘Oil of Ulay 2’, a hairbrush and a bottle of ‘beauty cream’ (as a child might innocently call it), allude to a remaining element of self-respect more than vanity. As for the glass of water in ‘Glass of Water’, it potentially speaks of more than refreshment throughout hours of rest or confinement. For water is a symbol of divine life and purity, and is especially emphasised against the blackest of backdrops. The narrative is both mundane and spiritual – is the bed a place of rest, confinement or refuge? The interpretation is up to the viewer in these and, indeed, all of the works selected for ‘Tea on the Sofa, Blood on the Carpet’. Depending on your age and experience in life these engrossing portraits might be read as ‘matter of fact’ or deeply disturbing. A child could recognise a grandparent, or an adult might detect a premonition of a stage in life not so far away. For a carer of a senior the impact could be felt most deeply and upsetting.

Paint

No one could have left this exhibition without lasting impressions. Rhys James’ practice is multifaceted, with conjoined matters of painting practice in a digital era (perhaps reminiscing, proclaiming or asserting painting); family orientated as it impacts on personal selfhood and changing generational roles (including cultural expectations); and in being assertively feminist with humour and pathos.

This was certainly a show for other painters to see as well, as any evidence of struggling with the medium of oil paint had been expertly disciplined to serve the needs of the compelling imagery that distinguishes this work. By ‘expertly’ I mean that the handling of the paint medium has not only been adeptly and skilfully realised through many years of experience and practice, notwithstanding Rhys James’ continuing exploration that reveals the contradiction of struggle as part of the deal, but is also attuned to the potential of the subject matter and the possibilities inherent in the materiality and visuality of the medium itself.

This sense of a dynamic embodiment of readings has, ideally, to be experienced by the viewer in the presence of the paintings, but the enlivening and stimulating combination of image, subject matter and a viscerally coloured and textured surface facture, endures beyond an initial viewing. Whilst the content goes far deeper than simply enjoying the paintings for their immediate visual impact, for viewed from half a yard or less there is always an engrossing content of captivatingly brushed, palette-knifed, dragged and drawn marks in every work that rewards inspection. This brings us back to the paint and its alchemical properties to become something or somewhere else in the memory, the here and now or beyond language or pronouncement. Where the visual is both animated and physical, time bound and fleeting; and space is past and present, inward as well as external.

I am reminded of a comment about the mystery and complexity of painting made by the American painter, Joe Bradley:

“I think it hopefully escapes language and kind of stops a linguistic read. I don’t think the idea is to be evasive or tricky, but I think one thing that painting does well is to broadcast contradictory content in a single view, as opposed to a book or movie that leads you through. Good painting sort of stops time and jams up the works – in a good way.”

The medium is the message.