painting – Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews

AFTER-IMAGE

AFTER-IMAGE: Works inspired by the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery Collection

Window Gallery, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

1 to 30 November 2025

A few years ago, as a break from the painting studio, I had visited the nearby Brighton Museum & Art Gallery to view the Prof. Paul Heyer bequest that includes works by Jules Olitski, Frank Stella and Larry Poons. Just before leaving, whilst still in front of the Olitski, I noticed a lonely painting from an adjoining gallery that I imagined waving at me, perhaps exclaiming, “Hey, look at me – I’m a modern painting too!”

I went straight over to this relatively small oil painting, encased in a dominating gold leafed frame, already sensing something special. It was a landscape by Thomas Gainsborough. The experience reinforced a belief I have that all paintings have a potential to remain vital and relevant today – for painters and viewers alike. So its production date during the 1740s when he was still developing his skills was not an issue. This is a somewhat intuitive notion – but Gainsborough sets the bar for painting (not only landscape imagery) way back in the 18^th century. He may well have his technical equals today, but there’s none better. Nor do visually powerful paintings have to be as big as the painters of the New York School often produced.

My first photograph of Gainsborough’s *Open Landscape at the Edge of a Wood* 1744-45
Brighton Museum & Art Gallery collection

This intriguing painting by Gainsborough, Open Landscape at the Edge of a Wood, lacks the presence of human figures (referencing the Classical Antique tradition that earlier generations of painters indulged in, or including the so-called peasants or the wealthy landowners of the day, such as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews), sometimes seen in his works. Though it has that constructed feel so typical of the European tradition of landscape imagery (post-Claude), an informal sense of place prevails. The viewer is invited to gaze upon the corner of a field, some local Suffolk woodland I assume, and the typically cloudy English sky. The implied narrative might be concerned with the everyday, as the artist invites the viewer to appreciate the countryside. I took a photograph with my new iPhone that usefully recorded the date as October 20, 2017 at 15:38.

I decided to revisit my photograph of the painting in 2024 after I received the go ahead to curate the AFTER-IMAGE exhibition for the Window Gallery at the Phoenix Art Space with the inclusion of other studio members. (An earlier proposal in 2022 had been rejected, perhaps because I was eying up the larger Main Gallery and lacked the funds to rent the space.) The prompt to my Phoenix contemporaries was for them to visit the Museum and to choose anything to react to in whatever way they wished.

One of the benefits of having a studio at the Phoenix is its close vicinity to the Museum and Art Gallery, where a publically owned collection of artworks are available to see all year round, subject to curatorial changes and re-hangs. I decided to stick with my choice of the Gainsborough landscape despite temptations to respond to other works that also drew my attention. The fact that it has not been on display for a while was not an issue as I had my photograph and the memory of that encounter eight years ago. In fact, a kind offer by Laurie Bassam (Curator of Decorative & Fine Art) from the museum was not taken up to get the painting out of storage, as I preferred not to see the Gainsborough in the flesh quite yet. I had my photograph and my visual recollection. Yet I would, of course, maintain that it is always necessary for artists to see and experience original artworks ‘in the flesh’, rather than only in print and/or online. Painters, and photographers, are typically well aware of the history behind their respective practices and engage with displays of original works in a way that others may not. Any reaction can be to emulate, to be inspired by, or to creatively adjust and re-present or re-order subject matter for one’s own purposes. Imagery and objects from the past will therefore be linked to the present either directly or more obliquely, depending on the inclination of the invested observer. The remit gave this small group from the Phoenix the opportunity to produce whatever they wished. I expected a wide range of responses, and have not been disappointed. I asked each in the group to write a brief (or not so brief) statement to explain their respective choices of works to respond to. With some respectful editing, and starting with the photographers, here is what they had to say:

Statements from the exhibitors:

Murray Ballard – Black Rock, Brighton. C type print.

**Jacques-Émile Blanche** – *Black Rock, Brighton, East Sussex* (1938)
Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

Jacques-Émile Blanche’s painting of Black Rock, Brighton presents a composed summer scene, its figures formally dressed, children at play, artists at work along the shoreline. Returning to the same site with a large-format field camera, I was struck by the extent of its transformation. Once considered the eastern edge of Brighton, Black Rock has shifted through many identities: from coal-landing beach, to lido, and a gateway to the Marina. Today the space is often empty, yet on this occasion it served as the end point of a long-distance trail race. My photograph reflects on this layered history and the changing uses of place.

Fergus Heron – Ship Street Gardens, Brighton, England, 2016/2025. C type print.

**George Dodgson Callow** – *The Chain Pier, Brighton* (1856) Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

I am interested in how the places of the studio and museum offer different but related ways to imagine Brighton as an urban landscape through pictures. I was initially interested in the pictures of the chain pier by George Callow and another by John Fraser.

The connections with my works being relations of land and water, distance, scale, looking at structures from which looking is practiced and that change perspective on place.

Ship Street Gardens, Brighton is a colour photograph on paper showing a view to the west over rooftops in the Lanes area of Brighton. The image describes the appearance of relations between buildings and natural features in soft overcast light with a high degree of detail. A dialogue with George Callow’s painting Chain Pier, Brighton is offered by the photograph with contrasts including direction and viewpoint, plus the presence of the i360 as a modern ‘vertical pier’ and the absence of the beach. My photograph forms a landscape that brings coastal, urban, and new and old aspects of place into relation.

Perdita Sinclair – How the Whale Got His Throat and Gen 9. Both oil on canvas.

*Ice Age Black Rock* AI fictitious digital animation in The Elaine Evans Archaeology Gallery
by **Grant Cox** of *Artasmedia* (2019) Image credit: Grant Cox and Brighton & Hove Museums

**Joe Tyler** – Replica Saxon shield (2018) Image credit: Joe Tyler and Brighton & Hove Museums

Both the animation and the shield influenced both of my paintings, How the Whale Got His Throat and Gen 9. They made me think about how animals and landscapes are captured and recreated by humans using tools. The tool being something practical, like a shield or information animation, but the symbols of animals representing something psychological or spiritual, like a connection to deep time. The paintings that I have in After-Image use the tool of AI to generate imagery and my own physical and psychological connection to Brighton and my home.

Denise Harrison – Water of Leith: Flow / Pause / Return. Acrylic on wood.

**Denise Harrison** – *Waters of Leith: Flow / Pause / Return*

**Ivon Hitchens** – *Forest* (c.1940) © DACS Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

In July, after the death of my sister, I spent three weeks alone by the Water of Leith in Edinburgh. This place, connected to my past, became somewhere I could be quiet and reflect. Each day I walked along the river or sat still in one spot, taking in the sounds, movement and atmosphere of the landscape. In my paintings, I translate sensations as well as views.

I was inspired by Ivon Hitchens’ painting, Forest and the way he immersed himself in his surroundings. I used acrylic paint on blocks of wood, adopting the panoramic format to reflect how the landscape is seen as a continuous space, without edges. Through gesture and colour, my paintings capture the feeling of being fully present in the landscape, where memory, grief and nature come together.

Bernard G. Mills – Bellows. Liquitex on canvas (diptych).

**Frank Stella** – *Red Scramble* (1977)
Image credit: © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025
and Brighton & Hove Museums

When viewing the work on a visit to the gallery and a talk about their twentieth century collection I was struck, not so much by the design, physical execution or colours in Red Scramble, but by the resemblance of Frank Stella’s painting’s concentric squares to the folds in a camera’s bellows. As I was (and am) engaged in producing a series of paintings that I call Photographic Paintings – paintings that relate to aspects of photography, I decided to incorporate the response to Stella’s piece with a diptych entitled Bellows.

I had originally decided to include twenty-four painting in the series (one has to draw a line somewhere) – either twenty-four or thirty-six (referring to the number of frames in a 35mm film cassette). With the Stella being a diptych, I decided to extend it to twenty-five because, in the interest of economy, if one loaded a 35mm film into a camera judiciously, one could squeeze in an extra exposure at the end of the film.

June Nelson – Fire Spotting, Where All Ladders Start and Every Rung Shone Strangely. All oil on canvas.

June Nelson – *Fire Spotting* (t/l), *Where All Ladders Start* (b/l) and *Every Rung Shone Strangely* (r)

**Toyokuni Kunisada** – *Firemen performing acrobatic feats at New Year* (1840)
Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

My initial response to a Japanese woodcut depicting firemen performing acrobatic feats took the form of a few small paintings – direct transcriptions of the image. After a long break working on another series of paintings, I returned to the ladder motif. Evoking ideas of balance, emergence, precarity, and triumph, the ladder has become the starting point for a new body of work, comprising paintings and sculpture. These works extend threads from earlier explorations of “impossible objects”: mirrors that refuse to reflect, faces that cannot be fully seen and shadow ladders that offer no passage. Together they forge a shifting vocabulary that hovers between the literal and the illusory, the structural and the dreamlike.

Mike Stoakes – The Tyger, Tony the Tiger and Sporting Tigers. Mixed media.

