Drawing – Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews

JULIAN LE BAS: Studio Visit for Spirit of Place

Star Brewery Gallery, Lewes

4 to 12 March 2023

“Plein air painting on a large scale has heightened my sense of involvement. My use of colour is instrumental in expressing my feelings about form and light within the landscape. Inspired by some new subjects, a shift in my work has transpired.”

(Julian Le Bas, 2023)

In preparation for Julian Le Bas’ much-anticipated exhibition at the Star Brewery Gallery in Lewes, I was asked by Sarah O’Kane (Sarah O’Kane Contemporary Fine Art) to write about Julian’s work, as she knew I was a follower of his career and had written about his show at Berwick Church for Lewes Artwave 2022. I made a visit to his studio last November to talk to him and to see completed canvases and a few works in progress for the exhibition in Lewes. Some of this new text has been included in the catalogue for the show and a suitably edited version is published on her gallery website.

With Sarah’s approval, here is the full version of the exhibition:

A Studio Visit

Julian Le Bas is a painter, perhaps the contemporary painter, of the Sussex section of the South Downs. His work bares witness to this characteristically splendid and captivating geography of chalk hills, meadows, woodland and the adjoining coastline. The Sussex landscape possesses a subtle drama that does not provide the instant awe of, say, the Peaks of the Yorkshire Dales or views from Snowdonia, but the chalk cliffs that stretch eastwards from Brighton and Seaford towards Eastbourne are unique enough to provide a painted image with the visual impact of location not always provided so explicitly in other locales.

If you know Sussex reasonably well you will be aware of Chanctonbury Ring, Black Cap, Mount Caburn and Firle Beacon, and will recollect on how these geographical landmarks change in mood and appearance depending on the weather, the season and the time of day. On a more micro-level you will know that as you travel around, away from the A roads, you will expect to see characteristic churches in the villages, such as at Berwick and Southease. You will also know that there are marvellous trees in the various churchyards, or alongside the fields that produce crops or are home to the cows and the pigs. Look closer still with this consummate painter and, depending on the time of year, see the bluebells, snowdrops or a defiantly red rosehip amongst the winter brambles. In other words, there is no hierarchy of place or incumbent: be it animal, mineral or vegetable.

I wonder, also, if the paintings are a form of storytelling. Many of these visual tales will find their way to new homes, perhaps above the hearth, in a bedroom, a study or in a corridor leading to the kitchen. The point being that the paintings will find, literally, a home to prompt a recollection of a known and familiar landmark, embedding an internal conversation not necessarily or exclusively about rural Sussex, but also beyond to landscape revealed through the act of painting. Prompted by various locations, painting as gesture, as abstraction and as colour obsession – in an era of the digital and the virtual that can loose the immediacy of a physical and mental interaction with light, form and space.

These many places visited by Le Bas, often with the imperative ritual of walking to them, are invested with powerful colour effects and combinations of brush marks too. The viewer might be convinced that they are as improvised as much as they are consciously planned and controlled. Le Bas balances these two complimentary aspects of the act of painting, which is so important for what I interpret as reflection in action, as a matter of course. He produces visually potent and efficacious oil paintings that retain this sense of having a heart beat, of being visually fixed but alive somehow and which have to be authentically realised in situ. These studies can only be so faithfully achieved, by necessity, out of the studio environment.

For the uncompromising en plein air painter the idea of the studio is, potentially, a notional one, as four walls do not restrict the site of production. So when I visited Le Bas’ studio in the back garden of his home in Seaford I was not sure what to expect. At 12 X 10 feet the space was significantly more than big enough for the lawn mower, gardening tools and cracked flowerpots that one might normally expect to come across, although thankfully there were no such items stored here. But this was more than simply a storage area for dozens of canvases of various sizes. The wicker chair and cushion, just the one, was evidence enough to reveal a space for the artist to sit and ponder on his latest day’s work. Space too, to rethink and assess the necessity to return to a particular location to complete a canvas not yet considered fully realised, hence the provision of three viewing walls. I asked Le Bas if he sometimes continued the paintings here, away from the subject. A simple ‘no’ was the answer. I need not have asked, for his many collectors and supporters will know that he is a purist of sorts; passionate and uncompromising in the most positive sense and completely at one with the traditions associated with the landscape/seascape painter who will go out in all weathers to attain their goals – and to constantly surprise themselves at the inexhaustible range of subject matters and moods that wait to be seen and experienced.

