Andrew Crane
Veil – cement, polythene, house paint, acrylic and graphite on paper, 11 x 12 inches (28 x 30 cm)
Painting is a meditative practice for Andrew Crane. He is fascinated by the space in between things: the pause between words; the gap between numbers; the split second that is the present rather than the past or the future. He is intrigued by number, “both its mystery and completeness”, but there are inherent contradictions between his obsession for the tidiness of mathematics and the randomness of his working method. The surfaces of his canvases are littered with letters, numbers and scribbled bits of handwriting. He uses them like notation, borrowing their respective languages and appropriating them into his own visual language so that they come to mean something different. However all of these things “are incidental to my search for a certain energetic truth in my paintings”.
Basta – cement, varnish and acrylic on canvas – 30 x 30 inches (76 x 76 cm)
At first glance much of his work appears monochrome but subtle modulations of tone are enlivened by understated pale ochres and colour greys. He believes strongly in the energy of marks and their potential to draw a response from the viewer. Crosses double as multiplication or plus signs and arrows direct the eye across the composition. His surfaces with their scrubbed out areas and obliterated fragments of text are like the complex workings of a mathematician solving an equation.
Beach scene – cement, varnish and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches (76 x 76 cm)
He arrived at his present way of working by chance. Struggling with an unresolved painting he took tile cement and trowelled it over the canvas. He discovered that he “loved the surface” because it “had a bite to it and it took the paint really well”. He “likes working outside with the canvas flat” and the “imperfections and scars” left by the trowel become part of the composition. He is an instinctive artist rarely planning in advance, often being led by the process. Unsurprisingly he is strongly influenced by Antoni Tapies who worked with similar materials.
Outcrop – cement, polythene, house paint, acrylic and graphite on paper, 11 x 12 inches (28 x 30 cm)
Most recently, again by chance, a piece of discarded black bin bag has entered centre stage in his latest series of paintings. There are seven in all. It is still all about process and materials and the numbers are ever present, like characters in a play, part of a darkly present chorus, sounding only when necessary but always to great effect. Crane works fast. He has to since the cement starts to go off very quickly once he has trowelled it onto the support, accident is an important element. The combination of speed and chance, “forces me into the moment, I am not thinking about anything else, it really focuses the attention”. Andrew Crane moved from the soft South to the ruggedness of Northumberland three years ago and he has become increasingly influenced by the wild and beautiful landscape on his doorstep. He wakes everyday to spectacular views across the fields; he can just see the top of Hadrian’s Wall from his window. The weather is stark and windy and he is often to be found up on the leaky roof of the shed, which serves as a studio, making repairs.
Ocean Perk – oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches (92 x 122 cm)
There is a spiritual element to Crane’s work. His interests in dowsing, meditation and mathematics filter into his work. He reads widely across philosophy and religion picking ideas from sources as diverse as the Gospel of Thomas, the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Zen Buddhism. The bust of a Buddha accompanied by colour strips inspired by a Tibetan thangka which hangs on his studio wall has appeared in some paintings. In others, ‘Happy in my madness’ he plays with the meanings of numbers and words like four and fou, and juxtaposes scribbled charcoal marks with carefully hand-painted type traced from computer printouts. In ‘Phi (Approx)’ the proportions of the golden mean, seen in plants like passionflowers, become a structure for its numerical equivalent. Crane’s philosophical approach allows him to detach himself from the process and observe. “When the mind is still, without past or future, this is the place of true creativity”.
89-8 – oil and water-based paint on canvas, 40 x 50 inches (102 x 157 cm)
©Fiona Robinson 2005-2012
Andrew Crane’s next exhibition, ‘Two and a half dimensions’, will be at the Kihle Gallery, Horten, Norway – March 2nd to 25th, 2012
www.hortenogborrekunstforening.no
This Text is an updated version of an essay published in Fifty Wessex Artists by Fiona Robinson, published by Evolver Books, 2006.
Gerry Dudgeon
Standing in Gerry Dudgeon’s remote studio the overwhelming sound is of birdsong. The walls are lined with paintings in his very distinctive palette. Terracottas, pinks and oranges sum up the pulsating heat rising off the deserts of Morocco.
Moroccan Hinterland. Acrylic, 76 x 86cm
Vibrant blues: ultramarine, cerulean and cobalt, suggest the cool underwater world which he encounters snorkelling off the coasts of the Greek islands and subtle muted hues express the cool landscapes of West Dorset where he has lived and worked for twenty five years.