*Munro and the Hungry Tiger* from the **Willett Collection of Popular Pottery** (c.1825)
Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

Though I’ve recently been working on the subject of my colonial past I have chosen this work for After Image out of pure interest. It represents an actual event where Hector/Hugh Sutherland Munro serving as a cadet for the East India Company was seized by the head and dragged away by a tiger, succumbing to his injuries even after the tiger was shot. The event was widely reported and subsequently (1820s) became the subject of a series of Staffordshire ceramic figures and more recently foreign fakes.

Not long after Munro’s death, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who loathed the British, commissioned an automata of the incident that produced movement and wailing and growling noises activated by a crank. The body of the tiger also contained an organ. The styling of the piece draws on South Indian traditions of sculpture and is one example of many images Tipu caused to be made of British meeting their demise, with the tiger being a significant repeated personal motif. Uncannily the iconography of the tiger mauling a soldier had been used by him prior to the Munro tragedy. Tipu was killed by the British in a siege and his tiger brought to Britain as plunder and is now in the V&A. The style was likely the basis for the Staffordshire figures and the subject for William Blake’s poem The Tyger.

The work I have made uses the tiger image to explore human projection onto nature through various media representations. Three paintings each about 35cm square are titled The Tyger, Tony the Tiger and Sporting Tigers. The Tyger is from Blake’s poem in all likelihood inspired by the Munro story. Tony the Tiger is the Frosties breakfast cereal mascot who was animated with a Brooklyn accent – which gives him a name and location link to Tony Manera from Saturday Night Fever. Tony and the Esso tiger (in your tank) had cordial relations until Esso used it was to promote foodstuffs at which point the relationship became frosty. sporting tigers refers to a scene from if…. where Malcolm McDowell and Christine Noonan wrestle naked on the floor of a transport cafe impersonating tigers.

Julian Vilarrubi – Study for Moonrise on the Rape of Hastings. Oil on board.

And Studies for Moonrise I and II. Oil on paper.

**Edward Louis Lawrenson** – *Moonrise on the Rape of Hastings, East Sussex* (c.1920)
Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

Caught in the liminal transition between day and night, the full moon ascends in direct opposition to the setting sun. The scene evokes an early evening in late September, sometime in the 1920s. The final warm, golden rays illuminate the treetops – light that is soon to yield to the cooler chromatic palette dominating the remainder of the composition. This fleeting equilibrium between sunlight and moonlight – the gradual succession of one form of illumination by another – imbues the image with a poetic transience. It captures the precise moment when day recedes and night begins its quiet ascent. The viewer becomes aware of the inevitable passing of time, as the low sun behind us slips beneath the horizon, signaling the arrival of autumn light and the encroaching darkness of the months ahead.

I first encountered this painting on 13 August 2023 at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. That single viewing has remained vividly imprinted in my memory. The work’s compositional and atmospheric qualities exerted such a profound influence on my painterly sensibility that I have since felt compelled to reproduce it, not as an act of imitation, but as an analytical engagement intended to uncover aspects of its making.

This undertaking is not an interpretation or a personal reimagining of the original. Rather, it represents a dialogue between my own practice and that of another painter. Through this process, I seek to concentrate on specific technical concerns allowing the act of reproduction to function as a form of enquiry. It is an attempt to locate, through practice, the intersections where two artistic methodologies might converge.

The objective is to study, replicate, and thereby understand how and why certain images resonate with such lasting intensity. Art museums provide a unique pedagogical context for such investigations: they preserve not only the works themselves but also the potential for experiential learning embedded within them. In this instance Lawrenson has already resolved many compositional decisions and I am thus liberated from considerations of subject or framing and can direct my attention entirely toward process, structure, and surface.

In total, my direct encounter with the painting amounted to less than ten minutes. My subsequent work has relied exclusively on photographic reproductions – an approach far from ideal. Reproductions inevitably introduce distortions of colour, scale, facture, and detail, yet they remain my only means of sustained engagement. As a student of historical painting practice, this project constitutes a deliberate methodological exercise: a means of interrogating pictorial construction, tonal balance, and chromatic harmony. By attempting to reconstruct the processes underpinning this work, I aim to absorb and internalise its lessons, thereby extending my own understanding of painting as both material practice and visual language.

Stig Evans – Unveil. Graphite and acrylic on canvas + curtain.

**Philippe de Champaigne** – *St Veronica’s Veil* (c.1640)
Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

To “draw a curtain” can mean two apparently contradictory things: to pull it aside to reveal what it had concealed, and to pull it in front of an object, in order to hide it. To draw, and to paint, a curtain is thus both to cover and discover.

Geoff Hands – After Gainsborough I and II. Oil on canvas.

And Open Landscape (Oval). Oil on board/frame

**Thomas Gainsborough** – *Open Landscape at the Edge of a Wood* (1744-45)
Image credit: Brighton & Hove Museums

Gainsborough’s painting chose me, in a sense. As I explained in the AFTER-IMAGE essay (above), I was looking at works by Olitski, Stella and Poons from the Prof. Paul Heyer bequest and the almost unnoticed small oil painting beckoned me from afar. As a contemporary painter I am always on the lookout for paintings to excite me, irrespective of when they were produced. So I love visiting the National Gallery in London as much as visiting displays of new paintings in the contemporary and independent galleries. My focus on painters from the past increased during the Covid pandemic, perhaps because I was usefully confined to my Phoenix studio and a packed bookshelf of artist’s monographs kept in there. So I was looking at painters such as Caravaggio, Rubens, Watteau, Gainsborough and Gillian Ayers, particularly intrigued by pictorial composition. As much as content and historical readings are essential in understanding paintings from any era, I was particularly focused on the more formal aspects of painting. Not only in composition, but also in internal shapes, passages of light and dark, and just how the paint medium has been applied onto the surface. Looking with a fellow painter’s eye I guess, though not as an equal of course.

When the NG re-opened I visited the Titian: Love, Desire, Death exhibition and was also pleased to see Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews for real in the general display. Later on, a postcard of Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda, bought from the NG shop, influenced my painting back in the studio. This attention to the image followed great discontent with a landscape painting made the day before, to which I now added the appropriated figures. Around this time, the experience of seeing the Gainsborough painting in the Brighton Museum in 2017 came back to me. So when the opportunity to make AFTER-IMAGE happen it felt appropriate to transcribe Open Landscape at the Edge of a Wood rather than another work from the Museum collection (I was also tempted by Ruskin Spear’s Brighton Beach and Gillian Ayres’ Sappho – and may yet produce something from either of these).

In addition to making three main transcriptions from the Gainsborough, a study entitled Open Landscape (Oval) integrated the frame that referenced seeing the Gainsborough in its historical gold frame, although I went with a more Hodgkinesque connection of the frame into the painting. In the AFTER-IMAGE exhibition I have hung this work slightly away from the main display as I am hoping that it is not immediately seen by visitors, but has that opportunity to say “Hey, look at me!”

Geoff Hands (October 2025)

**Julian Vilarrubi** – *Studies for Moonrise I* and II

Thanks:

Laurie Bassam and Lucy Faithful from Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Laurence Hill and Ainoa Burgos Gonzalez from Phoenix Art Space

Installation assistance – Bernard G. Mills from Phoenix Art Space

Poster design – Jiating Yang

Links:

Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Phoenix Art Space

Exhibitors’ Websites –

Instagram –

LOUISE BRISTOW/RUSSELL WEBB: and other trivial matters

Gallery Dodo, Phoenix Art Space

26 April to 8 June 2025

THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL

If you are already familiar with the artwork of Louise Bristow and Russell Webb you will know how fastidious they both are in the craft of their art making. Their respective and uncompromising working practices demand scrupulous attention to detail and full command of their chosen materials, processes and subject matters. I had not previously considered their work being shown together, but here they are in and other trivial matters at the Gallery Dodo in Phoenix Art Space. The results are impressive, not least because they have installed their work in complimentary fashion without either dominating the other and with a careful juxtaposition of contrasting imagery and objects. The works link under a broad still-life categorisation with the small (life size) sculptures sitting comfortably with the reduced scale of painted objects depicted in the paintings. As is typical of the still-life genre the imagery can be as straightforward, or as loaded, as the artist intends and the viewer is able to interpret.

My initial visit to the exhibition was hurried and fleeting as I had my own studio to get to at the recent Phoenix Open Studios weekend for the Brighton Festival. A few days later I was able to return to the space and to peruse the contents for as long as was necessary. But that first fleeting visit was surprisingly useful, for a stick had stuck in my mind. This was Russell Webb’s Stick Surgery (viii) to be precise. For when is a stick not a stick? When it’s a (found) curtain pole, with sawdust and acrylic paint applied, of course. But when this combination of materials is transformed, or re-naturalised, into an object/ornament that you might display on your mantelpiece at home you must remember not to be deceived and put it on the open fire – or you will have lost a sculpture. Why the mantelpiece? Well that’s where one might typically display a found object from a countryside walk. An objet trouvé become perdu (holding aesthetic value) – maybe with a hint of the wabi-sabi aesthetic. But it’s not a found object; it’s a sculpture, I dare say, of the unmonumental category. So whilst it references the natural and the everyday, the quotidian in contemporary artspeak, as a designed or constructed object it may have a different sense of value to the found object. At which point I am getting confused between any old stick and the one that the artist has made. Is this his intention?