Such an approach is Le Bas’ unspoken manifesto. He just gets on with the task in hand, albeit as a healthy compulsion loaded with drive and sheer enthusiasm. The work is so memorable that it speaks not only for itself, but also for the inexhaustible landscape related encounters that somehow await the viewer’s comprehension, though intriguingly via the work itself. The paintings may well function as signposts, imploring the viewer to get back out there and look again, but they are more than mere signage of course. The canvases, as carriers of physical imagery, embody lived experience and a sense of time, where to pin down the visual realisation of a particular place, set in some notion of the abstractness of duration, is reliant on the paint medium and its expert treatment. Time and light is fluid too, which poses a contradiction to the solidity of form, of the interaction of colours and the myriad relationships that constitute fixed composition. Le Bas’ works bring the observer and observed together so that the works also realise the shared experience of seeing, through the manifestation of consciously formulated structures constructed by this communal gift of sight.

There is an inherent democracy at work, wherein the drawing content, the range of mark making, the colour range are all carefully balanced so that if anything dominates it is the difficult to define ‘spirit of place’. Le Bas can apply such an abstract notion in any aspect of the landscape environment, whether nearby or far away. Interestingly, the historical picturesque can be discounted in his approach to composition and content, as there is an honest acceptance of what is simply there. What lesson we might learn from Le Bas’ life-long project is that every day and every scene presents a seemingly revived landscape offering a new vista, and a fresh encounter, with the apparently commonplace. These landscapes are tirelessly offered up, re-imagined, for continuous engagement and revelation, so long as the viewer will give over their own time to enjoy and contemplate the imagery.

Le Bas’ paintings celebrate, exalt and revere the various locations and unequivocally express awe at the natural world. The role of shamanic consort, expressing the elevating metaphysical aspect of the everyday through the ordinarily magical presence of the landscape is his task. The work continuously appears to convey this sense of the uniqueness of the quotidian and the local which changes in appearance, not only due to time of day or season, but is subject to the artist’s own crucial engagement at any particular time. This notion of self, however, is not selfish as these paintings help the viewer to see afresh and to experience beyond subject matter.

There is an extrovert inclination in these paintings and drawings, revealing an emotional involvement steered by rigorous and disciplined draughtsmanship. This engagement with the physical qualities of medium, from compressed charcoal or chalk pastel in his drawings to oil paint on canvas, Le Bas’ works are somehow a summation of perceived experience that lives beyond his initial encounters in the landscape. High key colour combines with earthy local colour. His engagement with the glorious power of colour reveals both a romantic and a matter-of-fact connection with the landscape experience.

There is, I suspect, some deliberate exaggeration in Le Bas’ practice. A visual proclamation in his use of colour and insistent mark making, which is intended to bring the viewer into the work, and to make a lasting impression, reminds us that the landscape is still a worthy and increasingly important genre. Not solely for the sake of decorating our walls, or as a reminder of those places we love to visit, but as ecological imperative. For, as our burgeoning awareness of environmental issues develops for all the wrong reasons, Le Bas’ representations of the landscape may be reminding us that Arcadia is on our doorstep and, by implication, we need to stop trashing it a.s.a.p.

Geoff Hands

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

262 CHAIRS: Molly Stredwick and Becky Hancock

Coachwerks, Brighton

11 to 22 January 2023

“A work of art is a whole, and this whole contains many parts – the material out of which it’s made being just one of them. We could include the interpretive horizons of the art’s consumers, for example, and the contexts in which the art materials were assembled… In this way it’s obvious that there are so many more parts than there is whole.” (Timothy Morton)

The chair in the art gallery has never been quite the same again since Joseph Kosuth presented, ‘One and Three Chairs’ (1965), in a Duchampian spirit of challenging the viewer to question representation in art. Subsequently we have learned, or been reminded, that everything is loaded with possible interpretations – especially when context is accounted for. A context that includes the viewer, of course.

