oilpainting – Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews

AFTER-IMAGE

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

Window Gallery, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

1 to 30 November 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statements from the exhibitors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoff Hands (October 2025)

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

Thanks:

Laurie Bassam and Lucy Faithful from Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Laurence Hill and Ainoa Burgos Gonzalez from Phoenix Art Space

Installation assistance – Bernard G. Mills from Phoenix Art Space

Poster design – Jiating Yang

Links:

Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

Phoenix Art Space

Exhibitors’ Websites –

Instagram –

JUNE NELSON: The Gloves Are Off

Diving Queens: Portraits of Resilience

Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

5 to 27 April 2025

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

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

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

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

In a statement on her website, Nelson has stated:

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

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

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

The artist further explains that:

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

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

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

June Nelson – *Helping Hands* (June 2024)

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

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

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

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

LINKS:

June Nelson’s website

June Nelson on Axis web

Instagram

Phoenix Art Space

LYDIA STONEHOUSE: Taking Her Body With Her

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.

Links:

Lydia Stonehouse

CASS

One Church

SEE EMILY PLAY

EMILY BALL: Walk with me

Atrium Gallery, Seawhite in Partridge Green

December 2024 to March 2025

Emily Ball – ‘Pulse’ – oil on canvas (120x170cm)

“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 Hot Hill collection) back to the artist’s home in Sussex (an ongoing series called Woodland Weave). 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

LINKS:

For high quality images of Emily Ball’s artwork visit – https://emilyball.net/

Instagram – @emilyballpainting

Viewing – *‘I smiled when I hear the cuckoo sing’* – oil on canvas (120x170cm)

CONSTABLE: Innocent Messenger of Doom?

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

Until 2 February 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Geoff Hands (October 2024)

NOTES:

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

“A woman and her partner are standing in front of A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge (‘On the Stour’) by John Constable. “Does he ask questions?” she reactively inquires. I think it’s a rhetorical question. It’s certainly a gift of a question and I now wonder, was the painting asking questions about subject matter; perception; time; self; the painting process or the fiction of imagery and invented composition? Constable also appears to have gouged his palette knife into the surface of the oil painting and it is an unsettling image. I doubt that the subject matter is merely a farmhouse or a landscape. Paintings have so much to offer and so much potential for interpretation, with endless ground to cover. It’s no wonder they continue to intrigue viewer and maker alike.”

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

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

LINKS:

National Gallery

CBPP review with reference to Constable’s Farmhouse painting

Contemporary British Painting Prize 2021

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

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

From the BBC news website

Climate protestors glue themselves to John Constable masterpiece

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

OLIVIA GUILLOT: Swallowed A Fly

At Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

26 June to 30 June 2024

Wow! Some paintings, some actual, real, “look at me I’m a painting”, paintings. Sometimes the best things happen when you least expect.

It has been a busy day and I am rushing around town. Dad’s taxi, paintings to collect from the framer’s, pick up a few things from Sainsbury’s, park at the studio (yes! there’s a space), say ‘hi’ to people in the corridor (make out all is well), pick up a notebook, water the plants and then, as I almost depart… there’s a new show just been installed in the Project Space at the Phoenix. But there’s no time to stop, but one has to.

Olivia Guillot, a recent graduate from the University of Brighton, has installed a display of seven paintings and a sketchbook in her first solo show, Swallowed A Fly. I am immediately drawn in by the painterliness and the strong colour hit. I might only have a few minutes, maybe 10 or 15 if I can dismiss the future awhile. Painting is so much more than the here and now, of course.

Olivia Guillot – *Swallowed A Fly* 2024 (120x150cm) oil on canvas

The works are lively and painterly, oh so painterly, and as fresh as the perennial daisy. This artist clearly has an almost unchecked love of paint and colour and image. I say ‘almost unchecked’ because there is a visual intelligence emanating from these canvases. There is a restraint too; revealing a painterly design sense that I suspect is intuitive. Whatever, these works are so refreshing to see with their vitality and energy. Paint and image are in transition, despite the fixed nature of the resolved canvas. What are these images peopled by? The figurative and the abstract meld. The act of painting, sucking something up from the imagination (whatever that is) makes new scenarios. Magic.

Olivia Guillot – *Walkies* 2024 (20x40cm) and *Anteater* 2024 (100x100cm) both oil on canvas

More joy: There’s a sketchbook (item no.3 on the exhibition plan, which gives an equal status with the paintings) that the visitor can leaf through. Why can’t artists show their sketchbooks more often? In some way this is an unusual, even a brave, decision. A document like this is such a personal document. Containing good and indifferent drawings and colour studies; notes from a tutorial; bare thoughts. But viewers should get the bigger picture (pun intended) and see some of the working and thinking process that determines the end result. That final canvas has a studio history. Discussions have taken place. Doubts work alongside discoveries and day to day planning. Ruminatory thoughts have floated by, sometimes recorded in scribbled notations. Perhaps there should be a clause that every painting exhibition includes a sketchbook or two.