A mental fixation on just one piece of artwork encountered at the start of an exhibition is rare in my experience, as I have a habit to scan for an initial impression and to have a walk around to acclimatise myself. But as the Gallery Dodo space is relatively small, and I was pushed for time, this particular example of Webb’s selected pieces caught my attention first. Of course, in contrast to noticing this one individual item, I was also aware that, in a sense, the whole room was full of objects. In addition to the thirteen three-dimensional objects displayed on four shelves there were over forty still-life items represented in the four paintings. A return was clearly required.

Sitting in the Dodo space on my own for a private viewing a few days later was immediately quite calming. My inclination was to just relax and look, scribble a few notes as preparation for this review, and try to dismiss personal expectations. Simply respond to the physical content before me. Whenever I look at Louise Bristow’s paintings I slip into a state of calm anyway. They are so quiet, not even a hum emanates even if the imagery, a painting of a photograph perhaps, suggests a particular soundtrack from the contextual content. But this is not a display to sit and look at from a distance. It is imperative to stand up and move closer to each of the four groupings of an individual painting with various sculptural forms arranged on a shelf beneath the image. Both sets of work invoke an admiration of how they have been painted. In a sense, they are super-realist – though certainly not photo-realist. Webb’s sculptures might be termed as object-realist. They are utterly convincing as being the real thing, such as the orange peel or the piece of string. There is a common factor of the discarded, damaged or moving beyond some notion of a perfect state (e.g. Venus Figure – a slightly over ripe pear that appears to be tottering in terms of balance and tastiness) in his selection of reproduced items. They might typically be found in the kitchen, the garden shed, on the street or from that aforementioned woodland walk.

His titles are fundamentally important too: Lost Memory (a knotted length of material), Little Victories (two successfully removed orange peels that each remain as one piece of skin), or Family Tree, a broken off twig with three shrivelling berries remaining and the slightly spiky and pointed receptacle bases of the original flower where the missing berries developed. The titles can be nostalgic, jokey or deep. Aspiration (Manet) might reveal the aspiration of the young art student or the long-standing ideal of the older painter. His titles certainly guide the viewer towards a particular thought or interpretation.

Bristow’s titles are also loaded with possibilities of analysis and exposition. There is also an element of nostalgia in the mid and eastern European and Soviet imagery where (for example) education, high-art, architectural design and social housing meet political idealism. On a formal level, the figurative-realist visual language of Bristow’s paintings appears to invoke that notion of apparent ‘reality’ that might align with objectivity. The People’s Forum, Red Vienna, Common Market and Playground are titles that certainly suggest further reading and investigation. But here, as paintings, and as objects, they invoke speculation and demand time for thought, probably over a long period of time. By implication, as observers of ‘art’ in a gallery, we might by extension question our own society today and critically consider our received political and social ideals and inspirations. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole now.

If one of Webb’s sticks remains in my memory, the image from Bristow’s paintings that stays with me is a section in the top left quarter from The People’s Forum that is a torn out page from a book or magazine. It re-presents a black and white photograph of a small group of young school children. Three of the four kids hold up their paintings for others to see and admire. The child (a girl?) in the top left corner of the composition looks at the photographer, and by extension us the viewers, so many years later. We might wonder who this person and the other young people were. What did they go on to achieve later in life, where did they live and what society were they were a part of. An objectively painted image (a reproduction) of a non-digital, black and white photographic print earlier reproduced in a physical publication might, semantically, become very subjective of course. It would also be a mistake to distance this image from the rest of the composition, visually engineered by the artist. What are we to make of another image of older (but maybe relatively young) people holding up small books? A few figures in the foreground are in focus with an out of focus background suggesting another photographic source, albeit in colour (maybe suggesting a later historical date than the aforementioned black and white photograph). Is that a sheet of wrapping paper on the tabletop? Does it introduce an element of nostalgia? What are those three-dimensional, architectural or modernistic objects doing there? Is that an ‘abstract’ type sculpture placed in the centre of the composition? None of Bristow’s compositions look random, in terms of content or compositional spacing. From the history of art, Piero della Francesca, Clara Peeters or the multi-talented El Lissitsky could well have inspired and guided her development as a painter – but she creates a voice of her own in the context of a politically complex world.

Physical objects (material culture in Semiotic theory) are inevitably reconstructed and interpreted by the artist and the observer, in this instance via the still-life repertoire and the notional gallery space that Louise Bristow and Russell Webb have all too briefly occupied. A sense of the personal and the political shifts between and within these works. As an audience we might question what visual artists do, and how they do it – especially the painters in a digital age. Biased as I surely am, seeing 2-D and 3-D paintings as impressively skilful as these, I sense an argument for the continued relevance of painting that both references a deep history and provokes or coaxes the imagination of the viewer. There may be more to this show than meets the eye. Where’s Duchamp, when you need him…

Geoff Hands

Links:

Louise Bristow

Louise Bristow on Instagram

Russell Webb on Instagram

Gallery Dodo on Instagram

Phoenix Art Space

Homework/further reading Daniel Chandler: Semiotic for Beginners

JUNE NELSON: The Gloves Are Off

Diving Queens: Portraits of Resilience

Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

5 to 27 April 2025

The gloves are off, or rather on. Diver’s helmets too, plus rigid ruffs and helmet-like attire from Elizabethan and Flemish portraiture. In this impactful exhibition by June Nelson the viewer will most certainly sense the presence of an implied wittiness and sense of humour conjoined in a serious and profound range of imagery.

The dramatis personae are unidentifiable as they are everywoman and, I surmise, the artist herself. It’s a clearly contemporary collection of works too, that take in historical references for the present day. What makes the choice of imagery for this exhibition at the Phoenix Art Space so pertinent for today are not only the almost cartoonish and comical images that might (but do not) undermine a serious visual discussion, but also forms a presentation of evidence of a dynamic and self-questioning undertaking aligning a feminist perspective with images to match. These portraits of resilience proclaim a contemporary voice operating from the painting studio, rather than from some alternative social media pulpit. Punches are not pulled.

June Nelson – *Beyond Countenance*, *Regalia* and *At The Court of the Pugilist* (all 2025)

Aligned to a notion of portraiture, that is in fact far from trite or superficial, the works create, with narrative devices such as gestures, gender related costume and the blank gaze, a stage on which to enlighten the viewer. In these sixteen paintings, Nelson holds back from presenting too much detail and is being cleverly and purposely simplistic in not overworking the visual language or the immediately readable content. There’s something here about proclaiming painting as relevant as any other medium too, with a feeling for the materiality of this colourful but sometimes crude substance that is what it is – just as any implied narrative is presented with a rawness of self-awareness and realisation through the crucial activity of painting. Paint, and painting, offers itself up as alchemical process, turning emotion, anger, thoughts and feelings (personal, social and, maybe, familial) into a positive, dynamic realisation and outcome.

In a statement on her website, Nelson has stated:

“I am fuelled by an interest in female agency and our sense of self, using history, mythology, and personal memories to stand witness to often hidden or silenced lives, particularly those of women.”

With this declaration in mind, I therefore assume that there is both a rallying cry, aimed at female observers who share a common sense of unfair, ingrained prejudices in society, alongside a wake up message to the male audience. This could be challenging subject matter for someone like me (a male, liberal, Late-Boomer) who likes to think that he is liberated from gender-based prejudices, when in fact he knows that he still has a lot to learn and to understand. Nelson therefore imposes, via engaging imagery and painterly expertise, a perspective and a position that should not be ignored or discounted.

June Nelson – *Diver, Deep Brown* (2024)

The artist further explains that:

“Recent paintings… continue to explore the same themes and motifs – seeing and silencing, suppression and repression. In a union of the personal and the historical, paintings portray women wearing deep-sea diving helmets, ruffs or boxing gloves. Often taking Tudor portraits or medieval ‘Doom” paintings as a starting point, uncanny faces gaze out at or hide from the viewer. As a modern woman looking back along the matriarchal line, not much has changed.”

This is certainly an absorbing theme and the exhibition, which initially invites a stroll from one end to the other in the corridor-type viewing space, has enough range to encourage looking at individual works as well as carefully selected groupings of pairings or threesomes. This display policy creates a healthy sense of the artworks as an ongoing project, with further possibilities for all sorts of juxtapositions or giving individual paintings their own space. There is both a sense of self and of belonging to a community offered up in this project. With similarities in content, such as entrapment, silencing, battling against the odds, and understandable frustration with progressive developments in ‘modern’ society changing so slowly, there is yet the sense of a series growing quite organically rather than as a too forcefully premeditated or programmatic endeavour. On a more individualistic level for the painter herself, I sensed that there is a form of self-revelation through the practice of being a visual artist, expanding and advancing a challenging discipline, which might always be on the verge of failure. I mean this in a positive context, as both an exploration into conditions of identity and as a necessary condition of painting.

