AI Overview: Thinking is the mental process of manipulating information to form concepts, reason, and make decisions. It is a form of cognition that involves activities like problem solving, judgment, and memory retrieval, and it allows us to interpret, categorize, and make sense of the world around us. (From Google)
We surely do not know for sure what Michael Stubbs, Ken Turner and Julian Wakelin were thinking whilst making these works for Thinking In Paint. But we certainly have something to see, to experience and to think about ourselves now that their works have been selected and presented.
Michael Stubbs – Signal 502 [2024]
As an immediate reaction I prefer to avoid (for as long as I can) such sentiments as I like this or dislike that. Reactions can be direct and instantaneous, but ideally require a little time to ferment. Initial thinking, at least, can be characterised by simply taking various formal and material aspects in, such as colours, shapes, textures and the relationships between such features. This thinking might initially be described as feeling and perhaps usefully delays anything too conclusive. One can also see with the benefits of art historical knowledge – sometimes a prejudiced lense – and from personal experience of looking at paintings before, or from being painters ourselves. We may be susceptible to personal preference (I know what I like) and bias at times, but hopefully reasoning and rational judgement will enable an honest experience. Even uncertainty or ambiguity might take hold.
Ken Turner – Reformed [2025]
A group of paintings, whether by an individual or three individuals, sets up possible contrasts too. Yet I prefer to register works individually, even though my own practice invariably produces the series. Visual judgements can change of course, particularly as works sink in. Taking photographs of the works on the iPhone to view later is highly beneficial too, despite forming a bit of a contradiction as a realreproduction. For an exhibition called Thinking In Paint, that might eschew the digital in favour of the material object, it is imperative that the paintings are (ideally) viewed as they were created in their corporeal, material reality. Add sufficient time with the individual works in question to become accustomed, as it were, will also be a necessary factor. A lifetime might be ideal. But we generally only have our exhibition visits to provide such an experience.
At long last I had travelled up to London to visit Tension gallery. It’s a trip that has been on my arty bucket list for some time now and the promise of coinciding a visit with a live Instagram discussion between Ken Turner and Michael Stubbs – lead by John Bunker – was bound to add something special and noteworthy to the occasion. So, whilst the Instagramers on-line could see the exhibition content (ten paintings in all) on their computer or mobile screens I had the benefit of seeing the works for real. Gallery host, Alison Aye recorded the event for close to an hour as she smoothly and expertly moved from one painting to another with her iPhone guided by the conversation.
Michael Stubbs – Virus Bleed [2024]
It all felt a little like a contradiction in terms as the event was benefitting from digital technology by bringing us all together, despite not being in the same location as the paintings. Another distinctive and unique aspect for me was that, rather than having to generate my own thoughts and reactions as I looked at the works, I could jot down the commentary given to me in real time by the speakers. About this I have mixed feelings as focussing on one’s own thoughts whilst looking at the work on the walls is the usual – and most crucial – thing to do. I therefore had to suppress this activity somewhat and go with the contributions of the faces on the little screen held in my hand. I guess this is a little like being back at Uni making notes as the lecturer(s) speaks. One’s own thoughts, hopefully, emerge later.
Listening to three knowledgeable speakers, however, interweaving with each other verbally, and clearly being on the same wavelength turned out to be quite comfortable to deal with. In fact in some way I had been appropriately set up for this as I had spoken to John Bunker at his own exhibition called Antinomies at ASC Unit 3 gallery just the week before. As an abstract artist and an art writer himself he has that ability to distance himself into discussing works of abstraction in broad terms and then to apply his more intimate knowledge and experience as appropriate.
Julian Wakelin- Time (lag) [2025}
A few quotes follow in this paragraph, but they are not purely verbatim or chronological, so I shall not add quotation marks. The dominant theme that commanded the discussion was, as the title of the exhibition clearly states, thought (and its association with word related thinking) and the pure activity of painting that results in the abstract rather than the figurative. The notion of time, perhaps of a contemplative nature and being of a far longer duration than the immediacy of the digital culture that engulfs our visual experiences, was expressed by Bunker as thinking in paint, a slowing down form of looking and of contemplation. Stubbs added that when you are painting you are proceeding and that actions are made in advance of thought. Therefore thinking is contradictory and extends beyond itself. To this Turner added that thoughts and ideas couldn’t always be expressed in words, but by painting one is doing it (thinking) in different ways and that the activity of thinking is a long, drawn out process. There are overlaps too, an in-betweenness, a liminality in thought and painting, as there are things we feel but cannot say in words.
Julian Wakelin – Untitled [2025]
Bunker expanded the notion or understanding of thinking to the eye, mind and body – to which Stubbs referenced the studio and its literal, material content. The digital cropped up once more when Turner reminded us that subtle marks and textures in painting cannot be seen on a screen and that through painting we make some kind of sense of the world. This act of doing was crucial, he stated, between him and the canvas. To bring the absent Julian Wakelin in, Bunker remarked on the uncaniness about what Wakelin is doing and that in stillness there was that contradictory sense of paint moving. He pondered on whether the abstract painter might be hunting for stories and that by looking at the work (whilst in production) starts a dialogue with painting, giving a physical power to the work that cannot be underestimated.
In a broader context, and perhaps one that can separate painters from (superficially) opposing camps at times, Stubbs referenced the process based and the procedural – and perhaps the contradiction of the less saying more. The abstract painter might add or subtract things to rupture ideas of figurative painting. But the abstract painter, today, has the burden of the history of abstraction e.g. the expressive or American abstraction. But, to place his work in the digital present and the contemporary reality, he could bring the outside world in, juxtaposing signage with abstraction.
Ken Turner – Look into the distance [2025]
From this exhibition, not just the discussion, I was left with that welcome feeling of abstract paintings accommodating a real sense of place and space in the world – as concluded items. Finished and fixed so that the observer might concentrate on the paint and any additional media over the history of its painting. Works no longer in progress in the studio but here and now. Offering the promise of something maybe worth thinking or talking about. Or even reacting to, and accepting, in a pure mode or silence, just pure acceptance.
We are an artist run gallery dedicated to showcasing the work and raising the profiles of emerging and mid career local, national and international artists. We show a mixture of contemporary & experimental art that questions what art is and what art could be.
“Poetry helps us understand what we’ve forgotten to remember. It reminds us of things that are important to us when the world overtakes us emotionally.” (Brian Patten)
Georgie Beach – Talisman 2025 and Brian Patten – The stolen orange
What might bring artists together for an exhibition? Well, a suitable space, a curator or three (who can contact artists already known to them) and of course, our Instagram community ready and waiting for a call up. Sarah Shaw, Hal Maughan and Anthony de Brissac present The Stolen Orange, inspired by the well-known Brian Patten poem, at a central Brighton studio space that has been turned into a gallery for the duration of this show. It’s a great initiative, particularly when suitable spaces are few and far between considering the significantly large community of artists and craftspeople who live here. Galleries are generally in short supply – although there is positive traction in the development of high quality exhibition spaces in the city with The Adelaide Salon, Kellie Miller Arts and Indelible Fine Art (amongst others) developing apace.
With the opening of The Stolen Orange clashing with the Anna Phoebe concert at the Hope And Ruin venue last week I was unable to attend the opening (Brighton is a great place for live gigs, by the way). In retrospect this wasn’t so bad as the event was fully booked and looking at the works on display – eighty or so – must have been challenging. So on a very sunny Monday lunchtime I took a break away from my Phoenix Art Space studio to recharge the visual batteries. This was a trip well worth making, not only for seeing several works by friends from the region, but for being introduced to some new names from near and afar. The installation was also very impressive. Poorly arranged displays can highlight the proverbial sore thumb(s) – but in this exhibition nothing looked out of place or clashed with unsuitable wall-partners. Figurative and more abstract works hung well together, and simple or more complicated and elaborate paintings (especially) commanded their own respective spaces. This was partly due to sizes not being too far apart with dimensions within 20 to 50cm in height or width, plus a handful a little larger or smaller. I also counted over a dozen 3-D pieces and a couple of videos – and the catalogue gave us two poems to take away, as well as the original poem from Brian Patten.
Mary Allen and Lucy Kaufman poems
Of course, the show was also held together in an organic aura rather than straightjacketed by any polemic. As stated in the catalogue the much-needed themes of joy and hope were intended as a positive theme to encourage a communion of spirit:
“Over the past few months, we have heard people talk of their stolen oranges as metaphors for something hopeful and totemic; something to hold onto.” (Hal Maughan)
The notion of joy as a positive and obligatory strength for the individual (artist or not) was also insisted upon for social cohesion:
“The exhibition reflects on how creativity can sustain optimism, humour, and connection in uncertain times, standing firm in insisting that joy isn’t optional, it’s necessary. Joy as an act of resistance. Joy as friction; a way to keep going, both with each other and for each other.” (The curators)
Carrie Stanley – I see the crescent 2025
Whilst walking back to the studio I pondered on the notion that a purist view of the visual arts (I plead guilty at times) to sustain a completely aesthetic independence for one’s work – unadulterated by ephemeral themes of the day – is nonsense. The content of this exhibition celebrates our many diversities and disparate interests. It’s what we share in common. It also keeps the memory of the amazing poem by Brian Patten alive. There is so much that is bright and special in the world.