West Dorset Snowfields. Acrylic, 51 x 61 cm
Down in the Valley. Pencil, 60 x 84 cm
The view from the studio double door is magnificent. Straight ahead, across lush fields, rounded hills cut into the sky and to the side the fringes of an ancient wood are undoubtedly the source of all the birdsong. Dudgeon loves this countryside and walks it endlessly, stopping frequently to make small drawings of his impressions in landscape-format spiral bound sketchbooks. His studio drawings are not topographical, they are “an amalgam of different sensations”, a record of his impressions of a place and the emotions it evokes. However he is a wanderer at heart and much as he finds Dorset entrancing the adventurer in him searches out the edgier more inhospitable landscapes of places like Morocco and India. As a student he hitched across the Alps into Italy in freezing December weather. He wandered the dark forests of Bavaria and encountered excessively decorated rococo churches. Now he travels to Morocco and Greece regularly and he made several trips to India in the 1990s. Attracted to North Africa by the exoticism of Matisse’s Moroccan paintings he researched Berber culture and delved into the complex history of the area. His repeated visits have developed in him a deep passion for the land and its people. His drawing of the stone vats of the leather Tannery in Fez, an aerial view of great pots of colour, carries the poignant undertones of his knowledge, that these workers will die young because of the caustic chemicals in the dyes.
Fez Tannery. Pencil, 25 x 19.5 cm
He finds the plateaus with their huge vistas of space, and the dramatic colour changes between river valleys and oases in the desert, extraordinarily beautiful. Fascinated by Islamic design, particularly “the way they handle geometry in ceramics and in ironwork”, he says of the Moorish vernacular architecture, “I love the way the buildings are crumbling and returning to nature because they are made of mud.”
Merzouga Mirage. Acrylic, 76 x 87 cm
Dudgeon’s work encompasses an exploration of pictorial space, form, tonal mass and line, but his investigations of these formal concerns are deeply rooted in a sense of place regardless of where he finds himself. Working exclusively in acrylic these days, “The paintings are studio based involving imagination and memory as well as perception”. The little drawings, done on location, which spill out across the pages of his sketchbooks are used as a basis, along with colour notes, for more abstract works which combine elements from different studies.
He works with graphite sticks and charcoal on cartridge, a surface that he likes because of the way that the graininess of the graphite picks up the texture of the paper. He finds that charcoal is altogether softer, complementing the hardness of the graphite and he often rubs back into the surface to reveal what is underneath the layers of drawn marks. This process of peeling back the layers in his paintings and drawings ties in with his lifelong interest in archaeology, revealing an equal concern with what is below the surface of the land and the sea, as much as what is immediately apparent.
Rockpooling. Pencil, 23 x 30 cm
The Chase. Pencil, 21 x 30 cm
A Walk in the Snow. Pencil 60 x 84 cm
© Fiona Robinson 2011
Gerry Dudgeon’s Drawings are on show in a group exhibition, Drawing: the visual representation of thought at Bridport Arts Centre, Bridport, Dorset, until 18th February 2012.
www.bridport-arts.com
Meryl Ainslie
Silver Casts. Wall, Ellis Island Step, Broom Stitching
Meryl Ainslie’s small, quiet works have a profundity that belies their diminutive size, addressing issues of value, beauty, legacy and scale. Based on detailed observation of her surroundings her work is about experience rather than mere recording of an image. “I see drawing as a period of time and not a moment in time`’ During a recent boat trip in Croatia she made sketchbook drawings of rocks and crevices. Drawn on the move, sight-size, these finely observed studies extend across the paper occasionally continuing on to the next page.
Croatia Sketchbook Drawing
India Cochin 10.5 X 15cm watercolour, pencil, collage and Silver MSA 17A Boat Stitch
In the last few years Ainslie has travelled extensively, India, Croatia, America, but it is indicative of the intimacy of her work that she journeys just as far in her imagination within the confines of the family farm in Wiltshire where she lives and works. It is the nature of her response to the tiny unremarkable things that she encounters that links these places. Her response to place, is immensely significant. The physical act of drawing locks her into a particular time and location far more so than if she had taken a photograph. “ When you make a drawing you remember the experience of the place”.
Croatia Sketchbook Concertina
Guggenheim NY 10.5 X 25cm watercolour, pencil, collage and Silver MSA36
Her sketchbooks are multi sensory containing 2D and 3D drawings, combining pencil, wash, pigment, self adhesive polaroids, and collected objects. Tucked into the back of each sketchbook are pieces of prepared paper. Japanese waxy tissue, squared paper, card, pieces of ‘found’ paper, many primed with gesso. Proper gesso, she is keen to point out, made with rabbit skin glue which provides a beautiful sensuous surface. “I like to work on a prepared surface. It is to do with the quality of the mark, particularly with brush drawings”. In India she also sources 18th century document paper, which is still used locally for miniatures. Sometimes she takes little brown envelopes with her which not only provide a drawing surface, but also portable storage for her treasure trove of findings and, “I just quite like the way a brown envelope knocks the colour back a tiny bit”. She is drawn to investigate anything which catches her eye. Often something just at the periphery of her vision and which appears to have no value whatsoever. She takes impressions of objects, surfaces: a door stud, a seed head, the claw of a dead songbird. These are then cast in silver using a lost wax process. One of her most emotive objects is a cast of part of the bottom tread of the stairs at Ellis Island, a step on which millions of immigrants trod on their way into America. This translation of ostensibly insignificant objects into items of worth is part of her process of investigation into what makes something precious apart from the obvious aspect of monetary value.