There is also a sense of the work-in-progress, as the artist engages in a creative studio-bound journey that is open to trial and error and who refuses to fall into the trap of producing some colourful decoration for the living-room wall. This, I hope, is the kind of project that makes the viewer stop and think, to be unsure, and even to be left feeling a little uncomfortable – particularly if the image initially looks somewhat humorous. For example, as in ‘Red Gloves’ that reveals a naked woman, not conventionally delivered for the male gaze, but almost as a take on a crucifixion of sorts. The outstretched arms, with red bulbous, stump-like ends representing boxing gloves, rather than blood, has a potentially defeated feel to it, but, ironically proclaims a rising strength of character.

June Nelson – *Helping Hands* (June 2024)

I also felt (but could be totally wrong) a measure of sadness and loss. This unexpected reaction initially emerged from a very small work, ‘Helping Hands’. This was not so much from the caring yellow hands that cradle either side of the outside of the diving helmet, but there is something about the paint application and the gently applied, painterly wash of blues and greys, with perhaps three horizontal strokes of the brush blanking out the eyes, that implied a melancholic theme. A greenish oval floats beneath the helmet like a brooch, a medal or a heart. There is enough scope here for the viewer to bring his or her own interpretation to a subtle yet robust image.

June Nelson – detail from *Silence Sealed* (2025)

Above this small work was a more immediate kind of message, a hand gesture implying secrecy or suppression, conveyed in ‘In Silence Sealed’. This striking portrait brought to mind the anonymous imagery of a nun from a silent order, with an almost halo-like disc that hid the face of the unaccredited portrait. Yet the icon-like image was not so much religious in a denominational sense, but more universal and quietly empowering, representing a vow of collective, female, knowingness. These are paintings well worth taking time out to see and to allow the imagery to enter one’s own thought-space. To prompt recollection of the roles, say, that our historical (and/or family) predecessors played, or that our contemporaries in society undertake today. Nelson’s characters form a sort of Commedia dell’arte for the past, the present and the future. But any implied comedic element is wittily and unambiguously turned into serious content. The female viewer is both in the ring and in the audience.

June Nelson – *Diver, Deep Brown*, *Pink Diver* and *Diver, Jade* (all 2024)

LINKS:

June Nelson’s website

June Nelson on Axis web

Instagram

Phoenix Art Space

GRANT FOSTER: Home To My Teenage Bedroom

At Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

1 March to 13 April 2025

Often the best paintings, literature, music etc. take time to come through. The first impression may well be the one to not give too much credence to. A degree of complexity in any art form deserves a period of further thought. After five or six visits to Grant Foster’s exhibition at the Phoenix Art Space I know that I need to look again and again. This is good.

Q. What do you think about when you are looking at an exhibition of paintings?

What is the mind of any onlooker doing? Searching for something recognisable? Prepared and preconditioned by our shared culture we might be expecting something general or commonplace, such as a human figure, a landscape or objects constructing a narrative as a way into the work. What, potentially, could these visual references add up to? What might the storyline be, if there is one? And if the narrator/artist is describing something, making a serious statement or spinning a yarn, can you relate to the theme? Alternatively you might be more of a formalist with an eye for the aesthetic hit. The purely visual, via systems or improvisation, might be your thing. Either way, so-called content can be very complex or minimal. Of course, if the exhibition has a title you are already geared up with some expectations. Home To My Teenage Bedroom sounds perilously loaded.

There may be some idealised notion of preparing to see an exhibition as objectively as possible with the mind emptied. Ideally the extraneous thoughts of those other aspects of one’s life are put aside, at least for a while. It may be an artificial approach, but imagine entering a show with a mental blank slate. No preconceptions or expectations. What is experienced afresh? Nope. This is just not possible, or even desirable. Our various histories create our personalities (however flawed or enlightened) and enable a personal take on what we see and understand. In the case of this show we might consider that that teenage past was an under investigated portal that might throw some light onto who we became in adulthood. Grant Foster acknowledges this potentially rich period of life in a wall statement:

“It’s often said that our teenage years are the most decisive – our interests, obsessions, and passions are innocently formed and planted like seeds, taking root over time.”

But without any foreknowledge beyond the title of the show, visiting Foster’s exhibition at the Phoenix Art Space initially left me more impressed with the thoughtfully and dynamically prepared arrangement of works by the artist with the new Phoenix Art Space curator Laurence Hill, than with the paintings. I made no connection with the content, despite knowing the title of the show. I was surprised and sensed that this was a body of work requiring more viewings. In retrospect I guess I was a little overawed by the presentation. But I sensed that a few visits might be necessary, if only because my thoughts were probably too elsewhere – especially at an opening event that was extremely well attended as the crowds flooded in for three painting exhibitions under one roof.

Grant Foster – *Nature V. Nurture* (2024) *Help* (2023) back and *Psychiatric Hospitals, Full, No. 3* (2020)

Back home at the computer keyboard I recalled my first visit, and an all too brief second pop-in the next day, by describing, albeit generally, those initial impressions. The earliest typed out observations prompted the following text:

The visitor very much walks into this exhibition. Into a structured, planned space – but not forced, obliged or coerced to travel in a particular way. This installation invites a weaving, walking, stopping and starting, slow dance in, around and even through the works. In the large main gallery the majority of the fifteen paintings are free standing, fixed on wooden structures that are equivalent to the human scale. Some have vertical poles, like spines, attached from floor to ceiling to prompt the visitor to actually touch the work of art and to carefully turn it around, thereby opening a door of sorts and changing the arrangement where, in two instances, accompanying canvases are set up next to each other as a triptych…

Grant Foster – *St Francis (To the Stars) (Matter without Hierarchy)* (2024)

But I was clearly missing so much more. On my third visit I found myself tuning in to the echoes of the art historical that, generally, permeates all contemporary painting. Plus, the painterly visual language and the way that Foster generally draws with the paint media – perhaps as an expression of his personality – was immersing me into the imagery. For example, in the four St. Francis paintings, representing statuesque Giotto-type figures that are placed as two separate implied diptychs on the walls, the paint application is fluid and almost shorthand. The figures have turned away from the viewer. Are we to follow – through some kind of portal? Then there is evidence, no more than implied, of other figurative content. A cat in one composition and a swan in another. There may be some wings too and a building type passageway where there might otherwise be legs. Is there a rural environment too, with a little taste of landscape beyond? The uncertainty must be deliberate.

Grant Foster – *Nature v Nurture* (2024) rear

Another art historical reference might be the Sotheby’s work shirt fixed to the reverse of one of the freestanding canvases, Nature V Nurture, to suggest the Crucifixion. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but others have made the same conclusion. On the front of this canvas a cartoon-like figure dressed in blue, but with red and black facial features appears animated by what might be two large yellow (psilocybin) mushrooms. This could be a retrospective self-portrait. It may not matter. Already, external contexts (facts or fictions) are expanding the reading of the works, even if I am mistaken. I am thinking again about the almost sketchy way that Foster applies the paint. In some of the works, many of them in fact, there’s a slightly underworked feel to the painterly execution, as if too much effort is to be avoided. This equates to a notebook-type intention, a formal device, which I interpret as a reference to a way of thinking and to the nature of mental recall. Events of the past, however strongly remembered or not, become a form of visual shorthand. Yet two canvases in particular stand out as comparatively overworked (even if they are not). These are Psychiatric Hospitals, Full, No 3 and Queendom which are each a part of two different floor-based triptychs.

Grant Foster – *Nature v Nurture* (2024) front

Each of these compositions appears quite different in subject and imagery. The former depicts a building (the hospital?) in mid-distance with a bloated pig-like character in the foreground, stood behind a table where a sad child sits with a discarded spoon and an empty bowl. In the latter, foregrounded figures appear to be involved in a judo move. Like the boy and table in the other painting these grappling forms are created with a squeezing out of white paint straight from the tube. Despite the two contrasting painting styles this incongruity works.

Queendom is the more complex, visually loaded image. Over time the observer will make out other forms including a naked figure in the top left corner (which reminds me of figures from both Titian and Matisse); two animal forms (formerly cartoon characters from a childhood comic book?) and even a flat smiley face symbol, albeit with a nose, just below the centre of the composition but in shadow. I am sure that there is more here to emerge from a ghostly, shroud like confusion that threads throughout the composition. The looking experience is truly durational, suggesting that more could well emerge.

On this time-base note Rat King (1576), which has the de facto front pressed to the wall, adds a digital layer provided by the projection of the Telly with Mum video repeating every 43 seconds. This small element of the digital might be a pointer to future developments in Foster’s work – or a remnant of a past engagement with the once trendy art college digital projections that can be somewhat passé. But the projected content does provide a moving image element of collage that references watching television, which was the precursor to the computer screen and now the mobile devices that cling to our hands like an extra organ, back when Foster was a teenager.