Painters have to have confidence of course, a resolve to climb on board for the journey. It’s an attitude thing. Guillot has this in abundance.

For contemporary painters the gallery system is not always open enough. The Gatekeepers are not always into painting, after all. Painters have to raid the bank account and rent spaces. Painters have to be self-confident and brave. But, despite obsessions with alternative media, painting persists. Painting courses, such as the one at the University of Brighton, attract students of a highly visual persuasion. The medium encourages investigation and thought; self discovery and realisation. Out there in the ‘real world’ there are so many painters – and they are, for the most part, a national treasure.

The end result, like this small but expansive show, is akin to a music gig. The various parts are given extended strength by the grouping, the set list. See the show if you can, get the ‘hit’. Let the experience dissolve into your consciousness forever.

Geoff Hands, June 2024

Olivia Guillot – *I Cant Stop Making Mush* 2024 (100x100cm) oil on canvas

LINKS:

Project Space: Swallowed a Fly

Olivia Guillot on Instagram – @livguillot_

Update: Tracey Emin Foundation

HARRIETTE LLOYD: When The Dust Settles

Gallery 19a, Hollingdean, Brighton

7 to 19 June 2024

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

LINKS

Harriette Lloyd – https://www.harriettelloyd.co.uk/

Gallery 19a – https://19a.org/exhibitions

REMBRANDT: Paintings Must Be Seen For Real

Rembrandt in Brighton at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

10 May to 4 August 2024

Rembrandt Self Portrait at the Age of 34 1640 Oil on canvas, 91 × 75 cm Bought, 1861 NG672 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/NG672

Earlier this year I posted the following advice to painters on my Painting Studio Strategies Instagram account: ‘Paintings must be seen for real’. Of course, it’s an obvious thing to say, but we all (not only painters) should see actual works whenever possible. The obvious reasons for looking at a painting are straightforward: the viewer sees the work without changes to its size, the colours and tones are not affected by a printed reproduction or the screen settings, the surface qualities are not smoothed out and you can get up close (within reason). But there’s another element, which is subjective and relies on the viewer giving ample time to experiencing the work.

In this instance I imagined the painter (myself included) in the studio surrounded by one’s own paintings with images of other artists’ work, especially our heroes, only being accessed through books or on our iPhone screens. There might be a few postcards on the wall too, although I suspect that card sales have plummeted since the advent of the mobile device and through being allowed to take photographs in most exhibitions for personal use.

When we do see a painting for real, by which I mean one from the greatest of all painters such as Rembrandt, there might be a degree of surprise or just a reminder that paint, most especially oil paint, is an astonishing medium. In the right hands a painted image can move into a region beyond what we might call ‘materiality’ today. The experience of looking might even go beyond ‘subject matter’ too. As I mentioned above, there is surely a subjective aspect to this point of view but I would advise a detractor to visit an institution, such as the National Gallery in London, to tune into the alluring charisma and sublimity of the paint medium. Or maybe just its ordinariness as an ingredient in a composition (I am thinking here of Piero della Francesca) will suffice.

So when a painting by your favourite Old Master is displayed in the local art gallery, just a ten-minute walk from the Phoenix Art Space studio for me, there is no excuse to not visit several times. In fact for the locals we just have to pay once and we can revisit the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery as often as we wish for twelve months. So I expect to pay homage to Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s ‘Self Portrait at the age of 34’ (1640) quite a few times up until August this year. The painting is on loan from the National Gallery to celebrate the Bicentenary of one of the most important art galleries in the world. Twelve paintings from the collection are being lent to venues across the UK, which would be a great initiative to continue and to expand to even more galleries for many years to come.

If I try to define the impact of this astonishing self-portrait it’s difficult not to fall into well-worn cliché, particularly in relation to the gaze of the sitter connecting with the viewer, or the implied humanity of engaging with a fellow human being from so far back in time. Then there’s the art historical and cultural information that not unreasonably feeds into the experience of appreciating the painting (see the impressively curated NG website for a full explanation, link below). One could even make a connection, if contemporaneity is sought, to notions of the ‘selfie’ today, although the virtual instaneity of the self-portrait type image made with a smartphone will generally be quite superficial, even facile. Rembrandt’s heavily implied self-confidence and promoting of his painting skills are clearly on display. But this is certainly not a painting that celebrates selfhood or reveals the more modernistic sense of existentiality that questions the times one lives in. The painting is certainly a form of advertising as Rembrandt sought commissions from the wealthy Dutch collectors of the 1640s.