Ellis Island Leaders NY 10.5 X 25cm watercolour, pencil, collage and Silver MSA87
She will take her investigations to extraordinary lengths sending a little drawing back to the place where it was made or where the idea for it originated. She hopes that someone will take the drawing in, almost like a stray, and by doing so, by treasuring it, give it an intrinsic worth which is part of its own history. She doesn’t mind that she has no idea what happens to these little works.
Wax casts
Meryl Ainslie dares us to reconsider notions of value in art. Her pieces of silver are her currency, prized according to weight and the current value of raw silver. She takes something of apparently no value and imbues it with worth, by creating something beautiful out of it. By casting it in a precious metal, she turns it into something which can be judged by a different set of criteria. However her little drawings are just as beautiful and also have a value, despite the fact that they are made using one of the cheapest materials available. Through the intervention of an artist, these works become objects of desire, a legacy, a history of experiences, hers and someone else’s, to pass on.
Silver Cast Broom Stitching
Best Boys Kerala Boats 10.5 X 25cm Etching and Silver MSA16A 1/25. Edition of 10
© Fiona Robinson 2011
Re-collect
16 November – 16 December 2011
Meryl Ainslie – Silver sculpture, drawings and etchings
Susan Preston – Paintings and works on paper
Susan Preston Drawing
Boat Detail III 16 x 13.5cm, graphite on prepared paper
Scroll down for an earlier piece on Susan Preston published September 2010
‘Re-collect’ reunites two artists in an exhibition of 100+ pieces of silver sculpture, drawing, painting and etching. Meryl Ainslie and Susan Preston crossed paths in India, and here they co-inhabit the gallery space with certain individuality and a shared experience.
Exhibition Dates
16 November – 16 December 2011
Open Wed – Friday 10.30 – 3pm plus
‘Special’ open weekend 3 and 4 December 10.30 – 3pm
Other times by appointment
Telephone: 01672 511999
www.rableydrawingcentre.com
Martyn Brewster
Coastal Light Works on paper No. 7
Martyn Brewster spent the summer of 2011 drawing intensively. In a new departure he worked indoors rather than going out and making observational drawings in the landscape. Sketchbooks of all shapes and sizes are piled in his studio containing hundreds of little drawings in pen and wash, which tumble from page to page of the thick creamy paper. Although suggestive of boats, islands or still lives these are linear abstract forms which generate a great sense of space and are an immensely rich source for the small works set out on tables and the larger canvases that lean against the walls. A recurring motif is the square, which Brewster says is “a device that I have used all my life and which now underpins work which is much softer”. Over the years he has often veered away from using blocks because they are associated with artists like William Scott, Hans Hofmann or Josef Albers but ultimately he feels that you have to go with what works for you within the context of your personal visual language.
Coastal Light Works on paper No. 15
Coastal Light Works on paper No. 11
On a table adjacent to the sketchbooks are a group of small works in acrylic and collage. Dissatisfied with the flatness of acrylic he started adding collage and he has now moved this way of working into larger paintings on canvas. He is somewhat surprised to find himself using acrylic but is finding that he is revelling in its potential: the looseness of the paint and the transparency, which produces beautiful watercolour effects. Brewster views his most recent work in terms of three distinct strands but linked by his perennial modes of enquiry. “Rich oil paintings; drawings in their own right; then acrylic with collage added, to give a little bit of texture to the paleish colours and greys.” His abstract works are rooted in an exploration of the landscape and informed by his process of moving from drawing through monoprint to canvas, following line, form and colour. His work is thematic and numbered within a particular theme. Viewed as a group reading from image to image one can see his thought processes as he inches forward moving the ideas on from work to work. Martyn’s most recent paintings, the result of an incredibly focused period of work, has a new freedom and a lightness of touch which is reflected in a change of palette to paler hues which make the intensely-coloured small shapes sing out. He still continues to work with his signature strong colours in some works: vibrant passionate reds with daring touches of purple or hauntingly beautiful, dark crepuscular blues. He no longer feels compelled to lose the underpainting as the work progresses, which leads to softer edged shapes and a greater sense of fluidity. This new approach is evident in the recent “Coastal Light” series in which he exploits the sense of light and space which he experiences living on the edge of the sea.
Coastal Light No. 15
Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm
Coastal Light No. 24
Oil on canvas 50 x 50 cm
Coastal Light No. 18
Oil on canvas 150 x 150 cm
The intensity of the drawing experience and the large number of drawings which he completed before moving into paint has led him to look again at the divisions between drawing and painting. The importance of the small sketchbook drawings and works on card both as compositional studies and as works in their own right is leading him to consider the genesis of the works on canvas. He has moved into colour because it is such an integral part of his practice but he still has a sense that essentially he is drawing but with colour rather than monochrome. Both the oil and the acrylic as media are now working so well that he feels that they are almost interchangeable. He says, “Whether they were drawings, or big oil paintings, or acrylic, or works with collage, there was a consistency coming out in the work which was very satisfying”.