Geoff Hands
Julia Williams – Türkis ist mein orange 2025 Diary
Note:
I have purposely not focussed on or highlighted any individuals from the exhibition, as there are just too many. I cannot feature all of the work here either, so please treat my choice of installation and specific artwork photographs as random. Although a special mention might be permitted for Phyl Callaghan’s fantastic cotton, silk and terylene oranges that are readymade for the pocket at just a fiver each – I bought a few for Father Christmas to distribute next month. I must add that there is a very well produced catalogue available from the gallery that features all of the participants’ work – and visit the website too.
Taking eight completed pieces out of the studio and re-seeing them, experiencing them afresh and re-contextualised in a carefully considered arrangement might be considered a luxury for some artists. But a room reserved for this purpose at ASC Unit 3 Gallery, a short walk from Bromley-By-Bow underground station, provides such an opportunity.
In turn, John Bunker has invited visitors to come and see the selection, thus creating an exhibition. Add the opportunity to visit his studio, just along the corridor, to see numerous works not displayed alongside works in progress is a real treat. But it’s quite informal and apart from stacking some chairs out of the way later on it’s ready for use. A stock of materials stored in readiness for creative activity over the coming months adds a little more depth to the whole experience of the visit.
Assorted works in the studio
In both spaces the visitors can chat socially and also engage in responding to the works displayed. There is certainly an atmosphere of excitement and respect. Everyone seems well acquainted with Bunker’s oeuvre and it’s a compliment that they continue to come back for more. In current artspeak this is surely an interrelational situation. But it’s the actual works on formal display that truly matters today and if there’s a hint or nuance of hierarchy I get it from the four wall-hung sculptures that may turn out to be the precursors of what comes next.
John Bunker – Mithras 2025
I have been fascinated by Bunker’s work for the best part of a decade after writing about TRIBE. New & recent collages by John Bunker at Westminster Reference Library in 2016 for Robin Greenwood’s much missed AbCrit. A significant number of artists, particularly painters and sculptors, continue the exploration and development of abstraction in the UK. In Bunker’s case, he plays (seriously, that is) in both camps, as the exhibition leaflet explains:
“Bunker’s abstractions are born of eccentric and paradoxical spaces that he has opened up between painting and sculpture. Known for his materially diverse approach to both disciplines, ‘Antinomies’ focuses down on cardboard. Bunker uses and abuses this ubiquitous everyday material by loading paint on its highly absorbent layered surfaces and, at the same time, engaging with it as a highly expressive sculptural material in its own right.”
This appeal, captivation, enchantment and enthralment with the phenomenon of a materially and visually based production of a cultural phenomenon we conveniently call ‘abstract art’ continues – despite the current expectation of a political correctness, a politicised demand from various quarters (including Higher Education), to engage with certain external convictions might blind the viewer to what the actual work contains, attains and demands of the viewer. Which, I guess, is my too wordy way of saying just look at the work! It is kind of purist, sure, but this is the real thing, in front of you – which maybe there is not enough of as we visually consume the (constructed and ready-made) world via the screen.
John Bunker – Rausch II 2025
Fellow painter, E.C. made an impassioned comment on her Instagram account after visiting Antinomies as:
“An antidote to the absurd, bloated gluttony, to the slick gallery shops and to the often frantic, frenzied and disinterested ambitions that can try to batter the life out of making… The kind of making that is about (to my mind) necessary and unfurling change and movement and not an efficiently quantifiable, capitalist product. Than goodness for this.” (EC 2025)
And added:
“I was thinking about the relationship to the wall and painting with some of these works and how they seem to occupy a cusp… slipping in and out of categories… imagining some sliding off the walls onto plinths or the floor. Where do things belong? Category crisis? Excellent!” (EC 2025)
In consciously looking at these works, most especially the wall hung sculptures and the two works on plinths I was captivated too. Comments from fellow viewers enforced this individual and collective sense of how engaging the new sculptures are. The eye/mind submerges into small spaces, pulled along by subdivisions of form and mass. Little distances, ins and outs, that pertains to the actual environment always in and around us. The paint is as much part of, as well as added to, the cardboard structures. The application is deliberately unfussy, hinting at the unpainterly but suggesting a conglomeration of parts or identities within the sculptural forms through the colour changes. There are dimensions that appear solid and still, but if you are in the zone, generate a sense of implied movement to quicken and invigorate. Are these works dedicated to physicality and consciousness? This is joyous and I wonder why. Is there not enough time? Get on with it, Bunker appears to be saying. Let’s make, share, manipulate and engage with materials in the world before we leave. So, yes joy, utter joy.
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 18th 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.
Murray Ballard – Black Rock, Brighton
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.
Fergus Heron – Ship Street Gardens, Brighton, England, 2016/2025
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.
Perdita Sinclair – How the Whale Got His Throat
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 MuseumsJoe 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 deeptime. 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.
Perdita Sinclair – Gen 9
Denise Harrison – Water of Leith: Flow / Pause / Return. Acrylic on wood.
Denise Harrison – Waters of Leith: Flow / Pause / Return
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).
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.
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.
Julian Vilarrubi – Study for Moonrise on the Rape of Hastings
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.
Stig Evans – Unveil
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
Geoff Hands – After Gainsborough I
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
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), LittleVictories (two successfully removed orange peels that each remain as one piece of skin), or FamilyTree, 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, CommonMarket 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 (materialculture 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…
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.
June Nelson – Red Gloves (2024)
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)
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.
Grant Foster – Queendom (2024) front
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.
Grant Foster – Rat King (1576) (2024)
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.
Grant Foster – Help (2023) reverse
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.
Grant Foster – Panspermia (2024)
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”.
Grant Foster – Drawing for Panspermia
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)
Grant Foster – From the works on paper installation
ORGAN PROJECTS at One Church – Florence Road, Brighton
24 to 29 January 2025
Going to church can be so rewarding. Naturally it’s a Sunday and I find myself outside the One Church building in suburban Brighton, quite close to my home. I have been here on a couple of occasions before for the crafts market, but now I learn that there is a studio where Lydia Stonehouse produces her paintings and that a space has been commandeered for a gallery.
Lydia Stonehouse – ‘Arrangements’ (2024) Oil on canvas (97x107cm)
Just the one small room, but highly suitable for looking at a carefully selected group of works. Eight paintings from last year are more than enough to give the visitor a good idea of what imagery Stonehouse is developing after graduating from The University of Brighton in 2022 and spending a year at the Phoenix studios as the receiver of the CASS Art X Phoenix Art Space Studio award that supports graduates in that potentially challenging year after completing their first degree.
Six of the paintings are seen at first glance, displayed on three of the walls. Two of these are ‘An ongoing birth’, with a strong landscape feel; which vies with ‘Arrangements’, transforming this sense of a distant view with (possibly) two figures dominating the foregrounded pictorial space. They initially dominate the immediate impression of the display. Four other smaller works, however, actually work well by alternating the various sizes of the works. The viewer must step forward or back to immerse the eye into the variously sized compositions.
Lydia Stonehouse – ‘An Ongoing Birth’ (117x127cm) and ‘Lotus Birth’ (26x21cm) both 2014
Lydia Stonehouse – ‘Book Scan’ (2024) Oil and coloured crayon on canvas (35.5x51cm)
After tuning myself into looking at the works, being aware that first impressions can be misleading, I realised that I was attracted most to ‘Bookscan’, a relatively small canvas that was predominantly a subdued green mini-vista that actually felt quite expansive, way beyond the 35.5 X 51 centimeters of its physical reality. The floating linear and rectangular drawn shape within the confines of the canvas edges certainly suggests (is that a contradiction?) an opened book. The impression of a patchy rectangle of light close to the bottom left corner of the canvas brings a notion of time revealed through the light of day. What we perceive, what things are, where we are, are on a continuum. All is in flux, despite the painter’s foolish project to fix things as they are. Yet Stonehouse does not illustrate this; rather, she appears to be engaged on a mission of sorts. Her painting project is nakedly, vulnerably open and questioning. There is no sense of superficiality in these works. She knows when to stop and not to over reach the phenomenon of observation as a painting trope; of visual rhetoric as a too-certain reality.
Then, I feel a little foolish. An arrow prominently marked on the floor points, most unequivocally, to the corner of a curtain. I have been in here for a good 30 minutes or so, totally absorbed by these engaging paintings, but where does this arrow lead? Parting the curtains I am welcomed into this intimate space by two (literally) glowing paintings. ‘Church State’, on my left, feels so small (21X26cm) compared to its equally lustrous ‘Not Even Trying’ (117x127cm) that might be exploding in slow motion. Each work has an embedded set of electric lights behind each canvas. I would like to sit here for a while. This feels like such a quite, meditative space.
Lydia Stonehouse – ‘Church State’ (2014) Oil and carbon print on canvas. (21x26cm)
I need a chair. I can imagine one. Or perhaps my consciousness is the idea of a chair. Either way, the emanating light and colour creates a sense of the physical painting embodying a phenomenon engaging with me rather than simply being observed. The much smaller work, ‘Church State’ (maybe it’s a landscape) includes a small Christian cross that floats in pictorial space on the right hand side. The larger canvas, ‘Not Even Trying’ is suggestively bodily, physical, earthbound – yet amorphous. I am not sure.