Molly Stredwick (wall installation) and Becky Hancock (drawing and sculpture)

In 262 CHAIRS, currently installed in the Coachwerks exhibition space in Brighton, I find myself looking for a chair to sit on, as I need to rest awhile. Alas, this is not an option, which I find ironically amusing. But there are chairs galore in this warmly welcoming environment, thanks to the blazing log burner, which are represented in many drawings and two sculptures. Adam Spain, Exhibition Manager at Volt, Eastbourne, has neatly curated the exhibition, which may account for a certain ‘just rightness’ about a selective display that does not go overboard visually and presents enough physical content to engage the viewer.

The two exhibitors, Becky Hancock and Molly Stredwick (both graduates of Camberwell College of Arts) are presenting works that simply work well together. Not just because the apparent subject matter might be the same, but also because there’s an almost unassuming simplicity and innocence about the imagery as well as the means of execution. Though I suspect the content could be loaded.

Take Becky Hancock’s five drawings, for example, where each composition includes a pair of chairs placed at, what might be, a dining table. Domestic space suggests relationships, often about couples, and by extension, families. Here the furniture is, in a sense, naked. There are no figures directly represented, although the placement of, and spaces between, the various pairs of chairs are perhaps melancholy and at odds. The viewer might clothe these scenarios with their own imaginative interpretations or real experiences and any one of these drawings would be ideal to start writing a short story from in a creative writing class. The more visually dominant element in these drawings is the table, which distorts itself into angular hieroglyphs. The table might be a body that undergoes both voluntary and, as a domestic situation might dictate, forced distortions and poses – though not so much as a referee or arbitrator, but functioning as a victim of sorts. As sketchbook drawings, presented on the wall unframed, they might well function as studies for paintings or installations but they are intriguingly finalised statements that are impressive and compelling enough to be fully resolved outcomes per se.

Also on display are two 3D pieces by Hancock. At first sight the viewer might read them as adjusted ‘real’ chairs. But they are human-scale simulacra. A chair can be an idea, a model, a prototype, an image, a word or even a functional item. Whatever a ‘chair’ has the potential to manifest itself as it can also be a sculpture, of sorts. These two pieces take on an anthropomorphic presence with one leaning forward, as if in prayer, adoration of the deity or submission, the other sat back in picnic mode – engaged in déjeuner sur l’herbe, perhaps. Either way, both are fallen, making a melancholic and downcast presence at the viewer’s feet. Or telling us that they are not really chairs, whatever our automatic reading probably is.

Co-exhibitor, Molly Stredwick, has commandeered the largest, most expansive wall, upon which 176 small drawings of chairs are displayed (selected from a series of 251). These are, for all intents and purposes, imaginary chairs. The perspective is sometimes distorted, conventional three-point perspective reversed, or appearing to be floating or rendered flat without surrounding space or objects included. Any resemblance to Hancock’s 3-D chairs is superficial, though creating a coherent feel and appearance for the exhibition. This wall of 11X16 approximately postcard sized drawings might be a catalogue of chairs, but each is surely the same one, or maybe not, for very subtle personality traits might distinguish each speculative rendering. Drawn on G. F. Smith paper samples with the same red Muji Gel pen there is a suggestion of the series or the genus with variety being sight. The manufacturer’s printed text functions as an internal framing device too, with the different numbers, paper types and weight information changing along with the colours and the visual and tactile presence of the material. So what appears to be repetition and sameness calmly explodes into huge variety. In effect, this wall of assembled drawings functions as an installation that can be viewed as a whole grid-type shape or as individual drawings that must attract viewers to any one sample or part, which is nevertheless complete in itself.