Coastal Light Works on paper No. 17
Coastal Light No.26
Acrylic on canvas 20 x 20 cm
© Fiona Robinson 2011
Martyn Brewster’s exhibition ‘Coastal Light’ is at The Arthouse Gallery, Bournemouth until 18 October. He has been represented for many years by The Jill George Gallery but is now represented by Waterhouse & Dodd, Cork Street, London, UK and his first solo show with his new gallery will take place in February 2012.
Emma Stibbon
Aqueduct
Woodcut
Emma Stibbon’s work is large, monumental in scale and intention, dark and brooding by nature. If she were a painter or a sculptor this would perhaps not be surprising but she is a printmaker and our default position is to see print as something that is relatively small. Whaling Station Deception Island 2006, is 117 x 238 centimetres. Printed on Japanese tissue which has been subtly almost invisibly pieced, since Japanese paper large enough for Emma’s purposes is difficult to source, the quality of the mark making in woodcut and the desolation of the image are astounding. It is printed from two plates in this case large sheets of plywood, they have the typical woodcut marks, the result of chiselling out the wood from the surface of a plywood sheet, and her signature dark, inky tones. The reduction in scale of images seen on screen or in print severely limits the appreciation of the tonal range. The physical work has an entirely different quality. One can see the colour, the subtle changes from dark to light, the delicacy and the marks have space to breathe.
Abandoned Whaling Station, Deception Island, Woodcut, 117 x 238cm, 2006
Duce Duce
Ink on paper
63.2 x 45cm
Stibbon is often regarded as a landscape artist known for rock faces and glaciers yet cityscapes feature strongly in her work. She combines elements of time, memory and place. Working in monochrome, her media of choice are drawing with chalk on paper and blackboard, black ink and woodcut. Landscape is a central preoccupation but it is engagement with place and its layered histories that drives her. “Through the act of drawing I try to reflect on the temporality, the mutability of place.” Photography is an important tool, which she uses to gather information alongside archive material and drawings. However photography is not just a visual resource, she imports the framing and time based elements of both film and stills into her approach to dealing with her subject matter, particularly in the urban work. She finds that there is something melancholic about trying to “relive that moment” that the shutter clicked. The beauty and seduction of her subjects concern her as well. Her cultural heritage, British Romantic and Neo-Romantic schools, encompasses notions of the sublime and her woodcut Aqueduct part of the Roma series also has hints of German landscape artist Caspar David Friedrich.
Piazza San Pietro
Chalk on board
28.4 x 49cm
Nurtured by earlier studies of German fascist building, her fascination with the overlaying of different ideologies on urban topography crystallised during her Derek Hill Scholarship at the British School at Rome in 2010. She focused on the massive concrete structures built by Mussolini to enhance his world standing and promote his political ideals, setting these alongside the vastness of The Colosseum or The Temple of Vespasian and Titus, equally strong statements of the power of Imperial Rome. The element of reportage in her work is a deliberate choice and often, though not overtly, political. Her images highlight the fact that the descent into dereliction of Roman Architecture was paralleled by the fall of that empire and that this has unsettling implications for the present and the future.
Colesseo II
Ink on paper
Temple of Vespasian and Titus
There is an irony here. Despite their monumentality Stibbon does not make these massive buildings the subject of grandiose sculpture or great history painting they appear in prints and drawings, media that were once regarded as the least powerful and having the least prestige of all artwork. Yet these woodcuts and drawings exude power conveying the darkness and heavy threat of totalitarianism.
Palazzo della Civilta del Lavore
Chalk on board 54 x 36cm
© Fiona Robinson
Emma Stibbon in her studio
Emma Stibbon
ROMA
An exhibition of woodcuts and drawings
Rabley Drawing Centre
Rabley Barn
Mildenhall
Marlborough
Wiltshire
SN8 2LW
17 September – 30 October 2011
Open Wed & Friday 10.30 – 5pm
Thursdays 10.30 – 3pm
Saturdays and other times by appointment
Artists Talk – Emma Stibbon
Saturday 8 October
2.30pm
Free (pre-booking essential, please contact the gallery)
followed by a screening of
ROMA
Director: Federico Fellini
Tickets £10
Includes tea, cake and the movie!
Tickets in advance only from the KVAT box office Tel 07771 704 253
http://www.kvat.co.uk/store/
Laurie Steen
‘I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance ee cummings
This lovely quote, is just one of many, which expresses for Laurie Steen how ee cummings ‘gives a humanness to nature’. A quality that emerges again and again from the simplicity of his text.
Steen feels that the way the poet pares down the words, thoughts, ideas, to their bare essentials validates the way that she works. She feels an affinity with cummings, because she perceives a relationship between their working processes.
The connection with nature:
“no heart can leap,no soul can breath
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea.” ee cummings
and inescapably, I suggest the picturesque, and the Romantic tradition, makes cummings significant to her oeuvre. Steen says, “What touches me about poetry, and particularly that of ee cummings is the weight that an individual line can carry. My aim is to make drawings where only the most important lines survive. Lines that make you want to read, then breathe, then read the drawing some more because you know it is moving something inside of you – and there will be parts that confuse and parts that sing and parts that you know you will never be able to forget.”
here and there, graphite painting 12-11
graphite on gessoed panel
30 x 45cm.