Lydia Stonehouse – ‘Not Even Trying’ (2024) Oil on canvas (117x127cm)
This uncertainty (if I am on the right track) is starkly honest I feel, in Stonehouse’s work. The work is explorative, which is healthy. The fatuous notion of the artist as unattached observer is dissolved. The reward for looking at this work is to know that our sometimes felt disconnection with the world out there is ultimately one, non-dual.
Notes:
Organ Projects is an artist-run space founded in January 2024 and is located within a small room in a church in Brighton. The space exists to bring together and show the work of visual artists both local to Brighton and further afield. They are committed to working with artists and curators to provide space for experimentation, share parts of their practice they don’t often get to show, test ideas, and encourage dialogue with one another.
“Walk with me over cushioned moss; your feet sinking into the soft leaf mould. Pick your way through tangles of bramble and bracken. Stand still and feel held in the quietness beneath the trees. Listen to the birdsong and clatter of leaves. Look up through slats of light between branches. Smell the damp and chill in the air.”
(Emily Ball, December 2024)
We play (mentally and physically) to learn, to discover, to realise. If this attitude diminishes nothing more will change and life will be mundane. It’s especially important for painters, or rather, it’s what I see in the painters who interest me. That’s my personal bias, but I am sure it’s a stance far from unique.
Emily Ball’s work has been on my adoration list for years, so making a fourteen-mile road trip in atrocious weather from Brighton was not a problem. Fortunately Storm Darragh had diminished significantly during the morning, which made the more scenic route north, via Henfield, possible. The countryside is fantastic along the meandering roads that gently rise and fall on the Sussex Weald. A feeling of being in the landscape is so strong, even if travelling in a car. Unknown to me, I was being mentally (and perhaps psychogeographically) tuned in for what was to be seen and experienced quite soon.
Installation including ‘Longing and Sweet Sadness’ – oil on canvas (120x170cm)
Many will know of Seawhites of Brighton (who moved to Partridge Green many years ago) as a great source of art materials, especially sketchbooks. But they have hosted exhibitions for several years too and with this show an expanded office space in an adjacent building to the one with the shop is perfect for a decent sized display that provides more than a taster of someone’s work. This is my first visit to the Atrium Gallery and first thoughts are assured and affirmative: wow, what a space, this is proper painting, everything is interesting (all 44 paintings and drawings). Then, unexpectedly: You don’t see this in the Turner Prize nowadays.
Indeed not. But initial impressions can change with reflection. So I walked around the ground floor for a while longer and was pleased to see that the floor above hosted many more works expertly arranged and hung. After a few minutes upstairs another visitor walked past talking to his partner, and I eavesdrop: “This isn’t kiss me quick or celebrity art”. He was referencing the nearby Brighton (but not so much Hove) art scene. It’s a little unfair, but I get what he means. There’s an abundance of excellent painters whose work is not seen enough down at the coast where the post/neo-Pop, street arty scene dominates. But I had to put that gripe aside for the afternoon and indulge in this engaging imagery from Emily Ball. After all, her work is unequivocally right here, right now whatever the trends might be.
Emily Ball – ‘Dig Deep’ – oil on canvas (120x170cm)
The work in Walk with me is totally absorbing. Many of the other visitors were either standing fully engaged with a particular work for several minutes or strolling around looking and looking again at the display. This is not so commonplace in the gallery environment where looks can be fleeting and it confirmed my sense of the high quality of the works displayed.
Emily Ball’s work in this show might simply be categorised as abstract landscape, but that would not be specific enough to account for a clear individuality of purpose in a lifelong project that engages with a searching, animated and exuberant understanding of the world as experienced. A being in the world, fully connected but including mystery. The works are full of implied movement, visually and physically expressed, by an observer fully engrossed in the act of drawing and painting. The imagery graciously pulls the observer’s gaze into a dynamic conglomeration of forms, coloured patchworks and passages through woodland spaces from the Algarve in Portugal (the HotHill collection) back to the artist’s home in Sussex (an ongoing series called WoodlandWeave). The paint is applied skilfully with dexterity, self-confidence and years of practice – but healthily retains an aspect, or an edge, of testing out applications and combinations of sometimes raw but playful brush marks. There is a sense of a positive and intentional work in progress, or a springboard for future works yet to be realised. This animated feeling confirms that environments are never really still or are only observed with a rational eye. Nature’s spaces are in and around us, containing histories and yet moving on.
Emily Ball – ‘Shimmer 1’ – oil on canvas (16x24cm)
So, in the future, we can look forward to an expanded Woodland Weave exhibition that explores the woods at the rear of the artist’s childhood home, merging with her parents’ garden. As with any space that Emily Ball draws and paints this will be as much an emotional as a geographical space. It will be past, present and future. We might be reminded, or prompted, to recall our own equivalent spaces to conjure the psychogeographic nature of environments that are personal, familial and, ultimately, social. This is a distinctive potential for the age-old practice of painting and drawing.
First impressions can even improve, too. See Emily play.
Geoff Hands (December 2024)
Emily Ball – ‘Shimmering Jewel Study I to VI’ mixed media drawings
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 ScepteredIsle 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 etal 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.
“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.
Paintings are fascinating things. They have the potential to extend beyond imagery and the object hung on the wall as they provoke thought and, sometimes, a sense of common subjectivity, but with open-endedness and multiple yet authentic timelines. There can be a sense of not being finalised or prescriptive but suggest a more speculative, active domain of resolution. Arthur Lanyon’s exhibition at Anima Mundi in St Ives celebrates a three-year period of intensive work in the artist’s Penzance studio and these works have that sense of being both finished and in progress. It makes for a fascinating contradiction.
Whenever I visit Cornwall, thanks to the family holidays (close to thirty years now), a trip to St Ives is unquestioned. The first gallery visit is, almost certainly, to Anima Mundi. Way back when (the children were very young) it was the New Millennium and the Tate Gallery that drew us in to town. Anima Mundi has developed and matured and the quality of work displayed is consistently high and thoughtfully curated. Either way, this is the best independent gallery in St Ives. No contest. There really is no contest. This is a fact we should regret, as there are so many talented visual artists in, or linked, to Cornwall. There should be a dozen Anima Mundis in this non-London part of the British Isles.
This is my first post-Covid visit to the town. Too long, I know. I have my Tate membership ticket at the ready – but it’s the Arthur Lanyon show, A Moon With A View, that tops my list of desires. I was not disappointed. With no intention to write a review, my partner and I have a good look around. There are three floors of displayed works to investigate but we are engaged in conversation on the ground floor for quite a while. We are attuning. No kids with us this year (we are a little sad and despondent). The conversation was quite formalist: line, mark, gesture, shape, space, surface, process, choice of medium – all that (important) stuff. It’s the way in we always take. As for subject matter. Not so sure. Not necessarily concerned. Not yet anyhow. Inevitably, the pen comes out of the pocket and I start my scribbles on the exhibition handout that I always hesitate to read before viewing the works it lists and promotes. This is my choice not to be too primed, although in retrospect Lanyon’s own commentary was very useful. For example, the centrepiece of the exhibition is the large work entitled, A Moon With A View, which sets up a frame of reference in his use of the term ‘shapeshifting’ that can be born in mind for any of the works displayed:
“The problem and solution to a lot of paintings is in the shapeshifting between background and foreground. In ‘The Full Moon Over Water’ by Turner, the painted waterscape represents the finite and the moon – seemingly painted but actually bare background paper – is the infinite. The relationship between water and moon – and, in my son Rory’s drawing, between tree and owl hole – draws the viewer closer to the non-material, further into the mysteries.”
And his use of the term ‘unfamiliar knowing’ in another extract also attunes the viewer:
“A childhood drawing can filter through your system like ‘chinese whispers’ and come out as something new. Call it an unfamiliar knowing… It is strangely intimate because the nature of the mind seems to expand inwards to a place that cannot be found in the world of objects.”
Drawings are embedded in the paintings. Surfaces are physically loaded and layered as well as scraped, scratched or sanded back. The canvas is a place of work. A place of purposeful action. Improvised and adjusted as he goes along, I would imagine. These certainly are hard won images. Drawings are crucial ingredients in Lanyon’s practice, collage too. His work can be described as gestural, abstract and certainly speculative and (dare I say) ruminatory through active image/mark making. They acknowledge an inherently cubist sense of time and space in a sense. Very real and encapsulating a nurtured progress through sheer hard work and commitment. There is no irony intended either and some content is childlike, not childish. Given time in an exhibition, and patiently letting the imagery in, goes a long way towards shedding unnecessary luggage. Which is what happens fairly quickly with Lanyon’s work. This may be because the works, of whatever size, are visually very busy, mysterious and demand the viewer’s undivided attention. I feel a sense of the everyday/extraordinary too. His commentary also spoke of the ‘moodboard’, which might well be a useful model for the true nature of narratives concerning the everyday simultaneously affected by the past and present – including long hours spent in the studio.