Which brings us to a literal emergence: the backs of the paintings. The majority of the works have backs to be viewed as additional fronts, which will be an interesting challenge for collectors of Foster’s works. The convention of writing a title and adding a signature on the reverse of the canvas is developed from what might be seen as the private space (like a sketchbook or a notebook) that actually wants to be quite public. With the further addition of painted imagery, photographs and extended text, they are clearly beyond being auxiliary or supplemental to the conventionally expected paintings made on the front of the canvases. The stand out rear view to me was on Help, which included a small printed image of a daffodil, a painted pixie-type figure riding a bicycle, a possibly alternative title (‘A celebrity in film, radio, TV, police stations & now online’) and a conversational collage of hand written text that was a recalling of a conversation between the artist and his partner. Foster’s jokiness feels deadly serious.

But delve further. Beyond this environment of paintings on the floor and walls the visitor, as a possible means of escape, enters what (in retrospect) may have been the implied bedroom of the artist’s youth. An annex off the main gallery with a large wall displays at least two hundred (I wasn’t counting) drawings, paintings, written notes and printed reproductions on paper. I jotted down a few of the phrases: Love and fear, All life is innocent, I must be the victim of a Hallucination, Innocence, Be Good People, and my favourite: MEMORY IS WHAT DOESN’T DISINTERGRATE (sic). Pictures (from books, art, TV, newspapers, magazines and the Internet) are so important to us all – and virtually unavoidable, then and now. Imagery from all and any context feed the imagination. There’s a sense of being inside an image-based thought process in Foster’s work that is constantly nourishing the potential of what the formative and the now fully realised artist continues to imbibe and assimilate. It’s the magical ordinary extracted from an image and text obsessed world – that was surely first started back in the caves of pre-historic humankind when the fundamental technology of mark making and visual language was really no different to now.

Grant Foster – Wall of works on paper installation

Foster’s wall text at the entrance explains more about the accumulation and assemblage of text and imagery:

“My studio is a haptic, experimental environment, where I continue to collect images, organising through free association: drawings, phone-screen grabs, newspaper clippings, children’s book illustrations, advertisements, and fragments of text.”

So, if the teenage bedroom was a place of seclusion that conversely expanded the imagination, then the adult studio clearly continues this function. Connected to thoughts and memories a touchy-feely collage type process, aided and abetted by literal touch as imagery that can be moved around, has expanded to and created the paintings in this show. On a more universal level we, as viewers, can surely connect with this phenomenon of the imagination, which runs alongside the everyday. Like the artist, we are always reconstructing and re-remembering: memories of memories, whether it was earlier today or decades ago, the happy and sad places, the images we made/make and those that we receive voluntarily or not. Narratives may not always be trusted as truth but new meaning or continuing misunderstanding may be of greater value and emotional impact as we age.

At this point as I consider wrapping up this review I recall a reoccurring image from the exhibition. There is just one photograph reproduced in the publication, A Year of Kindness that Foster has published and presented as the first listed work in Home to My Teenage Bedroom. It shows (I believe) the artist’s mother and uncle standing close to water where a swan has approached. The image is first encountered in the exhibition in the painting entitled ‘Panspermia’ (which Wikipedia informs us “is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, and planetoids…The theory argues that life did not originate on Earth, but instead evolved somewhere else and seeded life as we know it.”). The image crops up again on the amazing collage wall of imagery in what must be a preliminary drawing for the painting later on. Now there are four swans, curvaceously morphing into organic shapes. The drawing could easily have been missed amongst so many images, but may have stood out for its line of handwriting at the bottom of the page: “all life is innocent”.

Returning to the painting, Panspermia, one sees that the swans could be read as decorative visual elements and that the black lines in the earlier drawing are now changed to a more yellowish green hue that visually suggests an organic environment. The branch of a tree fills the head shape of one of the two figures. Is that a wind farm sail in the top left hand corner that hints at the environmental concerns of today? It makes for a somewhat dreamy image whereby the unconscious is given as much credit as anything rational.

Near the start of my response to this exhibition I posed the question: What do you think about when you are looking at an exhibition? Perhaps, what you and I think about after seeing an exhibition is more pertinent. Our memories of previous experiences, times and places are embedded in our imaginations as we engage in recall. There might be hidden treasure in a photograph album too. Timelessly it’s all a here and now that, for some, becomes stronger as we get older. Foster provides much for the viewer to consider. Nothing is necessarily too clear to merely illustrate. This project sets us up. The viewer has work to do.

Geoff Hands (March 2025)

LINKS:

Grant Foster

Instagram

ExeterPhoenixGallery talk on Soundcloud

Phoenix Art Space

CONSTABLE: Innocent Messenger of Doom?

DISCOVER: CONSTABLE AND THE HAY WAIN
At The National Gallery, London

Until 2 February 2025

NG1207 John Constable – The Hay Wain (1821)
Oil on canvas (130.2 × 185.4 cm)
© The National Gallery, London

A visitor to the latest Discover exhibition at The National Gallery could be forgiven for missing the star of the show, John Constable’s The Hay Wain, even as it is prominently displayed for visitors entering the main space of the Sunley Room area. The eager viewer might almost dismiss this magnum opus of British art as they might think they know it so well, as close to thirty other works fill this superbly curated space to engage their attention. This is one of the strengths of this exhibition as there is so much to look at and consider. It’s the kind of show that will, I am sure, not become tiresome if you can make several visits and that you could drop in to see just the one item on display.

In fact on first entering a kind of vestibule the curators had cleverly set up a palpable dichotomy of preparatory nudges to influence the visitors before the main space was entered. Constable is not only in the past, but is also now in terms of setting an example of painting as personal expression and for subject matter (*see another reference to Constable and contemporary painting in the notes section). The phenomenon of the European landscape tradition in art generally, and of English landskip in particular, is one of the more positive contributions that this sometimes narrow minded Sceptered Isle has, and continues, to contribute to the phenomenon of ‘art’. Our collective love and appreciation of the landscape (in some ways a constructed notion from the natural world that might best be called the environment) is worth celebrating and preserving.

But also displayed here in the introductory room are ten reproductions that sets up a duplexity that makes the exhibition so relevant, and modern, for today and tomorrow. These disparate but related images reveal, and in an odd sense celebrate, evidence of Constable’s ongoing influence on Britain’s visual culture. Including well-known imagery from Hockney (who like Constable no longer requires a first name), Peter Kennard and Frank Auerbach the viewer might casually eyeball the imagery and move on, feeling the magnetic pull of The Hay Wain. This is what I did, but something niggled.

But still in this first room, the viewer, if already a Constable fan, could be well satisfied with seeing Constable’s Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, that was the last painting he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1836, to prepare them for an experience of looking back on an era when British painting finally made its mark on the already well developed great European tradition. After all, ‘Constable’ is one of those names, along with Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Turner et al that harks back to the Golden Age of British painting. On this singular wall Cenotaph takes on the feel of an altarpiece.

So, appropriately on view in this space are a map of Constable Country (a.k.a. Suffolk), partly to make the point that the Grand Tour was not absolutely essential, plus the medal that the painter was awarded by King Charles X of France in 1824 for showing The Hay Wain in the Paris Salon that year (which, coincidently, was the year when the NG first opened in Angerstein’s London townhouse in Pall Mall – moving to its current location in 1838). The Centotaph canvas demonstrates Constable’s appreciation of the first president of the Royal Academy who insisted that ‘modern’ artists engage with the classical art of the past to reinforce their pictorial interests in depicting, and celebrating Nature in the present.

Then, on approaching The Hay Wain in the main space a wonderful Thomas Gainsborough, Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk (1748) commands attention and shows the viewer where Constable was coming from geographically, aesthetically and stylistically in a contemporary context, via the influence and example from the painters who emerged in the previous generation. With Gainsborough the exhibition adds George Stubbs (The Reapers of 1783 hangs next to the Gainsborough) and George Morland (amongst others) as crucial forerunners, plus Constable’s near contemporaries including John Crome, Francis Danby, John Linnell and Richard Parkes Bonnington. As expected, J.M.W. Turner is here too, though perhaps in a quiet way as pundits could argue forever over who is the greatest British landscape painter. Turner was far more of an entrepreneur than Constable and so to some degree represents the development of the marketplace, often via the print or the washing line of watercolours drying above his bathtub, than Constable the rural conservative. Undoubtedly, this function of the landscape picture production as a moneymaking artefact was an aesthetically pleasant aspect of the growth of the capitalist marketplace that, as it happens, was born in the agrarian context of English countryside (see Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Origin of Capitalism).