As you walk down the track away from Laurie Steen’s studio, a spectacularly beautiful landscape falls away into the distance. Mounds of green slopes, interlocking as far as the horizon, are punctuated with majestic dark trees, stark against a low December sunlight. This vista is what Steen observes every day, the inspiration which informs her drawings and paintings of nature. In the studio she works enveloped in an emphatic silence which makes space for the sounds of birds, the whisper of beeches, horses, the gamekeeper’s footsteps as he passes three times a day to feed the pheasants.
in front of me, graphite painting 10-11
Her working process has a rhythm that is in tune with the cycle of seasons and the routine that informs her days. The spring and summer months see her out making ‘shadow drawings’ of the emerging leaves on transparent mylar and rag paper; ethereal creations that capture the movement of a gentle breeze on a warm day. In Winter she immerses herself in the architectural splendour of the denuded trees, observing the bones of their structures. She reads the architectural writings of Louis Kahn, who wrote lyrically of what he called, ‘silence and light’ saying, “…silence is not very, very quiet. It is something which you may say is lightless, and darkless. …Light to silence, silence to light, has to be a kind of ambient threshold and when this is realized, sensed, there is Inspiration.”
Portrait of our (not unremarkable) Tree I. 43-10
oil, graphite on wooden panel
20 x 40 x 3cm.
She works extensively with photography, “composing with the camera” and then returns to the studio with these images, written notes and pencil studies. Recently she has been working on board, a more practical surface for shipping work to her galleries in Switzerland and Canada. She is also working on a smaller scale, a necessity dictated by the size of her current studio, very different to her loft space in Canada where she worked and lived up until three years ago. Canadian by birth, annual visits to see family in England over the years have now translated themselves into living in the UK full-time, so her ‘belonging in two places’ in now weighted in favour of Devon, to a deeply rural location in the South West of England, an area with which she has had a love a affair most of her life.
nest. Drawing 40-10
Drawing board 07.2010 – 05.2011 (detail)
Steen has a singular vision. She describes her work, as ‘very experiential’. Everything that feeds into her work is the result of direct experience, something observed whilst on a walk or when driving, or just being. “When you walk past something, or experience something in nature, it is that specific bit that inspires me and needs to be recorded. I have always had the desire to make work that is fleeting, which directly recalls the sensation of experiencing a specific subject.” The need to relate her vision with human scale, probably owes something to her architectural training. The complete focus on trees and the natural world is relatively recent, but she makes no distinction in her working methods between her tree paintings and the portraiture which is another element of her practice. The one informs the other and they are all part of the same progression. When she wants to push her work in new directions she often returns to drawing people until she solves the problem and then returns to her trees applying the results of her investigations to this different subject matter. Her working method is slow, a building up of layers of graphite drawing, gesso and oil. Then redrawing, waiting for pigments to dry, adding, looking and thinking until the piece is finally how she wants it to be. Her drawn line is very beautiful, delicate, thin and yet has a tensile strength which encapsulates both the brittleness of dead twigs and the suppleness of sap filled branches.
© Fiona Robinson 2011
Header Image
liminal view 09.3.2009. 04-11
oil, graphite on wooden panel
20 x 80 x 3cm.
Laurie Steen’s work can be seen at Badcocks in Penzance in the show
New Beginnings
18th August 2011 – 10th September 2011
Badcocks 10 Long Row, Sheffield, Penzance, Cornwall TR19 6UN. The gallery will be open from Tuesday to Friday – 11am to 4pm, Saturday 11 – 2pm. Otherwise OPEN BY APPOINTMENT PLEASE CONTACT THE GALLERY 01736731034 or 07977059326.
far from,,, View 21-11
oil and graphite on wooden panel
22.5 x 30 cm.
George Meyrick
Shadow 2011
“There is no perfect, it is unobtainable”, according to George Meyrick. His sculptures are hand-made and he sees their inaccuracies. Others see their exactness. For him “The pieces that really succeed are the ones that the viewers create in their minds and they will be utter perfection”. The scale of Meyrick’s sculpture is domestic, he aims for “a modesty, a lightness of touch, a delicacy”. When he makes installations they are more expansive, they cut into the space and become an integral part of it. He has a simple, direct approach to materials using what is readily available, like the yellow tiled wall in Join the Dots 2007. An existing part of a structure, a simple form and imagination work together to make his point.
Join the Dots 2007
He imagines that his pieces are buried within walls, indicated by a shape touching the surface but hidden inside. So the geometry of the perfect form is only complete when the viewer’s imagination takes the line on into the structure of the wall or the fabric of the building. It is not just a triangle painted on a wall. There is more to it than that. What is visible is incomplete.
Interjacent forms installation 2005
Brewhouse Installation 2008
Meyrick plans his work in sketchbooks. Small freehand triangles and coloured lines flow across the pages. Out of this chaos, he creates order. He paints precise coloured drawings using a mapping pen filling in the colour so it remains flat, unmarked. Once he used blacks; gouache, acrylic and Indian ink, which relied on the play of light on their differing surfaces to suggest the illusion of three dimensions. Now he uses bright, clear hues. He makes card maquettes which hang from the studio ceiling or sit alongside each other on a deep shelf. Finally his sculptures are constructed out of birch-faced ply and then painted.