But there’s just something about the paint and its application, and about the control of colour and tonality that Rembrandt fuses so well with the subject beyond appearance. Does the face/head represents thought and ideas, whilst the hand on the parapet in the foreground represents the human hand that physically works in conjunction with the intelligence. Is this a manifesto of sorts that elevates the painter to the realm of the poet? Rembrandt, the painter, achieves a notion of image (visual art) with ideas (expressed through literature, most especially poetry) that we might consider ‘abstract’ – beyond but reliant upon the visual and the written or spoken word*. The indefinable ‘X factor’, to use modern parlance.

On my second visit another viewer commented to her partner, “The more you look the more you see. It’s the detail.” Yes, I thought, but it’s the aura too. This does not seem to be down to skill alone. It’s not purely about the painter’s choice of what to do and how to do it. It’s from a training, and a looking at other artists (Titian in particular) and of having some practical purpose in the subject matter. But more still.

You really have to see it to believe it. And, fellow painter, if you get the chance to visit buy a postcard for just 75p.

Geoff Hands (June 2024)

* This connection of painting with poetry was mentioned by Bart Cornelis, National Gallery Curator of Dutch and Flemish painting, in a public talk connected with the showing of the Rembrandt portrait.

LINKS:

Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

National Treasures: Rembrandt in Brighton

The National Gallery, London

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rembrandt-self-portrait-at-the-age-of-34

Phoenix Art Space – https://phoenixartspace.org/

Instagram – @painting_studio_strategies

IN THE GARDEN

Michelle Cobbin interview with Geoff Hands

Gallery 19a, Brighton

March 21 to April 6 2024 (Closed Sundays / by appointment Wednedays)

Installation of In The Garden at Gallery 19a

Michelle Cobbin, a fellow painter at the Phoenix Art Space, interviewed Geoff Hands as he prepared to install his exhibition, In The Garden, at Gallery 19a in Brighton.

Install photographs by Rob Harris.

Michelle Cobbin – What was the first painting that had an impact on you?

Geoff Hands – A Camille Pissarro woodland landscape. I was 18 or 19 years old and on a Shrewsbury School of Art visit to Manchester City Art Gallery and The Whitworth. It was not a particularly large work, but the paint was quite thickly applied in that Impressionistic manner. It sounds naive, but I was so accustomed to looking at reproductions of paintings in books that I must have assumed that paintings were essentially ironed flat. Today we probably talk about ‘materiality’ but back then, in the 1970s, it was ‘surface touch’. A visual touching of course, which is one of those fascinating dualities of experiencing painting that might only truly be comprehended on a feeling level.

I should also mention two other paintings recalled on another art school trip a little later to Liverpool. These are Stephen Farthing’s ‘Louis XV Rigaud’ and John Walker’s ‘Juggernaut with Plume – for P Neruda’ that were selected for the John Moores exhibition in 1976. They employed a technique of employing collage within the canvas, which expanded the painting process. Collaging, in a sense, is more ‘hands on’ than painting with a brush.

MC – That is really interesting. Your recent work utilises unctuous and thick oil paint and collage plays a part in your studio practice. Would you say that the ‘materiality’ of making work is essential to your practice?

GH– I have always felt that the physical medium is a crucial ingredient in the realisation of the artwork. It’s experiential too, both for maker and viewer. There’s a symbiosis at work, which is material, physical and visual. Oil paint is a wonderful medium, just from a feeling point of view. If my painting is going well, on a subjective level, the oil painting process is still a challenging and discomforting experience. That’s the contradictory nature of painting for me, which has been appropriately labelled the ‘hard won image’. I’m sure that sounds rather old fashioned and romantic.

Oh, but the thick layers of oil could be thin too. And I love the term ‘studio practice’ as it implies a never-ending quest for something. The recent work being presented in ‘In The Garden’, particularly from 2019/20, really continues work from before but with an added realisation that there’s a singular pursuit to make a painting that was worth the effort. That’s why I called my show at the Phoenix Art Space in 2020, ‘It’s All One Song’, after a comment made by Neil Young to an audience member who wanted to hear a specific song but he launched into something else. My interpretation was adjusted to the notion of my own singular pursuit, engaged with as a painting student so long ago, that is still manifested in repetition of some kind of desire.