In his book, ‘Being Ecological’, Timothy Morton has explained that an ecosystem of parts and wholes is an environment of “just lifeforms and their extended genomic expressions: think of spider’s webs and beaver’s dams.” That’s what artists do; they make their respective webs and dams alongside and sometimes in collaboration with others (or curators make the connections). The viewer is part of the situation too; not so much caught up in the web, as one of its constructors.

Note: Both quotations from: Morton, T. ‘Being Ecological’, Pelican, 2018 (p.113)

Links:

Becky Hancock – https://www.becky-hancock.com/bio

Molly Stredwick – https://mollystredwick.com

VOLT Eastbourne – https://www.volteastbourne.org.uk

G. F. Smith – https://gfsmith.com

Muji Gel pens – https://www.muji.eu/uk/stationery/stationery-gel-pens

MOMA – Joseph Kosuth – ‘One and Tree Chairs’ – https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81435

JULIAN LE BAS: New Work

A Lewes Artwave exhibition at Berwick Church

September 2022

Growing Rich With Looking

In a post-industrial revolution context the English countryside, for so long a subject for painters, can still be a strangely ‘other’ environment for so many. Nowadays this space we call the ‘countryside’ is a place of escape and rest, suitable for a day out or for a camping holiday. For the daily traveller going about their business the countryside is a fleeting arena placed in between centres of commerce and mass housing. Viewed from the train, bus or car window lack of access may even create tension. Despite being loaded with mythology, folk tales, notions of paradise (very much lost), agrarian history and, for the south of England in particular (arguably the birthplace of capitalism) a mode of enquiry for the contemporary artist continues on to the ecological crisis that now impacts our “green and pleasant land” (to reference William Blake).

Julian Le Bas is a painter, perhaps the contemporary painter, of the Sussex section of the South Downs and the adjoining coast. Le Bas bares witness to this typically splendid and beautiful geography of chalk hills and woodland as he engages with his, and our, local world on a journey that has been his indefatigable undertaking for over forty years. What lesson we might learn from his ongoing life-long project is that every day and every scene presents a seemingly revived landscape offering a new vista, and a fresh encounter, with the apparently commonplace. The landscapes from Le Bas are tirelessly offered up, renewed, for continuous engagement and revelation.

Paintings and drawings, made en plein air and in isolation as he travels alone, invite a congregation of onlookers in a small exhibition of paintings and drawings at Berwick Church for this year’s Lewes Artwave Festival. Le Bas’ paintings exalt and revere his subject matter – and how fitting that we see these works in a place of worship. This particular church might be considered a wonderful art installation in itself, purposely referencing the pre-Reformation model of the church as the historical forerunner to the ‘art gallery’, permanently containing murals by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, plus the recently commissioned altar reredos panels by Julian Bell.

The paintings and drawings from Le Bas, however, are secular in subject matter and intent but unequivocally express awe at the natural world. Le Bas is the epitome of the artist engaging in the role of shamanic consort, expressing the elevating metaphysicality of the everyday through the ordinarily magical presence of the landscape. It may take a leap of faith to accept such a purposely contradictory definition of this particular artist, but the work continuously appears to convey this sense of the uniqueness of the quotidian and the local which changes in appearance – not only due to time of day or season, but is subject to the artist’s own mood or degree of engagement at any particular time.

These paintings are of the moment – a duration measured in hours we might assume. Le Bas uses an English post-Impressionist palette where high key colour combines with earthy local colour. His engagement with colour reveals both a romantic and a matter-of-fact connection with the notion of landscape experience. But what does this mean if it’s a correct interpretation? I would argue that some exaggeration, a visual proclamation in his use of colour and insistent mark making, is intended to bring the viewer into the work and to remind us that the magical landscape is still a worthy and increasingly important genre – especially as it contributes to our burgeoning awareness of global environmental issues.

The personal capacity required of a contemporary painter, with an arguably dated assignment to record the landscape, and at first glance unshackled by what might be on trend at present, is necessarily blinkered to enable a deep focus on such a potentially numinous experience of landscape. A logical pragmatist, a post-modernist, might reject Landskip as relevant now (unless it provides a context for other, grander, socially and politically qualified narratives), but one role of the artist might still be to say: “look at what I have seen, see what is available to all”.