Maybe it was this culturally sober yet complex young man from Suffolk who took British art into Europe (well, Paris and Berlin) despite his tendency to balance professional London life with his beloved Dedham Vale in his home countryside. Constable painted Landscape: Noon (The Hay Wain) in 1821 when he was just 44 years old. Not unusually, the large painting that we know and love was actually produced in London. Also on display are the ‘six footer’ study (the third of six), and a relatively tiny study, Sketch for ‘The Hay Wain’ (c.1820), that can be considered the first version of his most revered work. This latter work is the one I think I could return to see if only one painting was made available on my next visit to the NG, particularly as it will have to be returned to the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut when the show ends next February. Being hung next to the ‘six footer’ was curatorially daring but apt and demonstrates to any aspiring painter that preliminary works can be any size in relation to the final product.

But I had surely been taunted by those other images and so returned with some sense that something very relevant right here, right now, was being manifested. After my preliminary stroll around the show to tune in, looking more attentively at the last three images I was a little unnerved, perhaps intimidated. After all, I assume that like most visitors I am here to marvel at some impressive landscape works. Social reality (Chris Shaw), satire and humour (Cold War Steve) and climate change (Quentin Devine) was implied so strongly yet so innocently by the reproductions, undermined, or at least questions and recategorises every other image in the exhibition. Miss the display wall of contemporary works and an engaging display of paintings, prints and drawings – plus a rather quaint set of country folk figures purportedly made by Constable himself (though, I dare say, unlikely) – is certainly visually pleasurable, aesthetically satisfying and informative. The show is rich in social and political history, and in setting the historical context that Constable was affected by, engaged with and duly influenced himself. Constable is in our lives, in our visual psyches. How many homes in the UK have a landscape print, photograph or painting on a wall? The art historical thrust of this exhibition – of the whole institution – confidently insists, as always, that the viewer should be aware of any artist’s influences and the context of periods of style and subject matter. Paintings are never just lonesome, singular, objects even in the broadest context and are not merely decoration for the living room (** see personal memories in the notes). But the modern works, even as reproductions, give the viewing an unexpected frisson.

In a way, Kennard’s Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1980) sets up what could have been far more exploited as the major theme for this exhibition, as imagery from this later generation of artists, (Shaw, Cold War Steve and Devine) reinforce a message of shock and despair, obliging the viewer to take stock of any so-called beautiful or awesomely sublime landscape scenario as various regimes wage war with nuclear arms in the background and as global warming continues to affect the climate. Though, to be fair to the curators, this political aspect is acknowledged in the catalogue – which if you cannot get to see the exhibition I fully recommend that you acquire the publication, as it not only records this marvellous display, but also is a useful primer for the burgeoning art history aficionado who must understand that the visual arts always has a social, cultural, economic and political context, and a reinterpretive one at that.

Ignore the contemporary works at your peril. Are they (to appropriate a Constable term for highflying clouds) Messengers? Via Constable, these contemporary artists may well be saying something we all need to hear. With the revered Constable to reference they might challenge the mindset of the masses with less derision from some quarters than the environmental protesters. Which made me wonder if they attack the wrong targets? These passionate and well-meaning iconoclasts could choose to celebrate rather than diminish their respective responsibilities of protecting our cultural as well as our natural environments by preserving and developing our survivalist consciousness with more integrity. Art might save us yet – and Constable was right there as the agrarian revolution took hold.

We can all drink to that. (***)

Geoff Hands (October 2024)

NOTES:

* Reference to a painting in Late Constable at the Royal Academy (2021): https://fineartruminations.com/2022/01/29/contemporary-british-painting-prize-2021/

“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.”

** The first ‘work of art’ I recall in my parental home, way back in the mid-1960s, was a reproduction of The Hay Wain that came free with the electric fire that my mother purchased to replace the coal fire in our living room. About ten years later I was an art student and, on my first trip to a London gallery (18 February 1976), I was fortunate enough to see the Constable: Paintings, Watercolours & Drawings exhibition at The Tate Gallery, which of course included, The Hay Wain. Many thanks to Mr Vettise at Shrewsbury School of Art.

*** NG bans liquid after artwork damaged – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89ljnwgpqwo

LINKS:

National Gallery

CBPP review with reference to Constable’s Farmhouse painting

Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021

Alexandra Harris writes on John Constable’s last decade, which includes Constable’s Farmhouse painting (The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC)

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/john-constable-exhibition-ra-magazine

From the BBC news website

Climate protestors glue themselves to John Constable masterpiece

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62038615

STUDIO JOURNAL: The Painting of Modern Life

At The Hayward Gallery, London

October 4 to December 30 2007

As a painter, I love to write as part of the painting process. I have kept handwritten studio notebooks (Journals) since 1995, which I am intermittently word processing (18,000 words so far – about two thirds of the content, I estimate).

This adjunct to the painting commitment was taken to a more formalised level by studying on the M.A. Creative Writing programme at the University of Sussex (1998-2000) whilst I was course leader for the Foundation Studies Art & Design course at Northbrook College in Worthing. The painter Mary Lloyd-Jones, who knew Prof. Peter Abbs the course director, recommended the course at Sussex to me. This shift from one educational field of study to another might have been rejected out of hand, but as an avid fan of Patrick Heron’s paintings and writings I could see that these two disciplines were not incompatible (although Heron eventually put a hold on his writing for the sake of maintaining enough time to devote to his painting).

I have been considering including some extracts from the Journals here on fineartruminations but have been unsure where to start (chronologically seemed logical but did not appeal). Throughout the seven books filled with my scribbled thoughts (I have no.8 in progress at the studio) I had also made a few notes on exhibitions visited, but have largely left these observations out of the typed up version as they were not written in the studio. But in Journal no.5 I came across a very lengthy set of notes written after attending The Hayward Gallery on the Southbank in London for The Painting of Modern Life show in 2007. Unlike most other exhibition annotations, which are typically written in the gallery setting, the documented thoughts for this show were written in my home studio in Brighton two days after my 51^st birthday. Perhaps the Hayward visit had been a birthday treat?

Jumping forward in time, in June 2014 I began to write exhibition reviews in earnest for Conceptual Fine Arts (with thanks to the Editor, Stefano Pirovano) and I started fineartruminations of (mainly) exhibition reviews shortly afterwards in August 2014. (I expanded to writing for AbCrit the following year, invited by Robin Greenwood.) It appears that my potential Hayward review was written a little too early, although I would hope that a ruminatory flavour comes across in the writing. Apart from checking the spelling and changing the layout a little, the transcription from the Journal is relatively unchanged. This is not a formal review of the show, it’s a first draft at best, so please bear with the slightly fragmentary nature of the format.

JOURNAL 5 / 31

25 October 2007

The Painting of Modern Life at The Hayward Gallery

Many paintings possess a banality of image. An equally banal, flat (emotionally) surface. I feel the labour of the making of these works. Many (paintings) feel slowly knocked out. A few days/weeks (of) painting. Nonetheless there is a transformation from the original photographs. (How interesting it would have been to have seen the original photographs presented with the paintings.)

There is a sense of the integration of the lens. The mechanical/digital technology that distances the image from the viewer. Maybe this is a coolness or a dead-pan emotional aspect of such images. I suppose one might ask if it was worth the effort to make the paintings given that these images already existed in the photographic print medium. Do the paintings give the viewer something more, or significantly different, to what the photograph could have achieved?

On a materialistic level of course there is a difference – the medium, scale, choice of colours (or monochromatic), qualities of paint in terms of surface textures, thick and thinness of the paint. Are the ‘better’ paintings those that really transform/change and become more than just a reproduction? Might they oppose the medium of photography? Or go with the mechanical image up to a point but ultimately undermine? Is the evidence that upholds the tradition of painting? Some paintings certainly say more than the immediate lens derived image. For example, Peter Doig’s ‘Lapeyrouse Wall’ (2004) in which, in his own words captures a “measured stillness”.

“My painting is born out of a genuine distrust of imagery” Luc Tuymans (2005)

In many instances the paintings’ surfaces, and the physical manipulation and application, of paint is much the same. Is the simple crudeness of these paintings deliberate? (Probably.)
Often there is a burden factor, the ennui of our built environments.

For example, Johanna Kandl’s ‘Untitled (Ein sehr heisser Spätnachmittag…)’ 1999. (Translation – “a very hot afternoon”)

I am not so sure that I could live with this on the wall. There is a half finished feel about much of the picture. As if the artist could not be concerned about a more sophisticated completion (that we would see in a David Hockney painting from the same show). Perhaps the younger generation of painters invest that contemporaneous acknowledgement of the incomplete. Taste it, then move on.

There’s a sense of this apparent dismissal of a qualitative rendering of image and paint in Marlena Dumas’ work too.

A change of authorship takes place. Whether the artist made/took the original photograph or not seems irrelevant. I am most impressed by Gerhard Richter’s and Peter Doig’s works. There is a marked sense of a complete transformation of the original image into the artist’s own story. Richter seems particularly able to achieve in his black and white paintings (e.g. ‘Renate and Mariannne’ 1964). He masterfully exploits the potential of his paint medium (oil). So too Peter Doig – though he employs his (often) washed out colours (achieved by an overpainting of a thin veil of white).