Fortuitously, I have just read painter, Rebecca Partridge’s recent paper for the Journal of Contemporary Painting in which she explores the post ‘Modernism/Postmodernism’ of the metamodern, which can be characterised by “Simultaneity, depth, a ‘structure’ of feeling and a return to meta-narrative.” This term includes subjective experience, authenticity, romantic subject matter and multiple subjectivities. For his narratives (which, like ours, can be solidly clear, barely recountable or obscure), Lanyon appropriates the physical, material world of the here and now. But he also includes familial memories, sometimes of an historical nature across generations, in a painterly present in which personal iconography is embedded and emerges to make highly engaging imagery. Like a movie represented in its entirety by one still – which perhaps only painting, songwriting and poetry can do effectively.
An initial impression of the exhibition was that this is good stuff. It’s not immediately obvious or illustrative. Why? The work seems kind of honest. I am not sure what this might mean right now even as I type up my reactions almost a week later. That’s good, or at least promising. Looking and, subsequently writing, is a journey of sorts, though you can travel backwards and forwards through the text. The writer might fool the reader into thinking that this was all a first draft. That’s not so easy with a painting. Painting is often a more conspicuous struggle. Painting is vulnerable to scorn or indifference and misunderstanding. Painting is a statement often unchangeable. It certainly cannot hide whilst on display.
Painting is sometimes ‘metaphysical’. What does that even mean? Emotions are in there, for sure, and some sense of transcendence. Is the metaphysical universal (too Jungian a definition?) – for surely, one should not need to read about Metaphysics to experience it? Definition follows experience. Aspects of this evolving theory, the metamodern, are here in Lanyon’s work too. To take just three examples, or traits, from Partridge’s article:
“A pervasive ‘structure of feeling’, a return to affect, to multiple subjectivities”; “Construction as well as deconstruction, the expression of sincerity and depth as well as irony or critical remove”; and “Re-engagement with historicity and meta-narrative.”
Refreshingly, in his work something of the child remains and is addressed almost naively:
“A boy draws a tree for the first time. It’s tall, no branches, just a trunk shooting up to a leafy looking cloud (all simple cartoons are the same). But he forgets what lives in trees: owls. Looking at the skinny trunk he decides to put the owl hole out on the left – a free-floating circle. He thinks his drawing looks good. So he doesn’t screw it up. His dad blue-tacks it up on the wall by the light switch.”
This approach produces a visual poetry of emotion generated by the personal memory and the mark making activity. This set me thinking about the marks we all make and our human ingenuity for language in all its manifestations. When language first developed was it from a gesture (body language) or a sound (made from the body) – or from found objects reconfigured for use? Anyhow, in time, a mark of some kind was made that carried meaning. With some sort of tool – the finger, a stick – we shall never now. But Lanyon’s practice conjures a form of the metanarrative from the instinctive urge to make painterly and colourful marks and shapes that will literally surface in the studio-based activity.
Unexpectedly upon leaving the gallery I found myself looking at the exterior walls and the pavement as a continuation of the paintings – an experience my partner confirmed for herself. This has happened before, but not often. This emphasises to me that Lanyon’s paintings are in and of the physical, playful and creative world, which is all around us and at all times.
Back home in Brighton I check my notes: “Battle between abstraction and fig. Not only visually busy but also content/lyrically.” That was enough to start writing this Rumination. How can one appraise artwork from a one-off visit? It’s more impressions gained than a sustained ingestion and understanding. But how do you separate the art from the viewer anyway? Paintings need a viewer, often strangers, not just the artist. We turn up with our tastes, our troubles, our pre-conceptions, misconceptions, expectations and prejudices, but ripe to be transformed and refreshed. Yes, refreshed.
I am unable to make the Private View so have visited Gallery 19a the day before the initial gathering of friends and fans to have a sneak preview of Curb-Bound, a one-person show by Archie Rogers. The installation appears complete, unless any wall text or other information is yet to be introduced. As visitors we may well seek out some explanatory content but I am not so sure it’s needed.
Archie Rogers – ‘Copsewood’ Oilstick on two wooden panels (20x25cm)
Titles usefully act as signage towards subject matter and, usually, enable a more informed or focussed reading. But without such prompts the emphasis is on the viewer’s imagination to make some sense of the creator’s intentions. I was not counting but there were close to twenty pieces hung on the walls and about a dozen other items arranged on the floor and on a long shelf. Sculptures might be the incorrect term for the various objects; I prefer the latter term, objects, as it acknowledges the ‘found’ nature of many of the pieces on display.
If the viewer knows of the Japanese term Wabi-Sabi, an appreciation of the found object, now defunct and showing evidence of natural aging, impermanence and transience, a context usefully envelops these works. But, interestingly, Rogers has continued any natural transformation with a carpentry and woodcraft type activity. In this sense the objects drift back towards some notion of the constructed and designed object. By collecting many wooden items (though not exclusively as chalk, oil, Bakelite and string make an appearance too) and sawing, drilling or carving up these materials, that could otherwise have been heading for the beach or home fire as kindling, are transformed by the simplest of means. This flotsam and jetsam from the street, and the beach, takes on a new purpose as art – and the hand is always present to make purposely-unsophisticated changes.
Archie Rogers
Some constructions are wall mounted and others are arranged on a long shelf or stored in a box. One such box held many pebble-like pieces of wood from the beach. A smooth little piece of wood had ten holes drilled in it that were surely added after being found. (I was reminded of Roger Ackling’s works that he embellished with burnt lines from the sun’s rays focussed through a magnifying glass and are currently on display in Norwich.) These holes suggest some semblance of transformation, perhaps from a primitive and seemingly unsophisticated starting point. Without obvious purpose the object remains abstract but is highly suggestive of human interaction
Another box held more cuboid and cylindrical forms that had clearly been carefully placed to enable all of the pieces to fit in. I thought of keepsakes, emotional treasure, something you might need one day, or just can’t bear to part with. The stuff found in parents’ lofts many years after the children have left home.
Archie Rogers – ‘Weaving’ String and wood
The standout item for me was a small weaving made from the artist’s very small hand made loom. In fact it was the second loom made, as the first, also on display, appeared flawed, broken or unfinished. The warp and weft item was suspended from a large wooden knitting needle. Although nearby, on the shelf, were three items, including a spoon, that equally drew my attention. Again, the subtle hint of earliest design and technology directed towards everyday needs, the real treasures of life, was refreshingly present. Wood, and associated materials have literally transformed our lives. Wood must be present in our creative and imaginative DNA.
Archie Rogers
Britain was once heavily forested, almost completely, 7000 years after the last ice age. Now we live in one of the most de-forested countries in Europe. With the Green revolution well underway our relationship to the natural world will surely rejuvenate. Archie Rogers appears to be discovering this material legacy in the curbsides and on the pebbly beach here in Brighton.
Geoff Hands (July 2024)
Archie Rogers – Wall installation
Note:
Archie Rogers is a co-founder and curator for Fresh Salad Art, a platform supporting emerging artists through the organisation of group art exhibitions around the UK and internationally through virtual gallery spaces. He is a University of Brighton graduate from 2022.
“My smaller works are predominantly made using found wood and other discarded materials, so surface takes on a whole new significance. An object which has been intensely used, worn, fixed, and abandoned bears evidence of its past life and can only become more beautiful as time passes. I enjoy reacting to these marks with the intention of complementing, not merely to conceal them. I believe in tactility and rejecting boldness in favour of subtlety, thoughts which are reflected also in my recent sculptural and functional pieces.” (UOB website, see link below)
I have this unexpected feeling that I have been outside for a walk. I am not so sure about the weather conditions, or where I have ventured. I may have been alone but I was definitely walking – probably at a leisurely pace. Rupert Hartley’s paintings presented at Gallery 19a in Brighton have this feeling of gentle serenity nuanced with a sense of fresh air and time flowing, though not fixed or too specific. The journey is the destination in itself, somewhere in between A and B. It is no surprise that psychogeography, a wandering multi-experiential activity, interests this artist. But the works are quite formalist too, with no requirement to read them figuratively.
Installation at Gallery 19a
In true ‘white cube’ tradition it has been a dominant convention not to display titles on the white gallery walls for many years now. Sometimes this purist ‘rule’ is annoying or occasionally quite helpful (maybe for figurative works?). In this show, however, it feels appropriate not to place wall labels that could distract from the works on display. The viewer, at least initially, is thrown in to the deep end of abstraction. The works might be described as minimalist or geometric in nature. The use of colour is paramount, with a predilection for the handcrafted, painterly approach. Though there are some signs of the use of masking tape making a tantalising approach towards the hard-edge.
After a general look around for about ten minutes, to tune in as it were, I take a look at the list of paintings in Rising in the start of its arc, quite possibly affected by how I have initially received the works. Echoing a moving gaze that shifted within each composition and from canvas to canvas, reading the titles randomly, not necessarily from the first to the last on the A4 sheets, was uncharacteristic of me. Many sequences are possible from just eight titles:
Totals; Leave here for large external world; Green lights both their smokes; Blue black on yellow smile; False dawn; Lights bathe you in red-blue-red; Afterlight; Totals…
Rupert Hartley – ‘Blue black on yellow smile’ 2023 (55x45cm) acrylic on canvas
How does the title of a painting function? In ‘Blue black on yellow smile’ we see the blue and black squares on a yellow background or surround (to avoid too spatial a reading), yet I am not sure about the smile. This is good. Let’s not get too literal or descriptive. The titles, perhaps they are best considered as sub-headings as the paintings are paramount as visual phenomena, from Hartley’s selection of paintings certainly have poetic potential as pure text. They could conjure an imaginative scenario of people and places or be presented as a form of Concrete poetry. In actual fact the titles are taken from Infinite Jest, a novel by the late American writer, David Foster Wallace. If these works are actually urbanscapes (and close to the seafront in Hove where the artist lives and has his studio) the notion of the literary arc is appropriate given a sense of place and some sentiment or hunch of the fictional nature of reality as it might be retold or represented in a literary or visually creative mode. But unlike a text rendered narrative a painting is usually manifested as a kind of one-off statement, even if part of a larger grouping. Such a form of ‘reading’ (if that is the right term to use) can be challenging, simple, or both.