*‘Garden (Pilgrimage) – After Watteau II (for PJ Harvey)’* 2020-21 (121x150cm) and
*‘Garden (Pilgrimage) After Watteau I’* 2020-21 (121x150cm)

MC – That quote from Neil Young, ‘It’s All One Song’, you mention one way you apply that idea to your painting in that it is a repetition that forms part of your ‘studio practice’. Keeping with musical references I would suggest that you use a lyrical mark-making motif in many works that lead the eye from painting to painting in a rhythmic way. Are you conscious of that – is it deliberate or is it perhaps that you are listening to Shakey in the studio and the marks are spontaneous responses to the music?

GH – Well, I am conscious of a desire to create a feeling of movement and flow in the paintings. This starts with the looking and the observational drawing before the paintings are made back in the studio. This interest in rhythm, movement and atmosphere is concerned with consciousness, time and space. So there should be occlusion and fixed point too. This is everyday stuff, acknowledging the animism and agency of the here and now. The mark making can be described as ‘lyrical’ and I see it as an extension of the looking and the drawing but improvisation is key too, along with a journey into abstraction with colour.

I get the musical link too but I more often paint with some chilled ECM label jazz playing in the background. The occasional blast of Neil Young with Crazy Horse would be good to stop overthinking though!

It’s worth briefly mentioning that I am currently working with musician and composer, Tobias Wheal, on walking, drawing and painting with his music responding to my work and vice-versa. There’s a little poetry as well, but it’s still a little early to say much more as we are buried in the project at the moment.

‘*Garden’* series, 2023 (25.5x31cm)
and ‘*In The Garden (for V.M.)’* 2023 (51x26cm)

MC – The project with Tobias Wheal sounds like an interesting collaboration, I look forward to seeing how that develops. Recently your work has referenced paintings by historic landscape painters such as Watteau and Gainsborough. In particular I was drawn to the large painting inspired by ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’. What drew you to riff off that particular Gainsborough painting?

GH – Between two of the lockdown periods I went to see the Titian show at the National Gallery and took a walk around the permanent collection. Gainsborough’s painting is one I know well from many visits there and it never fails to impress. I always expect it to be bigger than it is and his paint handling is astonishing. It’s a loaded image of course, not just from a feminist perspective concerned with the implied male ownership of the female partner, but it is also an unintended glorification of capitalism and land ownership from its early history of development in England. For anyone interested in the English Landscape tradition in painting it can’t be ignored either. All of these political frameworks are important and remain relevant today, but I think that we can look at paintings for what they are without having to add a societal context every time.

Anyway, at the time (during the pandemic) I was incorporating elements from paintings from the past into my own work. I was initially looking at a Ruben’s composition (‘Landscape with St George and the Dragon’ 1630-35) and adjusted a small series of my own paintings to include compositional references. This lead onto ‘appropriating’, the artist’s term for stealing, various elements from Titian, Watteau and Gainsborough to add to my own imagery. Some of the content from these painters has been intermixed, especially from Watteau’s, ‘The Embarkation for Cythera’ (the version in the Louvre) that has become a bit of an obsession. With the Gainsborough I have found that I can enjoy painting towards abstraction. The image just seems to lend itself to this painterly and colorful direction. All of this has been happening since about 2020 when I was becoming a little disillusioned with where my work was going, or rather, it was stuck in a groove that needed changing somehow. My forthcoming exhibition (In The Garden) at Gallery 19a will show a small selection from this quite large body of work and I shall have an opportunity to distance myself a little from the paintings so that I can see it from another perspective.

*‘Andromeda’s Garden’* 2023 (145x200cm) oil on canvas

MC – As I think about you preparing to select paintings and curate your exhibition ‘In the Garden’ I wonder about titles of individual paintings and whether titles are important to you. As a whole you say the work is ‘all one song’, how does that effect how you title individual works?

GH – Well, there’s an obligation to title work but it’s useful. Just numbering works does not feel right for my works – although as I work in series there will be a roman numeral somewhere. A title is something of a portal, an entrance into the work for the viewer. With the works that reference another artist it seems ethically correct to add their name to the title. As for the importance on a personal level I often reference the source of the painting. This is often a particular location where I have typically visited with a sketchbook to draw in. The untitled option is always there though, and if I am looking at someone else’s paintings in an exhibition I generally avoid reading the wall label at first. The song reference is more of an acknowledgement of a lifetime’s quest or project.

The exhibition title for my show at Gallery 19a is deliberate reference to the feel of that particular song by Van Morrison. It’s quite personal, and perhaps only relevant to myself. The garden reference is also an allusion to the painting studio, especially during the pandemic lockdown periods, and an even more oblique reference to images of Mary in the Garden from the Gothic and Renaissance periods in art history. I like to think of this as a poetic decision, inviting the viewer to make whatever they wish from the references without any clear answers from me.

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

Links:

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

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