It’s a shame that Dan Hays was not included in this exhibition too. I’m thinking of his Internet derived Colorado paintings with digital pixellated references (though Wilhelm Sasnal’s ‘Untitled (Hunters)’ from 2001 is made with reference to an internet hunt – but fails to acknowledge this in his painterly language).

The tradition of composition is significantly challenged. Essentially by the snapshot image – in both formal (Morley, Hockney and Bechtle) and informal ways (Richter, Peyton and Kandl). In Robert Bectle’s work second hand information becomes first hand – as if the photographic print or slide exists first (rather than as an image received from the photographically recorded situation).

Can the traditional artist who uses paint fantasise that from today ‘photography is dead’ by the evidence of this exhibition? Well, maybe this is too simple. There are many photographs that are vastly superior to a million mediocre paintings, and of course as many paintings that evoke and celebrate existence that countless billions of photographs do not. Is this an argument for painting? Or simply to register the accessibility of the lens-based image for painterly usage.

A photograph? Take it or leave it – that’s a message for painters today. In this postmodern sense the photograph is there to be acquired, appropriated or manipulated for painting purposes. Painting does not desperately need the photograph. But perhaps I has helped, in a contradictory way, to support and sustain painting in this technological age.

A spurious argument?

Is there a dialogue between the photograph and the painting? (Not for all painters.)

Painters paint. We refer to whatever is usefully available including photographs.

Painting is always informed and influenced by the technologies and ideas of the times.

“I want to slow down the reading of an image; I want to say, this is important – look at this.” (Elizabeth Peyton – The Painting of Modern Life catalogue p.133)

“I’ve become my own camera.”

Malcolm Morley Interview with Klaus Kertess in Art Forum (Summer 1980)

Materiality of the paint. A foil to the photographic plane. Surface tension. A veil of pigment.

Geoff Hands (from Studio Journal no.5 2006-2009)

LINKS:

The Hayward Gallery – https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery

Images from the exhibition from the Guardian newspaper -https://www.theguardian.com/arts/gallery/2007/aug/31/art

Artforum –

https://www.artforum.com/features/malcolm-morley-talking-about-seeing-208842/

Conceptual Fine Arts –

At the show with the artist: Geoff Hands visits “Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner” in Margate

AbCrit –

#12. Geoff Hands writes on Bridget Riley at DLWP

Mary Lloyd-Jones – https://www.marylloydjones.co.uk/

Peter Abbs – https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/54348

IN THE GARDEN

Michelle Cobbin interview with Geoff Hands

Gallery 19a, Brighton

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.

MC – I think that’s a good place to end.

Links:

Geoff Hands – https://www.geoffhands.co.uk/

Michelle Cobbin – https://www.michellecobbin.art/portfolio-abstract-paintings

Geoff Hands – *‘Emilia’s Garden’* 2023 (135×185.5cm) oil on canvas
*‘Andromeda’s Garden’* 2023 (145×200) oil on canvas

Catalogues, included limited edition of 32 with original paintings.

MICHAEL CLARENCE: Full Catastrophe Painting

At Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

21 February to 3 March 2024

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.

Image © Michael Clarence

LINKS:

Michael Clarence – https://www.michaelclarence.com/

Freelands Foundation – https://freelandsfoundation.co.uk/artist/michaelclarence

Museum of Education (explanation of Barthes studium and punctum)

Roland Barthes: studium and punctum

DENISE HARRISON: Seven Sacraments

Window Gallery, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

2 to 24 September 2023

“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)

Links:

Window Gallery: Denise Harrison

Instagram:

@deniseharrisonart

@phoenix_artspace

Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage” speech from ‘As You Like It’ by William Shakespeare, spoken by Jaques. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage

JULIAN LE BAS: Studio Visit for Spirit of Place

Star Brewery Gallery, Lewes

4 to 12 March 2023

“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.

Geoff Hands

Image from – https://www.instagram.com/sarah_curates/?hl=en

Links:

Sarah O’Kane Contemporary Fine Art – https://www.sarahokane.co.uk/julian-le-bas-spirit-of-place-2023

Edited version of the essay – https://fineartruminations.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/91cdb-lebas-hands-text-sokcfa.pdf

Julian Le Bas website – http://www.julianlebas.co.uk

Star Brewery Gallery – https://www.starbrewerygallery.com

Visit Lewes – https://www.visitlewes.co.uk/things-to-do/art-and-culture

JULIAN LE BAS: New Work

A Lewes Artwave exhibition at Berwick Church

September 2022

Growing Rich With Looking

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.

Geoff Hands ( September 2022)

Links:

Julian Le Bas – http://www.julianlebas.co.uk/home.html

Sarah O’Kane Contemporary Fine Art – https://www.sarahokane.co.uk/julian-le-bas-gallery

Berwick Church – https://www.berwickchurch.org.uk

R.S. Thomas – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/r-s-thomas

Timothy Morton – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/20/being-ecological-timothy-morton-review

BILL LYNCH: The Exile of Dionysus

At Brighton CCA, University of Brighton

From 6 August to 15 October 2022

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.

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.

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 19^th 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’

Links:

Bill Lynch at Brighton CCA – https://brightoncca.art/exhibition/bill-lynch/

Laura Cumming review in The Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/aug/21/bill-lynch-the-exile-of-dionysus-brighton-cca-review-the-greatest-american-artist-youve-never-heard-of

Bill Lynch at The Approach – https://theapproach.co.uk/artists/bill-lynch/images/

Roberta Smith in The New York Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/arts/design/bill-lynchs-paintings-get-a-show-at-white-columns.html

White Columns exhibition – https://whitecolumns.org/exhibitions/bill-lynch-u2013-curated-by-verne-dawson/

Brett Goodroad at Phoenix Art Space –

BRETT GOODROAD: TOE BUOY

UP FOR GRABS at APT

Jonathan McCree, Bruce Ingram, Jonathan Goddard and Joe Walking

APT Gallery, Deptford

2 – 12 September 2021

It was Thursday 9^th September and Up For Grabs had been open for a week. A performance had already taken place some days before and the Private View was tomorrow. This was a two-week exhibition of painting, dance, sculpture and film. I had missed the dance and the film too, but a projector was being installed to show a video of the performance, but I couldn’t stay too long as I had a timed entrance ticket for something of apparent importance at the Royal Academy. So this would have to do, and thank goodness, it was probably the best part of the day. *

The front space was conventionally organised for an exhibition of sculpture and painting and Bruce Ingram and Jonathan McCree had three works each on display. By conventional I mean some works were placed on the wall at a comfortable viewing height and three more pieces were arranged on the floor with ample room to walk around. There was a balance. They were, it appeared, ‘finished pieces’ and ‘final’ as we expect artworks in exhibitions to be. As a first impression there was surely something going on about construction and deconstruction, about placement of the works and relationships within the works themselves. What was ‘up for grabs’ at this stage I wasn’t sure – maybe an opportunity to take something away from the show, or to suggest potential.

This initial selection and indeed this space could be complete in itself, but it proved to be something of a threshold to pass through, for in the next space that precedes the largest room at the rear, a clue to some playfulness was sensed from encountering an apparently disfigured column, a strongly vertical element, that was placed on the floor but had unexpectedly been folded at 90 degrees to fix itself to the wall to form an archway to tempt someone to stoop under and squeeze through. This piece was quickly followed by another of McCree’s stretched box forms wrapped around the protruding corner into the next space. Clearly an intervention had taken place at some point and as the artist was on duty to greet visitors today he explained to me a little later that one of the performers had previously indulged in interacting with the sculptures to adjust them to the gallery environment.

Also in this middle room were more of Ingram’s works and by now there was more of an obvious or staged interaction between the two artists’ works. Typically, Ingram’s works explore found materials in assemblage and collage-type painted forms employing plaster and various paints (household and artists’ acrylics) to fuse the various elements together. Placed on the floor rather than on the wall one of Ingram’s constructions formed a framework to look through to see another work beyond. A sense of destruction as much as building the artefacts of the environment was taking shape. As a visual tease, Ingram’s works have remnants of colour applied, similar to McCree’s suggestively ‘out of the tin’ coatings, to link the works. Contrasts of smoothness and rough surfaces distinguish the two to some extent but the pairing is not incongruous.

My daughter and I walk around a while, tuning in still to a display that has transformed from calm quietude at the main entrance to visual and spatial cacophony in the largest room. I pick up a press release (which I shall read on the train back to Brighton later, as I want the work to speak to me first and foremost) and start to scribble some notes on the reverse:

Enter the labyrinth, parts, bits & pieces…

Plenty to see, though not too much…

Image / Object – which will predominate…

What is an exhibition for?