Rupert Hartley – ‘Green lights both their smokes’ 2023 (55x45cm) acrylic on canvas
Hartley’s works are both objective and subjective. They are formalist and tantalisingly impressionistic. Light and colour are strong characteristics. Implied affects, from the paintings, include floating or an about to shift sensation. The process of the making of a painting could be sited as its essential subject, as a form of narrative, in this category of abstract painting. But that old-fashioned term needs a capital letter: Impressionistic, crops up as the works emulate moments of lived experience (a development of Realism in art history). Nowadays we might prefer the term environmental, as the works may well allude to the land/seascape and the constructed social space. Living on the south coast is an environment that local visitors to the exhibition might well recognise, even if indirectly or obliquely. The viewer could see or sense something in the work from the outside world they inhabit, as this is an aspect of traditional expectations too. The mind will often want to make sense of/from the abstract. But in Hartley’s works there is no illusionism. There is certainly a concrete feel, or sensation of space and structure, and some sense of figure and ground, whether intended or not. Viewpoints are potentially here too as one could be looking down on (an aerial view or map) or across to (a group of buildings or even a still life). The frame might even imply a window view, in pixelated fashion. There can be a sense of illusionism too, as in ‘Green lights both their smokes’ gives a hint of floating and shadow.
Rupert Hartley – ‘Afterlight 1’ 2023 (160x135cm) acrylic and flashe on canvas.
In all works, to slightly varying degrees, there are layers or just the one coat of paint, in a specific square or rectangle. The bottom section of each painting is either bare canvas or (mostly) painted with one colour for the whole width and might be read as an unintentional, though minimalist, predella. (The bottom section of a Gothic or Early Renaissance altarpiece that typically illustrates the life of a saint.) In all eight paintings the bottom section appears separate from the grid above, as if it could have been cut off before being stretched on to the supporting frame. Reading figuratively this strip/rectangle could be an urban, geographic pathway (and in ‘Leave here for large external world’ a blue stripe at the top, suggests the sky). Repeated greens in several of the works might suggest trees or bushes, but this literal reading that any viewer might have, though revealing a subconscious pictorial habit that is hard to suppress, is unnecessary.
Rupert Hartley – ‘Leave here for large external world’ 2023 (86×70.5cm) acrylic on canvas
There is a subtle predominance of blues and greys and a few reds and pinks in the selected works. Perhaps this made the earthy yellows stand out, particularly in ‘Leave here for large external world’. Colours are generally subdued, but retain vitality, from intermixing in most instances. Seldom does the acrylic appear squeezed directly from the tube or out of the manufacturer’s paint pot. The colours are key, not just individually but in relation to each other. The general square shapes and grid structures maintain an implied order and structure that holds it all together. The canvas surface is also part of the visual content. I frequently found myself stepping very close the works, especially ‘Green lights both their smokes’, to simply take in the woven texture. So too with various brushmarky laminations of colour in some of the squares. A handmade quality is retained in the painting process at all times. Nor do the works look pre-planned or overtly systematic, despite a studio-based system of some degree leading to these outcomes. In Hartley’s works we see infinite variety in a restricted, and sophisticated, practice.
Another reading might be of a form of deconstruction of the seen and experienced, leading to a constructed amalgamation of visually encountered environments to be realised as a work of art – something new in the world that we call a painting. On a more subject level I sensed a sort of breathing element too, as the imagery might be taken in to be exhaled. The visual becoming air as a calm softness of encounter accommodates a sense of changing viewpoints as well as general and specific identities. A kind of sense of place that is literally psychogeographic.
Before visiting Rising in the start of its arc, the last time I saw a painting of Hartley’s was in the memorable H_A_R_D_P_A_P_E_R exhibition at the Phoenix Art Space just four months ago. In my review of that show I avoided choosing a favourite, as there were so many works on display and my shortlist was too long anyhow. But I was tempted to choose Hartley’s contribution as my personal front-runner for the fictitious gold medal. I was not sure why though, and seeing this more comprehensive selection of his work helps me to realise that it might have been for the skills and ability to produce a work that appropriately requires a long look and a calm kind of gaze. The imagery sinks in rather than imposes itself upon the viewer. The colour range also adhered to this methodology of encouraging a mind-merging/thought process linking with the visual experience, rather than an all too obvious revealing of subject matter. In this new exhibition there is a purposive yet contradictory sense of the finished suggesting the unfinished in each work. There is also a sense of the process of becoming and of being made, with colour, shape and slightly imprecise or loose grids. But clearly being finished and resolved enough to merit the imaginative responses from the audience.
Geoff Hands, July 2024
Rupert Hartley – ‘Totals 3’ 2023 (120x120cm) acrylic on canvas
Harriette Lloyd – ‘After The Dust Settles’ 2024 Oil on canvas (67x112cm)
What are the painterly visual equivalents for the recollection of time and place? At a simple level we might think of the dark and the light, forms and space, the near and the far. Shapes, layers and geometric or organic forms, which despite the very clever invention and illusion of perspective, combine as an environment. Compositions from the visual field in the here and now, and potentially from memory (or become a version of memory), offer evidence. The future’s not so certain. There’s a sense of permanency unfolding into change of what is or was. Building, deteriorating or soon to be replaced scenarios are here or there. Surfaces reflecting or absorbing light enable differentiation in the visual field. Oh how we need light, and touch, of course.
Harriette Lloyd’s exhibitions of a dozen or so paintings at Gallery 19a in Hollingdean, Brighton conjure these notions of time and space as she makes these evidential documents. The painted memorials appear quite individual but make links from one to another and might be categorised as an extension of the traditional still-life, albeit expanded into architecturally interior spaces such as walls, floors and corners. The seventeenth century Dutch still-life painters of the vanitas recorded and presented objects as a sub-genre of the still-life that reflected a Protestant acknowledgment of the all too short duration of life and of the ultimately limited value of possessions. Lloyd’s project is also embedded in the everyday as a commemoration, but specific objects appear less important than the remarkable visuality of anything and everything around us – including the very process of painting which produces a kind of visual diary from actively engaging with a seeing in action. The application of and engagement with the stuff of painting is certainly endearing as I found myself imagining wanting to apply more of the medium, but Lloyd holds back. She does not get carried away or seduced by the oil paint. This is a promising sign of confidence and calmness in a demanding process. Graduating from the University of Brighton Fine Art Painting course she has clearly been well tutored.
Harriette Lloyd – ‘Grout’ 2024 Oil on canvas (138x82cm)
Lloyd’s visual vocabulary, including the inclusion and reference to of distortions or glitches in digital photography (a generationally related trope from a young painter?), of a near abstract style of painting appear wedded to a language of realism but allow for some degree of improvisation and, as she explains in her exhibition statement:
“The works individually are fragments that together archive fleeting beauty in melancholia.”
Melancholia implies depression or despondency but my take on this collection of paintings overturned any degree of personal dejection into a somewhat positive and celebratory frame of reference. These paintings might affect the viewer in a surprisingly positive and optimistic sense of being alive right now and of a consciousness of the here and now, even in apparent banality, as hugely wonderful. The viewer might leave the exhibition having been prompted to look around wherever they might be and to comprehend and value what’s here rather than some illusion of the elsewhere. This seeing does not have to be denoted as good or bad, or beautiful or ugly. These works might encourage us to accept what is, even if nostalgia, a sense of loss or even premonition creeps in. The paintings certainly stand up to a prolonged viewing as a quick glance was quickly developed into a compulsion to stay put. These paintings generously invite the viewer to stay calm and to carry on – and to deserve a place in your home.
Geoff Hands (June 2024)
Harriette Lloyd – ‘Hot and Cold’ 2022 (30x27cm) Oil on board
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.
It’s Saturday evening and I have spent part of the afternoon in Kemptown, the eastern quarter of Brighton. Sapele Neon Boy is the first show I have visited since attending the Turner Prize press preview in Eastbourne a couple of weeks ago. My review of the Turner is written but I am not happy with it. The show or the writing. But this small selection of works by Joshua Uvieghara at KOOPProjects has woken me from my slumbers. I am going to write this in one draft, check the grammar and publish with a few of my iPhone snapshots. Be damned.
Painting. Thank goodness someone is still painting. I mean, making really good paintings. Producing paintings that grab you and demand your attention. It’s a tough ask these days as visual artists work in so many media. Maybe some ‘alternative media’ artists are really painters at heart, but trends and expectations have taken them off course. For a while, at any rate.