Sketchbook 2011
The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds holds all his early sketchbooks and maquettes in their archive. His student ‘drawings’, consisting of wooden rods and shadows thrown by a light source, had an elusive quality which is still evident in his current work. Solid triangles intersect corners or emerge from the surface of a wall and combine with an apparently three-dimensional form which is actually a piece of flat painting. It is the illusion of solidity which makes them so intriguing. His ‘Form from Form’ series relocates a section of wall without adding any material, essentially creating a sculpture from nothing. Meyrick’s installation, Plinth 2007, shown in the Bournemouth University Art Collection 2007/2008 exhibition relates to the earlier Form From Form series.
Plinth 2007
Form From Form 2006
Increasingly Meyrick’s installations are collaborative. From his ideas he creates a physical form but leaves the final version to be interpreted by the viewer. As with much art they need that perfect triangle of maker, art work and audience to make them complete. He does not use beautiful materials to produce a beautifully made product; his works are not objects to possess. For Meyrick the idea is what matters.
He cites the Russian constructivists and the American minimalists as influences and he also talks about a “wonderful box” by Naum Gabo in the Tate: “It is looking quite battered now but you wouldn’t want to see it remade, you enjoy it as a battered object, but in my mind’s eye I see it as it was”. This is the key to Meyrick’s work, the importance of it remaining perfect in someone’s mind.
Inside the outside IV 2006
© Fiona Robinson. 2005 /2011
Rebecca Salter
Untitled RR35 2009. mixed media on paper 100 x 152 cm 39 x 60 in.
Rebecca Salter’s beautiful contemplative work stays with the viewer long after they have left the physical object behind. Her labour intensive process retains that element of craftsmanship, which she acquired during her time in Japan at a formative stage in her career. Her layering of marks, dashes, washes is worked on, removed, covered, building up residues of light, tone and line which fuse and meld into a quality of other-worldliness which is both ethereal and adamantine. Her work, frequently informed by a grid-like structure, has always been dependent on observation, sometimes leaving a horizontality which suggests the meeting of land and sky, at others and this seems more present in some of her most recent work, a strong verticality. In 2003 Salter completed a three-month Residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut and the work that she is currently doing has its genesis in that experience.
Untitled AB4 2010. mixed media on linen 75 x 70 cm 30 x 27 in.
Untitled AB19 2010. mixed media on linen 140 x 130 cm 55 x 51 in.
Rebecca Salter’s trajectory from Bristol trained ceramics student to the English Agnes Martin, as she is sometimes called, via Japan, is well documented. Her six years in Kyoto when her contemporaries where busy making names for themselves in London left her feeling isolated when she returned to England, more of an observer of the art scene than a participant. Now an exhibition which opened on February 2nd at the Yale Centre for British Art in Connecticut establishes her as a major player on the British Art scene. She has been given the whole of the third floor at the centre, comprising some five thousand square feet and this huge show, over 150 pieces of work spanning the years 1981 – 2010, is essentially a retrospective of Salter’s work. The inclusion of watercolour studies and printmaking tools alongside paintings, drawings, and prints provides a history both of Salter’s processes and her career development. Most of the pieces, had been selected by the end of 2009 leaving her free to work towards her upcoming solo show at Howard Scott’s in NYC in March and a further solo show at the Beardsmore Gallery in London in the Autumn. Salter found the selection of work for the Yale show, “an interesting experience, “the curator made me get everything out of the cupboard”! With a watercolour in the forthcoming survey of British water-colourists at Tate Britain as well, Salter is having an exceptionally busy year.
I interviewed Rebecca Salter for AXIS Dialogue in 2007 and we talked then about the centrality of drawing to her work. In the intervening years she has come to an absolute conviction that drawing sits at the centre of her practice and the show at Yale picks up this theme, alongside the Japanese angle, exploring the many ways in which all of her work always comes back to drawing. Salter had no exhibitions in 2008 concentrating on drawing for the whole year. It was a year of research and development and everything she did in those twelve months fed into her work. In fact she says, her drawing in the studio “is still feeding off that experience”. She has become increasingly attached to an isolated area of the Lake District near Wastwater and goes there regularly to draw the landscape from observation. Whilst there she works in sketchbooks in watercolour using her hands, sticks or whatever is available. The show consequently contains “quite a bit of watercolour and things to do with water”. She feels that familiarity with a place is important because, “When you keep going back to the same place you don’t start at zero”. Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, was particularly interested in Salter’s regular visits to Cumbria and although she does not regard her as a landscape painter, she sees her as a Romantic Artist, a label that fits with the curatorial ethos of the show.
Untitled RR31 2009. mixed media on linen 190 x 180 cm 74 3/4 x 70 7/8 in.