What is an exhibition for? Now that’s interesting. In this instance, Up For Grabs is certainly entertaining, exciting and memorable. The individual paintings and sculptures work on their own terms, but as an arranged event (sadly for just over a week) the exhibition comes alive as a happening of sorts as much as a static display. I imagine the missed performance and projected film work that preceded today’s visit, which isn’t enough, but will have to do. The finished and unfinished, or work in progress nature of the works, suggests a similar modus operandi for the viewer. There is method in looking, in relating to the artworks physically, spatially and psychologically. Visual art is not exclusively about seeing; it offers possibilities for recognising the power of one’s own imagination (and sometimes a lack of). There are formal relationships to find or be presented with. There are colours and textures to indulge in. Likewise there are parts that seem to work perfectly and others that the viewer might desperately want to change – even to improve. The visual aesthetics provide a way into potential readings that could suggest social interaction, notions of community, interdependence, the built environment (including furniture) and the politics of choice, indulgence and creativity.

My daughter described the assembly as “rocks and trees”. Jonathan McCree talked perceptively about “… delaying uncertainty in or from painting to the sculptures, which are moveable parts”. This gave his three-dimensional work edginess, like it was finished but not really. Or resolved, but hopefully not so as it invited some form of change.

This exhibition, no – this environment, concocted a landscape of sorts, an active space demanding an audience to interact by looking, moving, pacing, stopping; head up then head down, confronting occlusions to find surfaces, then seeing variously coloured or textured planes morphing into three-dimensions giving way to silently laughing, then becoming equally engrossed or bemused. Performing a journey, in effect, as an exhibition is not necessarily a final resting place for particular works – anything might be up for grabs; even our expectations.

Note:

* This statement is a little disingenuous as I was also impressed with Mind’s Eye at Flowers in Cork Street where Carol Robertson’s geometric works had been displayed with Terry Frost’s. My review of this show has been published by Saturation Point. See the link below.

Links:

Bruce Ingram

Jonathan McCree

High Folly: Jonathan McCree at Sim Smith

Saturation Point review of Mind’s Eye at Flowers

SERIAL THRILLER: Bridget Riley, The Curve Paintings 1961 – 2014 De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea

Bridget Riley, The Curve Paintings 1961-2014 installation at DLWP.

Even an English flâneur may have imagined being on the Côte d’Azur in this heat, pausing on the Promenade des Anglais, to admire the view. On an outstandingly bright summer morning, if you looked south from the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea towards France, the sea and brilliantly dazzling sky dissolved the field of vision, eschewing aerial perspective. Space had flattened; somehow, confirming the shifting nature of perception as optically realised and, therefore (or thereafter), re-conceptualised, re-seen, rather than diminished without the culturally acquired safety net of perspective.

Bridget Riley might be categorised as a ‘classic’ abstract/geometric painter, whose practice engages with image making that, autobiographically, encapsulates her perfectionist tendencies. Her methodological practice is invariably characterised by tightly controlled, sensuously schematic, repetitive and minimalist, optically demanding imagery. She’s a serial, visual, thriller – of the highest order.

I am here today, as part of a small posse of writers from the press, to look at a selection of paintings and prints that explore Riley’s fascination with the curve. Petite and agile, Bridget Riley, one of the internationally most acknowledged British artists of the twentieth century, generously and energetically informs and entertains. In what approximated a subtle balletic performance, she is self-assuredly poised, both physically and intellectually, to address those present with great enthusiasm and vitality. Her explanations are as exacting and precise as her imagery and her confidence is assured.

My sense is that behind this apparent coolness, regularity and control in her work an engagement with the world as it is experienced (hence the opening paragraph), both visually and physically, continues to inform her whole oeuvre. Readers of Riley’s collected writings, cleverly titled ‘The Eyes Mind’, will be aware of her early visual and tactile childhood memories of the sea and sun. Confirming the particularly visual contingency of her paintings and prints, the non-perspectival experience of the sea front panorama referenced above was echoed and confirmed in Bridget Riley’s own words: “Pictorial space has to be about something on a two-dimensional surface, in which pictorial space happens by pictorial thinking… perspective is by no means the only way.”

A sense of the closeness of France was also fortuitous: “French and early Modernist art was clearly about perception… a connection with that line of looking.” Engaging with the works on display in this retrospective collection, and turning to scan her audience frequently, to explain the practical, formative training that her particular form of abstraction partly derives from, she referenced her traditional art school training in drawing from the figure: “Drawing can develop your insights – drawing is a tool that can open up the world.” But Riley also explains that the history of art (especially the painting tradition) creates influences, and visual language systems, as essential as the daily practice of planning, and making, work. From considering the spatial investigations of Cézanne and her journey to abstraction, via an interest in Cubism, she references Bonnard and Matisse to illustrate her defining interest in line and colour. Art historical knowledge, and a constant meditation on the rich history that informs her concepts and her entire output are consistently made clear, for there are many: “Respected and admired artists from the past and we can learn from them… according to [our] temperament.”

In explaining her burgeoning practice, as a young, aspiring artist in 1960s London, she says: “It was a sort of statement… I learnt to draw when I went to art school… I was taught to make figure drawings… I was very interested in colour… basic colour relationships… I would look at Matisse… How would Matisse be able to make that? From tonal painting, colour lightened and darkened… there had been an immense adventure in modern art… I went to work for J. Walter Thompson and in the lunch hour I went down to the ICA and Cork Street to listen to lectures by David Sylvester, Laurence Alloway and [Roland] Penrose…”

Her audience is captivated by now; she continued: “The development of modern art was halted by the two wars… I went to look at an exhibition of Futurists… (Visits to the Venice Biennale and Milan are mentioned too) … there were important and interesting things in it… abstract thinking… I carried on with making my own abstract work… instead of abstracting from things seen out there in reality… Bonnard and Matisse could do much more than Mondrian had done… I started from a line, what a line can do, a square, a circle… when I altered, changed or distorted something that was familiar to people… I found ways of making things active…”

Riley’s ability to clearly elucidate her practice as an abstract artist par excellence, and her measured use of a precise language, to objectively explain and describe the carefully selected examples from her Curve paintings, provided a simple exegesis of practice that absorbed the audience. That she believes that painting is still relevant was clear: “Painting is an incredible discipline and a great art form.” And again she emphasised tradition: “All my experiences [with the] figurative is a huge help in knowing what a painting needs if it’s to develop.”

Riley’s articulateness matched the refinement of her paintings. She drew the meaning out of the works, confirming the evidence presented to the viewer’s attentive mind. But her work is not purely cerebral, as the physical engagement and geometric coordination within her work is truly embodied: and not only in the eye. The sense of flow in the paintings echoes the movement of the human form and the environment that we occupy. Most especially, lines and angles of orientation are designed to evoke pictorial space: “Vertical had to bear the stripe… lead to the plane… the painting is very transitive… Verticals allowed one to have a rhythm, to contrast it with the curves.”

But, there was a period of 17 years of an insistence on the horizontal in her prints and paintings (1980-1997). This revelation had to be re-visited. Of the return to the curve she states, “the curve is more open to amazing changes than the straight line.” Again, Riley confirms her appreciation of the line, learnt from life drawing as a student, and that “The contrapposto is like frozen movement… The curve is so elastic and changeable.”

In discussing ‘Lagoon 2’ (1997) she admits that she was: “Trying to get the curve back”. And paradox is readily admitted: “Contour suggests a flat volume…” This elegant painting (quite large at approximately 1.5 X 2 metres, but absorbing visually, and not at all imposing) has the feel of a dense forest of colour-shapes, which is neo-Cubistic: Cézanne through Matisse’s eyes. Or, as Riley discloses, is based on the notion of her idea of looking at Matisse looking at Cézanne.

Superficially, Riley’s own personality, and temperament, as a painter appears less sensual than Matisse. But a flattened painterliness, where autobiographical marks are repressed, still allows colour and line to dominate with the joie de vivre we associate with the French master. The surface quality in Riley’s paintings is typically one of relentless smoothness, but colour sensation is still paramount.

In ‘Rêve’ (1999) contrasts and harmonies work with and against each other with a colour scheme of blue/green and cream/yellow. In ‘Painting with Verticals 3’ (2006) and ‘Rajasthan’ (2012) there is a pronounced sense of purposeful movement across the surface. In the latter, Riley describes the “march of the greens”, as this organic colour comes alive amongst orange, red, grey and white.

Bridget Riley’s abstract art is clearly modernist, but notwithstanding her traditional training as a painter (she still produces cartoons for her paintings), her work successfully combines a strongly characteristic feature of line through disegno (drawing) with form as colore (colour) to attain a synoptic temporality: intimating a psychogeographic relationship with space through physical positioning and perception; and a sense of time and rhythm integrated in and through the intrinsic properties of the images. The association of colour and line, especially the curve, is sensuous at a visual and an intellectual level. If this interpretation is correct, it might suggest that a purely non-objective abstraction is a fanciful notion – because contingency is unavoidable, so long as human beings continue to make art.

Geoff Hands

Links:

De La Warr

http://www.dlwp.com/event/bridget-riley-the-curve-paintings

AbCrit

https://abcrit.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/12-geoff-hands-writes-on-bridget-riley-at-dlwp/

Painters Table

http://painters-table.com/link/abcrit/bridget-riley-curve-paintings