Joshua Uvieghara has been painting for many years. His work should be seen more. Much more. Why? You may well ask. As a fellow painter I am hopelessly biased towards painting. So I know about the relentless challenges and frustrations, including the dangers of repetition and lying in a safety net of satisfaction with what’s okay. And I know that painting is nothing new. It’s been around for so long, after all. But painting is inexhaustible even though it has had to assert itself from modernist decade to post-modernist decade. Painting involves the application of paint onto a surface, often canvas. Paintings never really work on the computer or iPhone screen. There’s no true texture, the size is wrong and the exhibition context is destroyed. The human sense of visual experience and reception is curtailed by digital technology, as technologically clever as it is. Uvieghara’s paintings, like many others of course, have to be seen in the flesh. They should also be seen more because they are, actually, more than visual imagery.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘The Cascading Wall’ 2018
Uvieghara’s paintings often visually unsettle. His tactile combinations of out of the tube colour can appear crude and raw. He uses all six primary and secondary colours – often on the same canvas. Going crazy with colour can create one hell of a mess – but not in Uvieghara’s work. The viewer must hang on in there when first looking at one of his canvases – or fourteen or so at KOOP. Thank goodness there is still somewhere in Brighton that displays quality contemporary painting from time to time. The city is full of artists, but there are few places to show work. Hopefully the situation will change before too many people have left for pastures new. But I digress.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘Magodo Gate’ 2018
In Sapele Neon Boy figurative imagery jostles with the expressionistic abstraction of the twentieth century. Indications of landscapes, places and people coexist with paint applied, sometimes, in a hurry. But always with hard won experience, and certainly with self-confidence. Colour clashes; paint is laid down and left as it is. Paint sometimes drips, but mostly just sits there. The colour combinations could be enough for pure abstraction, but there is subject matter of a highly personal nature too. If there was nothing personal there would be no reason to paint, I suspect. This vicarious nature in/of painting is clearly intended. Taken into the illusionism of space and time, but soon (abruptly) brought into the present by the physical and visual qualities of the painting, Uvieghara’s paintings evoke a living body that is both coming into being and tragically disappearing into the past. Through incompleteness, or imagery taking hold of something concrete, there is a sense of searching too. The work is autobiographical yet universal. Identity is cultural and geopolitical as well as individual. The artist’s personal, familial history, linked to Nigerian and Dutch heritage, will encompass so many cultural and political facets – but there’s enough leeway for the viewer to consider their own sense of selfhood, individuality and identity. At least that was the effect the work had on me.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘Head as Firmament’ 2022
I found some of the portraiture almost emotionally painful, despite the use of bright, gorgeous colour and even gold leaf in one work. Maybe ‘painful’ is too strong an expression. Mirrors and photographs reveal so much and so many people. Uvieghara’s portraits have this unfathomable quality. I was reminded that our pasts are present, even if not always across continents: even if remaining a mystery. The science of DNA has opened doors to the past. We are individuals who know that we are not totally so distinctive and unique. But so many stories are forgotten, secretly hidden or just too distant to recollect. Painting can reconstruct: even as simulacra, as substantive new territory as real as the forgotten or submerged real. Whatever that is.
Visit this exhibition if you can and watch out for any future shows from one of Brighton’s pre-eminent painters. Painting is alive and, well… available to conjure something for the restless imagination.
Joshua Uvieghara – ‘Fragments On a Riverine Ocean’ 2019
Founded in 2022 and based in Kemptown, Brighton, Koop Projects is a neighbourhood gallery with an international outlook.
The gallery believes in Contemporary African art and artists as a dynamic source for learning and change, promoting sustainable art practices through an interrogation of materiality and the contexts in which artists across Africa make and show their work.
We support our local art community through the gift of space. Opening doors for artists, curators and creative people with stories to tell, by providing them with space in which to realise their projects.
In the future, the gallery hopes to develop connections and conversations between creative communities in Africa, Brighton and beyond.
“Denise’s current body of work explores memory, loss and place using the rituals of the Seven Sacraments that marked the milestones of her family’s life-events and gatherings. These memories are then re-imagined with the additional knowledge that is acquired. This work is about exploring the loss of her mother to head and neck cancer. Each of the seven sacraments has a narrative, a memory. When exploring old photos and family memories, her relationship to these images change according to life experience, what was once a fleeting memory suddenly becomes a treasured and precious embrace that can now only be experienced in her thoughts and on her canvas.”(Phoenix Art Space website)
Entrance to Phoenix Art Space – Poster image ‘Baptism’
Why visit a painting exhibition? For pleasure, to be inspired, to engage in a sort of communion, to be challenged even? This is human behaviour best explained by an anthropologist, no doubt. I suspect we have performed this ritual in different ways and contexts for a wide variety of reasons, in many forms, since the era of the cave painting. Closer to home, and today, the introduction from the Phoenix web site (above) succinctly sets the visitor up for something more than a superficial aesthetic experience for Denise Harrison’s thought provoking exhibition, The Seven Sacraments.
I was able to initially see the seven paintings and two small mixed media works in advance of the official opening and before those last, final tweaks with wall labels and the switching on of a video player. This was usefully raw as the final polishing for display was still a day or two away. I had previously seen some of these works in progress in Harrison’s Phoenix studio over the past few months. But here they were, finally resolved and ready for viewing as a group rather than as singular items in various phases of completion. Perhaps the studio is the notional cave from which the work emerges, requiring a suitably lit and formal viewing context. There is no more disappearing into the depths of the earth to celebrate or ritualise through what we now call ‘art’. This is a truly powerful set of oil and acrylic paintings that carefully balance colour impact with emotional content. This is certainly not mere (contemporary) wall decoration made for interior design purposes; it’s a visual witness statement conjuring the moving, melancholic and sometimes distressing subject matter of religious expectations and obligations for the family – yet I believe reveals a thoughtful and affectionate reflection on the presence of love within a family across generations.
Denise Harrison – ‘First Communion’ – acrylic on canvas (120x90cm)
My first impressions were divided between a reading of the powerful narrative in the series of paintings, including a reconsideration of the notion of time, and the visual impact of the colour combinations and paint handling that pulled in the eye as well as the mind. The memorial content, based on individuals and familial groupings – from ten parents and children in ‘First Communion’, pairings in ‘Baptism’ and ‘Wedding’, to a rather sad looking ‘St Bernadette’ displayed in the annex of the café – connected the works as forms of portraiture and stage settings. There are Shakespearian echoes here as we may well eventually realise that, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players…” But the players here of course are set in a religious, Catholic context. As an outsider to this faith I cannot really comment knowingly on the lived experience of adhering to the Seven Sacraments or of being directly involved in what appears to be a range of disturbing experiences for one particular family. The priest in ‘Ordination: Fr. Shannon’, the centrepiece of the display, doesn’t seem to represent any spiritual joy for himself or for his flock of seven red-clad females. As a counterpoint to any notion of spiritual exultation another emotionally moving image is ‘Last Rites: Despair’ where the ailing mother/grandmother appears alone despite the presence of three younger but ghostly figures in the foreground. The content sounds harrowing, but its production ultimately feels strangely rapturous. This reading is, admittedly, personal and intuitive on my part, but I think it has something to do with the painting and this sense of love that I mentioned above.
Denise Harrison – ‘Ordination: Fr. Shannon’ – oil on canvas (90x152cm)
In a more general sense there is a sense of time as well. Of duration rather than moments, despite the imagery being derived from family snap shots, and the artist’s memory. This time aspect might be more strongly felt by the older viewer, although the younger visitor will ‘get it’ intellectually. The implied presence of the camera is here too as the imagery is akin to looking at a photograph, or a photo-album. There could be a desire to know who, where, when and why but art works on universal levels as well as with local, specific histories. Although it’s not the case here, one might have found the original photographic prints (not on display) in a house clearance but the treatment and editing of the information is clearly specific to the artist’s own history. A story now shared to expand from the individual and the familial to the communal. Paintings cannot escape this fate once they become public and face scrutiny.
Denise Harrison – ‘Last Rites: Despair’ and ‘Confession: Sinners’
Still ruminating on this sense of time it struck me that as we age, time and memories collapse in a sense. Some degree of linearity remains but as we can all look back at our own histories through time we also belong to a family, like or unlike the one recorded here. This may not necessarily be nostalgic in a truly celebratory sense – this sounds too rosy spectacled. But the filters are removed decades on, or perhaps replaced by something at least a little clearer. You have to be outside and beyond to look in, sometimes feeling like a stranger or third party. But you’re still in there, somehow, and this forms identity broadened beyond oneself. Paintings can present contradictions that we can allow ourselves to go with. Paintings are poems, not screen plays.
With regard to painting the viewer might be struck initially by Harrison’s use of glowing pinky reds and airy blues in addition to the strong figurative content representing facial features, especially the eyes and the expressions of the mouth. The various colour shapes morph with their surroundings producing a dream-like, visual connectedness that forces, or frees up, the figurative confines of the photographic content to flow and expand by use of the paint medium. With its various aspects of selection, composition, colour choice, painterly application and materiality the paintings somehow challenge the original photographs to attempt to say more than a superficial reading might offer. A painting, a good one, might read more like a poem that does not explain all. A straightforward story will need some openness for the viewer’s own interpretation and meaning to arise. Narrative is potentially unsteady, open to interpretation and unavoidably filtered and synthesised by the onlooker. Meanings might change from one gaze to the next. Or at the very least we might adapt the various scenarios to our own histories and experiences as a way of dealing with trauma that is beyond the individual, residing in the family and across generations. I am aware that I am probably getting carried away here, beyond the intentions of the artist, but a visitor could not walk through this space without exchanging a ‘look’ with the various individuals depicted and possibly find an echo in there.