Or, to take most of the words of R. S. Thomas from the poem, ‘The Small Window’:

“… there are jewels

To gather, but with the eye

Only. A hill lights up

Suddenly; a field trembles

With colour and goes out

In its turn; in one day

You can witness the extent

Of the spectrum and grow rich

With looking…”

Like this poet, associated with the Llŷn Peninsula in north Wales, Le Bas is tuned in to the sheer visual experience of his own landscape, not withstanding its potential to transform our experiences. Le Bas reminds the viewer that this environment is bursting with colour as much as any city has to offer and that it has the indefatigable capacity to ‘move’ us and to provide space to think, to plan and reflect and to explore. On a trite level, even a small canvas of Le Bas’ in the urban home will break down the barriers between the town and the country; but also on a metaphysical level, based on concrete experience, a transformative understanding of the landscape environment is possible too. Perhaps usefully, we cannot seem to let go of our obsession with ‘the countryside’. Landscape as a genre, engaged with constantly by the Sunday painter and the obsessive, committed practitioner alike, persists in our culture – which is quite assuring.

Whilst there is a certain, expressionistic conventionality in Julian Le Bas’ paintings and drawings (which I say in a positive sense), the gestural yet restrained visual language, honed and perfected after years of hard practice and utter devotion, results in a compelling engagement with his subject matter. For some observers he may exaggerate colour and mark making at times, approaching a general expectation of abstraction, but this is the hook that pulls one in and presents the eye and mind with spatial conundrums of simultaneous senses of flatness and depth. The generally bold brush marks are laid in areas that intermix, overlap or abut, amounting to a distinctive patchwork of organic shapes. Local colour and colour in its own right – straight out of the tube, Fauve-like – or mixed on the canvas as well as the palette to create secondary and tertiary mixes, make a variety of colour combinations. Realised as mark and gesture as well as for their tones and values, these colour-shapes are at once based on responding to visual reality and to testifying to a daily practice that celebrates the act of painting, whatever degree of verisimilitude is sought. There is clearly an extrovert inclination in these paintings, revealing an emotional involvement steered by rigorous and disciplined draughtsmanship. This engagement with the physical qualities of medium, from compressed charcoal in his drawings to oil paint on canvas, Le Bas’ works are somehow a summation of perceived experience with an aspect that says, “look at this world around you and engage with your whole being”. This is very much a serious undertaking, where pleasure is often an outcome.

In Le Bas’ paintings the drawing content morphs, via the brush, into painted lines that delineate shapes and forms, often flat rather than rounded, but creating visual space on the canvas. Perspective is loosely reduced within the network of colour-shapes but an abstract, surface acknowledging, arrangement of colours and gestures there is also an essence of movement. The observer might detect a degree of improvisation too, as taking liberties with mark and colour is a strong characteristic in Le Bas’ work. The paintings are made from a totally immersive activity of looking at sections, and spatial passages where the eye has been lead in deep concentration, engaging with various parts, structures, surfaces and atmospheres that make up the whole. A ‘whole’ that actually includes the observer, for if the environment is captured in spirit, it also captures us. In these paintings there is a record of being that is symbiotic with ‘nature’ as, in a real sense there is no divide. If we learn to appreciate this environment, starting with the local, with what’s in front of us, we might start to protect it better and therefore see that Le Bas’ paintings are as relevant as any other contemporaneous projects that have a more immediately political purpose.

Philosopher and Ecologist, Timothy Morton has written:

“Somewhere a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead. You stop reading this book and look around you.” (‘Being Ecological’)

We might stop looking at paintings and look around too, but engaging with the art might be the doorway we need to see what’s in front of us.