A companion show at Yale University Art Gallery, Rebecca Salter and Japan, concentrates on the Japanese element featuring work that flags up the importance of that experience. This exhibition includes items from the extensive University Art Gallery’s Japanese Collection. According to Rebecca, Sadako Ohki, The Japan Foundation Associate Curator of Japanese Art, who curated the show, “ was fantastic and very knowledgeable having a Doctorate in Japanese Calligraphy, and the show is done very intelligently”. Salter has always sheered away from being labeled purely as an artist with Japanese connections wanting her work to be recognised for its intrinsic worth rather than for some version of the English artist abroad. This recognition is emphasised here by Salter’s work being shown alongside works by artists like Brice Marden and Mark Tobey, which are also informed by Oriental culture. One part of the Japanese connection, which particularly pleases Rebecca is the inclusion of a group of four woodcuts of her watercolour drawings made by Craftsmen from the Sato Woodblock Workshop, Kyoto. “I did the original watercolours and they decided which ones they were going to do”, and in doing so these spectacularly accomplished craftsmen have managed to capture the fluidity of watercolour in this apparently intransigent medium. Salter has specialist knowledge of these techniques having written two books on Japanese printmaking and is well aware that this type of woodcutting is a dying art.
Quadra 2 2010. 12×12 inches Japanese woodblock on torinoko paper. Printed by Sato Woodblock Workshop, Kyoto
Quadra 3 2010. 12×12 inches Japanese woodblock on torinoko paper. Printed by Sato Woodblock Workshop, Kyoto
In the last couple of years Salter has also become involved in architecture, making her first piece of public art for St Georges Hospital in London. The Arts Officer for the project at the hospital visited the Beardsmore Gallery, which represents Salter in the UK, and initially wanted a painting for the new foyer, which was being designed for the hospital. She had seen an exhibition of the work of Agnes Martin and hence felt that Rebecca was an obvious choice. In discussions with the artist it was decided that a specifically designed environment would be a much better solution rather than just hanging a painting behind the desk of the nurses’ station. In collaboration with the architects she designed a curved wall that contains white LED lights behind recycled glass, which lead the eye and visitors into the space. A different piece, sited behind the reception desk, is lit with coloured LEDs and the staff on duty can choose the colour , often choosing the less subtle options. Now that the unit is open the consensus is that Calligraphy of Light has significantly improved the welcome to the hospital.
Calligraphy of Light. St George’s Hospital, Tooting, London
© Fiona Robinson 2011
“into the light of things”: Rebecca Salter, works 1981-2010
3 FEBRUARY — 1 MAY, 2011
Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven‚ Connecticut
Rebecca Salter and Japan
will be held concurrently at Yale University Art Gallery.
A substantial monograph, Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things edited by Gillian Forrester, featuring essays by Forrester, Sadako Ohki, Achim Borchardt-Hume, and Richard Cork published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, is available in the UK from Amazon.
Rebecca Salter Recent Work
Howard Scott Gallery, New York
24 March – 30 April 2011
Waterclour
Tate Britain, London
16 February – 21 August 2011
Tony Martin
‘I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.’
This quote from Clearances In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 by Seamus Heaney encapsulates Tony Martin’s sparse enclosing blue lines. These few words have become almost a manifesto for him. Martin’s early work post-college was almost entirely figurative and landscape based. Most, apart from the drawings, has been destroyed. He still looks to landscape, still valuing the idea that fields contain the history of their past, however there are now other more significant references which are themselves underpinned and connected by a personal “theological perspective”. Poetry, Architecture and Music have in common a sense of space, a sense of interval. The silence, the pauses between notes or words, the interruptions of walls and doors between rooms are as important as the sounds, the phrases and the void. It is these things that Tony Martin explores, investigates and captures in his line drawings.
Six years ago during a printmaking session he was attempting to get the effect of aquatint when he had a moment of revelation. Reaching out at random he picked up a blue conté crayon and drew a line around the edge of a piece of absorbent Fabriano printmaking paper. Thus began an obsession with line, margins, edges and pentimenti, an Italian word used by Art Historians to describe the corrections made to Renaissance paintings. Martin quotes Leonardo, “Drawing is the art of correction”, and he pursues this in the complex process of paring down, correcting, rubbing out which occurs until he achieves a resolution which satisfies him. “I keep reworking them until they come to a place that I am happy with. I have an internal sense of when a line is right”. The whole history of each drawing is present on the paper. The distinctive soft, woven quality of his chosen surface, printmaking as opposed to drawing paper, allows traces of his obliterated marks to be retained creating a ghost image of what has taken place. The line and the space it contains are the most important elements of these small square drawings.
Recently Martin has started to increase the size of his drawings which has led him to reconsider the quality of the line he is using, in response to the change in scale. 2010 also saw him returning to the exploration of colour, a move partly inspired by a visit to Sandra Blow’s Studio in Cornwall as well as his continuing experiments with collage through which he hopes to, “more fully integrate line, colour and form”.