An affirmation of painting is also powerfully and skilfully evoked by a suggestion of the purposely unsophisticated veering on apparent clumsiness. For example a limb such as a leg that is too straight, or a head too big or childishly bulbous. This somewhat unfair attribution emerges as there is clearly something of the lens-based / photographic record in the visual language that sparks an expectation for some category of the photo-realistic. But this combination somehow works. The apparent distortions and simplifications are deliberate. The colour is sometimes acidic and contrasts are crudely intentional. Detail, for example, is reserved for eyes and mouths, whereas bodies and surrounding forms and spaces tend towards a more abstract language as backdrops from the theatre of the everyday to make the imagery emotionally real. These people are us, vulnerable and loving, lost and found.
Visit this exhibit if you can. Support for artists is about engagement with their works and ideas. Be baffled and be sure. Participate and trust. We need to share our stories and painting does this so well.
Geoff Hands
Denise Harrison – ‘St. Bernadette’ – oil on canvas (66x46cm)
Scarlett Segal’s exhibition, A Sense of Place, is briefly on display at Green and Stone in Chelsea. Before the show opened I enjoyed a visit to her studio in a village nestled in the South Downs, not far from the Long Man of Wilmington and equidistant from Seaford and Eastbourne.
This location is worth mentioning for its varied and quick changing geographical diversity of well kept fields, ancient patches of woodland and dramatically shaped, grass covered chalk hills. Within a short day’s wandering a healthy walker could find themselves enclosed by thickets of ash, beech and oak trees, tripping on stony ground or slipping on soaked grassy banks. There are plenty of dark, leafy copses, leading on to more open local vistas that coax and challenge further investigation. Steep stretches of smooth hillside that beckon the traveller upwards towards local summits can be enclosed in mist or clearly contrasted against clear blue skies. These climatic changes can take place within a day, let alone from season to season. For those who reach these various hilltops the views of the South Downs will stretch far and wide to invite aerial perspectives and to scale up vision. To the south, where the gaze can detect the sea view so surprisingly close by, there is a big enough hint to confirm the island upon which we can still sometimes lose ourselves in – a place of safe solitude, perhaps, despite the recent pandemic. To the landscape painter it’s a small paradise that can stretch as far as the eye can see, to beneath one’s feet, or to the finger-tips in search of the distinctively tactile.
We first spoke to each other after a presentation of Julian Le Bas’ paintings exhibited at The Star Gallery in Lewes. As with Le Bas, if you live in this wonderful corner of the county and you have an interest in painting, you cannot avoid the land and sea as subject matter. Historically Eric Ravilious, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (at Charleston) plus Jean Cooke and Harold Mockford, amongst many others, have responded to and extracted and invented something from this chalky Downland that engages with the English Channel, or should I say La Manche, as Segal is a French citizen who will therefore not take this landscape for granted.
Meeting in an artist’s studio is always a special pleasure, and, with an interview a handy precursor to a formal exhibition presentation. Many of the paintings for A Sense of Place had been unwrapped and temporarily displayed in the library, mostly perched on shelves in front of the art books and French novels. The paintings were simply but effectively framed in white moulding which more than adequately served the purpose of completing the works for hanging in future homes. From seeing some of these paintings on the gallery website beforehand there was a degree of familiarity with the imagery, but the digital image can never substitute for the real thing. Colours and surface qualities have to be considered in the flesh – and a composition such as ‘Path in the South Downs’ came across as far more varied in painterly and scratchy, drawn textures and subtle tonalities than on the computer screen. At just 26X34 cm it is quite small, but the composition and paint handling evoked sensations of both the physicality of the terrain and the implied movement of the walking observer who will perceive the changing scenery as a time-based phenomenon.
I was intrigued by the art history books, but was curious as to how Segal had found herself in East Sussex and, as a painter myself, in her daily working practice.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Before the Storm’
GH: You originate from Paris and have lived and studied in London, so how have you found yourself in rural Sussex?
SS: I needed a change of scene literally and a reset button. I am a big city person at heart but the lockdown took the advantages of city living away. The culture had gone overnight and so did the possibility of socialising with friends. I have always liked to replenish in the countryside. My family had a country house in Normandy, which we always went to at weekends and on holidays. I also lived and raised my family in Surrey for many years. It did not feel rural enough and therefore I took the leap. Sussex is gorgeous with its hills and the sea nearby. It is a stones throw away from London. And it has its perks. I have also discovered the Towner and the glorious Charleston Trust. What is there not to like? I once wrote in a journal years ago that I needed to be in isolation in the calm and quiet to build a brand new body of work. And I did just that here. I am very adaptable and flexible. If money were no object I would live between London and here, and between England and France. I could certainly do with more sun and blue sky!
GH: What is your way of working? Do you have a routine?
SS: I am very self disciplined and a hard worker which does not prevent me from having fun and procrastinating somehow. I justify it as my thinking mode. I work most days and even on walks I look and sketch and think. I would read on a train journey. For me art is a way of life and thanks to it I learn valuable skills such as problem solving and perseverance. There are skilled artists. Talented ones even, but in order to make it, it is sheer hard work and resilience. I am fortunate that I can now devote my time entirely to a passion that originated in childhood. And even though I came to it later on in life I can now put all my energy and life experience into it. So yes, I draw most days and paint relentlessly. No routine as such but I make sure I go to my studio every day. To paint, to read, to tidy up. To prime surfaces which I love experimenting with. Boards are my favourite at the moment. I love being there. I love the smell of the various media. I feel time stands still except when there are important deadlines. I find solace and the more you do the easier it gets. I paint in both acrylics and oil and want to experiment with mixed media. But for landscapes I definitely prefer oil paint. I use very high quality pigments because it makes life easier and the process is so much more enjoyable. I use a limited palette and mix all of my colours.
GH: There must be ‘off days’?
SS: Of course – some days are just not meant to be. There are also the happy accidents and the times when everything falls into place. It is an ongoing learning curve. I feel so fortunate I can do what I love and express my emotions. If viewers are moved or reminisce or travel through my work then I am a very happy artist indeed. I never quite know what the next work will be and this makes the process exciting. The dream I have is to make a difference and collaborate with community projects.
GH: Art History is clearly important to you, as you have studied at Christies, Sotheby’s, The Courtauld Institute, and continue to do so at Charleston. Does this academic background affect and inform your painting practice in any specific kind of way? Does it help, or is it an academic hindrance?
SS: It certainly does help. I think the discourse is changing drastically right now and it is very exciting for female artists who have been so cast aside for centuries. Somehow I don’t think it had ever been questioned before Linda Nochlin’s essay (“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”) in the 1970s. Since then, we have had women such as Judy Chicago, Siri Husvedt and Katy Hessel, among others, to thank for that. When you think that widely read and influential art historians such as Vasari and Gombrich could only name one woman each! So, yes, history of art informs my work through research but like all artists I am a magpie and will study real masterpieces in order to use what appeals to me. I love visiting galleries and I am sure I must be irritating to other museum goers as I love standing close to understand how a certain effect was achieved. I must confess that it can take the fun away which is why I tend to go to exhibitions often more than once if I can and take friends too. You cannot learn from books reproductions or art critics. And to see the brushstrokes of Cézanne or Morisot in the flesh brings tears to my eyes.
I am very aware of all the arts movements and their historical context. I wish I knew more about cross disciplines such as literature and music. I remember a splendid exhibition at the V&A a few years back called Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. The curator (Kate Bailey) had done just that putting all the facts together per city, where there was an opera house, on a blackboard. I remember thinking this is the way we should be taught before being taught the formal way of analysing works of art and the themes to look out for. It feels forced to some extent but you need a toolkit.
Cézanne, the Father of Modernism, is one of my favourite painters and we are so fortunate that his works are so easy to access. I also love Corot and Turner. My work is inspired mostly from Modernism, including Abstraction, and as such it is inevitable to have a very good understanding of what happened before, since Modernist artists pushed boundaries and endeavoured to break all the rules.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Autumn Reflection’
GH: Your exhibition at Green and Stone, A Sense of Place, has essentially a landscape theme. Are you moving on from your geometric/abstract work or do the two practices work alongside each other?
SS: Yes, it is actually all landscapes but not only – hence the title of the show. The works are painted in a varied style or language. Some move totally towards abstraction even. It comes back to what I was just saying. It is difficult to justify that you can do both and want to do both. Galleries will accept that you paint portraits and still lifes, or still lifes and landscapes, but not representational and abstract. I find this infuriating and short sighted. I think the explanation lies both in the difficulty of branding different looking aesthetics, or what could commonly be referred to as a “Jack of all trades”, and the classification and hierarchy of genres imposed by the Academies.