Geoff Hands ( September 2022)

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

KIKI STICKL: Drift

A Poetic Exploration of Space in Lines

At Window Gallery, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

2 – 24 July 2022 (Wednesday – Sunday, 11.00 – 17.00)

Outer space is right here, right now. It’s in front of us and in us, one and all – for there’s an inner space too. In terms of individual consciousness the two may as well be the same. When we think, we travel too, even if we remain physically still. When there is nowhere left to go, when we are trapped, marooned or sheltering from the storm we can rely on mental space. Still, but adrift in time, when memory kicks in to take us out of ourselves there is a palpable sense of space as an extension of self. Such are the conditions of splendid isolation, afforded most recently during the early months of the global pandemic.

Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath In Breath Out V’, 2020

Kiki Stickl clearly made the most of her own experiences of her family’s six months spent in countryside near Munich during the first lockdown in 2020 when she produced her ‘Breath in Breath out’ series of drawings, several of which appear in Drift. Here she encountered ideal conditions for creativity: time and space, duration and environment – and possibly sound as well – especially when the world is hushed. In fact, as I awoke on the morning after seeing Drift being installed at the Phoenix Art Space a couple of days before the opening I was semiconsciously thinking of Stickl’s drawings as visual soundworks. Not necessarily apropos Cage’s 4’ 33”, but literally, and deafeningly, silent. Stickl’s drawings suggest small arenas of silent sound consisting of visual counterpoints, full of emptiness inviting a form of meaningful mark making as an abstract response to recalling time and space. These are drawings made as an end result as they are not subservient to, or necessarily leading to painting as might traditionally be the case. Stickl conjures drawings from a meditation in the everyday physical realm of being that amount to sensory, environment-based studies. From a landscape environment to the literal sheet of paper that she works on, the drawings map out themselves. Sometimes she cuts the paper to reference, literally, a sense of layering as well as amalgamating marks on the paper surface as a form of recording what has been seen and remains to be seen: Cartesian, with Buddhist overtones.

Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath In-Out (A Walk)’, 2020

Drift presents 19 works. One is a temporary wall drawing (employing paint); another is a painting (titled, ‘Lines of Disruption’); plus seventeen square format drawings on paper, simply but immaculately framed. The painting is placed in the adjoining coffee shop, but cannot be missed on the main show wall as a little taster of her painting practice. The wall-based work, ‘Drift’, at about two metres square, is the centrepiece in the long Window Gallery space. Composed as an essentially linear structure from two tones of grey paint on the white wall, with the addition of ground up glass beads applied to the lightest grey paint when it was still wet, the darker grey mass suggests a resting figure, perhaps in meditation pose. An ephemeral, time-based work such as this will disappear at the end of the exhibition later this month. This work, therefore, demands that we hold it in our memories, just as we may do from our personal experiences of places beyond the gallery.

Kiki Stickl – ‘Breath In Breath Out (Cosmic Matter)’, 2020

The bulk of the show consists of the drawings that have been selected from a much larger body of works, the aforementioned ‘Breath in Breath out’ series. From drawing to drawing, as they are arranged in blocks and rows, there is great variety of imagery and mark making. Subtle use of colour is occasionally employed, although they still read as essentially monochrome iterations. In many, linear rhythms consisting of scribbles, dots and short or flowing lines are accumulated suggesting light and weather conditions. Forms are deconstructed to some extent, invoking that sense of recall that does not rest, preferring flux and instability as performative, shorthand approximations. Imagery that might be solid is no longer fixed as a conventional photograph might replicate for the viewer. The paper cut-out sections present voids and absences, shadow and light, useful contrasts and visual paradoxes. Implied shapes and lively line is reductive though essential as imaginative remnants of remembrance celebrated. These are motion pictures, mapping the psyche as much as the terrain.

Stickl is not so much taking a line for a walk (re: Paul Klee) as inventing and playing with accumulations, sometimes in counterpoint mode, un-egotistically presenting a notion of drift through time and space.

Geoff Hands

Links:

Phoenix Art Space – https://www.phoenixbrighton.org/Events/kiki-stickl-drift/

Kiki Stickl – https://www.kikistickl.com