Poetry has had a profound influence on Martin and it is an essential element of his intellectual engagement with the formal processes of making his work. Seamus Heaney’s poetry and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets have been vital sources of inspiration in his search for the ultimate poetic space within the confines of geometrical two-dimensional flat surface. In Architecture, he identifies with the stately geometric rhythms of Norman and Romanesque buildings. In Music, predictably, the measured tones of Bach’s Baroque compositions bear a relationship to the process of refinement he takes his drawings through, in search of a simplicity which masks their immense complexity. He says of Seamus Heaney’s, collection, ‘Opened Ground’, “I felt what was coming across was an arrangement of word, of space and measure and that there was something in this of what that I wanted to do with the graphic line.” Martin has collaborated with poets too, with Ray Givens on his volume ‘Earthworks’ and with the Cornish poet Alan Kent. “To move from being stirred by poetry to working with poets was a thrill”. As with all of his work, the drawings for these two volumes are in no sense illustrations of the texts, they are deeply felt responses to the poetic language.
© Fiona Robinson 2010
Betty Gannon
Betty Gannon’s large powerful Structure drawings dominate any space in which they are hung. Graphite powder, sticks, pencils, even blocks of this shiny carbon mineral are manipulated on square or generous rectangles of hot press paper. The work is process based, rubbed, scratched, manipulated. Powerful physical marks made using the whole strength of her arm are contained within a series of grids, which gives an element of control. She works very quickly and the energy that this speed generates suggests the interior energy contained within the buildings she draws. Her working method is rhythmic and repetitive, the size of the work necessitating long periods inside a meditative space in which, she says, she gets lost and which she finds is “a nice place to be”.
She is interested in architecture and urban spaces often homing in on derelict and abandoned buildings as well as the many construction and demolition sites that still litter the Irish countryside following the collapse of the boom years of the Celtic Tiger. “In the last four or five years, everyday there has been a new house on the landscape. There are half-built housing estates on the edges of towns. They call these ghost towns.” In 2008 she had an opportunity to work with two other artists inside Bellacorick peat-fired power station in north Mayo before it was decommissioned. In March 2010 together with photographer Michael Gannon and Ian Wieczorek her large drawings were part of an exhibition, ‘Bellacorick-impressions of a place’, at the North Mayo Arts Centre, Aras Inis Gluaire.
Gannon has a huge vocabulary of marks and tones at her disposal from the darkest, so deep there is a waxiness to the texture, to the palest of gently rubbed graphite. A chaos controlled by the order of geometry; softness versus hard and deep unrelieved black opposed to ever lightening tones of grey. She is interested in change and returns again and again to the same place, recording the changes photographically. This element of repetition occurs in the physical making of the work too! Although it is essentially all about mark-making and a sense of enclosure. House shapes with energetic marks inside them, not desperate to get out, I don’t think, but certainly not going over the edges of the shape, reveal an element of autobiography in the sense that they are directly sourced from her surroundings and her situation. Choosing to work at home in order to be there for her family as her children grow, her work has often centred on the location of her daily life. In her house drawings, the structure of the external shape contains and supports the skeleton of the drawing. Circling lines weave and curve around the rectangles hinting at other interpretations: pipes and wires carrying water and electricity within the fabric of a building; lifeblood moving around the body in veins and arteries; family life flowing through the spaces of a home. Far from restricting her as an artist, her daily routine has provided rich sources of inspiration as she looks outwards through doors and windows, the gaps in walls. She constantly gathers references, which will feed into a new set of drawings, as diverse as: the footsteps of children running between her garden studio and her kitchen; the worn sections of the yellow lines on a road; to a discarded red ribbon in a Renaissance painting of St George and the Dragon. Her perennial concern is to explore change, to let things move and develop, to retain the sense that everything is always in a state of flux. However she says, “It is important to contain an element of control, otherwise it would be chaos”.
On occasions the drawings metamorphose into structures themselves as she bends and shapes the paper into cylinders, rectangles and boxes with lids. “After I have the drawings done I need to put them into 3D. They seem to want to come off the page.” An interesting development arising from this necessity to create a three dimensional form is that the form itself takes over the structural element of the drawing, leaving her free to draw in a looser more organic way. This softer approach is evident in her new series of drawings inspired by broken surfaces. In the ‘Breaking Down’, drawings, the enclosing rigidity of strong verticals and horizontals has been replaced by circles and curves; dividing and multiplying like cells; spreading out from the centre of the paper like a stain. Ink becoming a species of decay where the bruise moves from the initial source of impact to contaminate the surface of the pristine page. However, the circles spreading outwards in these recent organic drawings have unbroken lines. In a volte-face it could be the white of the paper, which is encroaching on the inked marks so these curving lines still function as a boundary, protecting the disintegrating miasma within them.
© Fiona Robinson 2010
Restless Structures
22nd November 2010 – 17th December 2010
by Betty Gannon ‘Restless Structures’ is an exhibition of drawing that explores architectural and industrial forms and spaces, which are at the stage of being developed, demolished or left to decay.
At The Alley Arts Centre, The Alley Theatre, Railway Street, Strabane, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, BT82 9FJ.
http://www.alley-theatre.com/exhibitions/38/restless-structures/