In the history of art timeline, artists evolved towards semi abstraction and abstraction from the 20th century until now. Very few reverted back to representational art. Vanessa Bell did try it all. The need to label and compartmentalise everything is a sign of our times whereby instant gratification and ready-made explanations are sought. But this is exactly what artists have always done (think of the Bauhaus or the Bloomsbury Group) and must carry on to do. Anyhow, conventions and limitations have always been imposed. Think of Gainsborough who painted portraits for a living but only ever wanted to be a landscape artist. Nothing new. Artists have free rein to express the way they see the world and seek to make a difference.
So to answer your question, yes I would like to find a way of making the two practices co-exist and look coherent. In my eyes they already are and show an evolution from Space to Place. This is just commercially difficult to explain.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Gone is the Long Man, Wilmington’
GH: There is quite some emphasis on water in many of the paintings in this new exhibition, with the Cuckmere river, streams and the coast nearby this is inevitable for a landscape painter living in this part of the county. Plus there’s snow in ‘Gone is the Long Man, Wilmington’ and ‘White Stillness’, plus mist (‘Misty River’) and the loaded, soaking, atmosphere in ‘Before the Storm’. Should the viewer read anything into this?
SS: I find water soothing. Its noise. Its rhythm. Its fluidity. And I love swimming. I am drawn to reflections, as I also like how it changes our perception of what we see above. It is like being confronted by two realities, one more transient that the other. I have also always been fascinated by the myth of Narcissus. I see water as a mirror of our soul.
GH: I am also intrigued by several of your titles, particularly ‘Let Go’, ‘Looking Up’ and ‘Serene Promise’. It suggests to me that a sense of place is more than a view or visual record. I feel a sense of time, particularly on a personal level, where one might acknowledge that sense of a lifetime journey. Am I reading too much into the titles?
SS: No you are not at all. It is true. Some works are drawn to certain memories and are very personal. Landscapes can be self-portraits too. I actually think you can dig deeper and express more this way without being obvious and imposing a reading of the work. I am a strong believer that once you finish a painting you need to let go and accept that some people will perceive other emotions than the ones you intended. Hearing the explanations given to some Old Masters’ and contemporary works sometimes make me laugh. I think of course that was not the intention, but who knows? If it gets people thinking and talking this is a great thing! I like the openness in a way. I dislike pedantic talks about art though. Art should not be elitist. It should be accessible to all. But knowledge is power in any field.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Serene Promise’
GH: A serious and a tongue in cheek question: Why not just photograph these landscape locations? Isn’t the genre of landscape painting quite outmoded nowadays?
SS: Well if you want to look at and frame a photograph then you can. It is a work of art in its own right. Photography has in fact forced painters to paint differently. Would the Impressionists have existed without its invention? Most unlikely, or not to that extent.
GH: Well photography probably created Realism (in France), from which Impressionism developed that sense of the now and the everyday. Monet is the classic example. I don’t equate your paintings with the camera at all.
SS: Even though I use my own photographs, I do not paint directly from them. I would find this boring and limiting. There would be no creativity. One could use grids or paint by numbers! Joking apart, I always work on compositions through sketches, and rebuilding photographic worlds in Photoshop or Procreate. And I really think my heavily constructed abstract geometric works made me work this way. Nothing is random or completely organic. I see myself as an architect of worlds. By contrast, the landscapes start with a mapped composition but evolve organically with shapes of colours. So no, a photograph could never achieve this in my view.
GH: As I said earlier, your work suggests a sense of place and the experience of perception in that place – far more than a view or visual record.
SS: I personally see shapes and colours dancing in front of my eyes all the time. I thought everyone did. It certainly makes drawing easier. It might be a form of synaesthesia or something else; I am not sure what the correct term would be. This perception informs the way I paint. Painting for me is recapturing the experience of seeing and feeling.
But I should add that I do not think that landscape painting is quite ‘outmoded’. Quite the contrary, in fact. I think landscape painting has a very long tradition for sure but that its ubiquity has been sidelined by more spectacular art forms such as Conceptual art, Installation art, Performance and Land Art, even. But I have noticed a resurgence of interest for landscape painting as demonstrated by the latest publications on contemporary landscape artworks. I find the works by David Hockney, Peter Doig (exquisite show at The Courtauld by the way), Anselm Kiefer and Luc Tuymans, to name but a few, very current. They have all reinvented the idea of landscape according to their artistic needs and the times they live in.
GH: That’s an extremely positive point to end on, to acknowledge that landscape related art is continuously reinvented. Thank you, Scarlett.
Scarlett Segal – ‘Stormy Stormy Weather’
Links:
If you miss the show you can contact Scarlett Segal directly via her website – https://scarlettsegal.com
“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.
Returning home from the Private View for ‘We Like The Taste of Certain Poisons’, I am compelled to write something immediately about this small but compelling exhibition of Richard Graville’s paintings at NoHawkers Gallery, which is situated in the Rodhus complex of studios and workshops in Brighton.
Richard Graville- ‘WIDE’ 2022 (60x120cm) Flashe & acrylic on canvas
Some sense of urgency (including the use of my iPhone photographs – so apologies to the artist) is due to the fact that the show is only open for two days and that if someone were to read this hurried review in time they might make it to see the exhibition. But another aspect of this impulse is due to my having spent a large proportion of the day preparing a teaching session, in which I shall ask my students to consider our shared human history of the landscape environment and might consider why this is still an interest for contemporary painters.
I had been re-reading Timothy Morton’s, ‘Being Ecological’, in which he posits the notion that:
“Picture postcards are descendents of what came before Romanticism in art, namely the picturesque. In the picturesque, the world is designed to look like a picture – like it’s already been interpreted and packaged by a human. You can easily see what’s what: there’s a mountain over there, a lake, maybe there’s a tree in the foreground… this is pretty much what humans saw in the savannah millions of years ago. Having a body of water nearby and some shade (those trees), encircled safely by mountains where you know there is water descending to feed the lake (for instance), is pretty handy if you’re some kind of ancient human. The picturesque is keyed to a fundamental human-centred way looking at things: it is anthropocentric.”
This seems strangely fortuitous, for although Graville’s paintings would certainly not be identified as landscapes as such (though they hold that possibility for a viewer who might be so inclined to wear their landscape-tinted spectacles), some kind of deep psychological and ‘pre-historical’ possibilities are pertinent to Graville’s project within a minimalist, systems/coding kind of approach to hard-edged abstract painting.
Richard Graville – ‘SOLUTION’ 2022 (100x100cm) and ‘CLEAR’ 2022 (80x80cm) both Flashe and acrylic on canvas
The last time I saw a Richard Graville painting (in the flesh, as opposed to on Instagam) was in H_A_R_D_P_A_I_N_T_I_N_G_x2 (Part 1) at the Phoenix Art Space in Brighton at the beginning of 2020. I wrote then that:
“Even Richard Graville’s pair of canvases, ‘Blushing Phantom’ and ‘Red Banded’, that come the closest to accruing accusations of painterly abstraction, have an aura of careful, premeditated control. That they echo the similar stripes on the workforce vans outside the building is either unfortunate or reminds us that abstract art is everywhere.”
This was my personal, uninformed but simplistically and naively honest response to two rather satisfying paintings. We search for meaning, some allusion, illusion or just good old subject matter in paintings. It’s habitual. That the red and yellow stripes on the Highway Maintenance vans had any connection with the natural world, as in animal colouration and patterning, I must admit was beyond me at the time.
Richard Graville – Studio view
From this solo show of ten new works by the artist (plus several more in his studio on-site) an information sheet presents this comment:
“Humans were once able to navigate and track subtle clues in nature. Now flat signs in primary colours tell us which way to go and what to do. I continue down that path to see where it leads.” (Richard Graville)
Hence my connection with Morton’s view on the picturesque, in that we humans create systems of understanding to navigate and understand the environments we live in – as do the other animals. Morton’s observations reference a perception of the world from a clearly human viewpoint (the anthropocentric), although also in the book he makes it clear that a worm’s experience of an apple is somewhat different to a human’s. Nevertheless, on all sorts of levels, data is interpreted, via various access modes, to be acted upon.
A wall mounted information display adjacent to the exhibition room tells the viewer that animal colouration systems, categorized as aposematism, inform potential predators that an animal is poisonous, venomous, or otherwise dangerous. All animals (which include us humans), to some extent, live (and die) by preventing attack (or not). Data requires interpretation, which is a form of code, taking us back to the work of the artist.
Not that Graville’s works could be categorized as ‘landscape’, but various painted arenas (canvases) are presented for interpretation and contemplation. Sensory input, from the simple act of looking, enables the mind to process information that we categorise typically as colour, size, shape, texture and finish or sheen. Each composition is relatively simple and geometrical and often references (purposely or not) windows and road signs. The colour palette is always limited (sometimes monochrome), though sophisticated and astute enough to prompt some reaction from the viewer. Every work is immaculately and carefully composed, painted and visually constructed. I suspect that the paintings might feel different depending on one’s mood and known or unknown frame of reference at different times. If you can accept a minimalist type of simplicity, aligned to a deep interest in colour (for its own sake, never mind any aposematic coding or sign) try to see this show – or look out for the next opportunity.
Geoff Hands (October 2022)
Richard Graville – Studio view
Notes:
‘Being Ecological’ by Timothy Morton (quotation from pp.24/25 Pelican, 2018)
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 