Art From London Markets, a-n feature

This week I got the delightful news that I will be having a show in a small public gallery in Lincolnshire in 2019. I will be producing a body of work directly related to place and lost memories. This is the county where I was born, however my family moved away when I was very small. The landscapes and colours of Lincolnshire are the first that I saw, and the family stories that have been told by my parents are part of who I am, and yet how much are they my own memories? And how much has the area transformed in the intervening years? This is my starting point for this project, and I am feeling excited. Phase one is going to be a photographic expedition over the Easter break.

In the mean time I have been playing around with images from landscapes of my later childhood, places I do remember, the New Forest, Martin Down, places local to my later childhood home: drawing, photographing, developing abstractions and playing with creating evocative spaces.

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As these works reflect on geographic place then the abstractions have a basis in real landscapes, refined to the point of suggestion. This is a development in my work, started with Fulham Lethe, prior to that the abstractions were from memories of place or a direct interpretation of pure idea. I am interested in where the interplay between idea, story and geographic place will take me.
The London work has been embedded in an idea of place as a trading centre, and a place that is in almost constant flux, the form constantly changing. It is lovely to set off on a new adventure, a rural contrast and it will be interesting to challenge that idea of rural constancy.

Having scaled up my work in the 2016-7 period I will need to scale down again, as the gallery has a limited number of large walls, I will be receiving the gallery plans soon.

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This week started with the Talented Art Fair, I spent the whole weekend talking about my work with the visitors and meeting other artists. I was delighted that Conrad Carvalho came along and brought visitors. The Fair was really well organised by the team at Lemon Art and they are not only professional but also very friendly. Thank you Rachel Dein for helping me set up and to Rohan for helping me pack away.

As a result of a labyrinthine hunt for Roberson Matt Glaze Medium, which is a rare thing in London just now I found myself in Cornellisen’s in Bloomsbury this week. This is a shop I love but also enter with trepidation. It is the most expensive place to buy Roberson’s (but the best place to buy pigment), also as a result the only place in London with the last few bottles of this medium available. I share this valuable information with you only because I have just bought a litre and have a promise from Atlantis (the cheapest place to buy it) that they will let me know as soon as it is returned to stock.

Hunt over I went to a local cafe and overhear a lovely conversation going on between staff and customers about Polish wedding plans, the waitress has been back to Poland to plan her wedding, and within a week has sorted everything from church to dress to invitations…and the story softens into the story of how they met, how long they have been together, whether he asked her or she asked him…and at this point she tells us ( entranced, we have all become her audience) that he proposed on Westminster Bridge, her voice once confident and calm now breaking not wanting to make the connection with this week but having to.

I walked the short walk to the British Museum, once in Bloomsbury and having a little time it would be crazy not to go there. I am currently rereading The Iliad, so am planning on going to the classical galleries. On my way through the main hall I saw this sign, which made me smile, the best of London reactions possible.

Going through the Assyrian a galleries looking at the first writing ever, a writing that was initially developed to keep tally of trading, but which later became used in politics and for aesthetic purposes

Most of the imagery in the initial Assyrian galleries is political propaganda boosting the strength of the King, showing hunting imagery,

and in particular the killing of a lion with his own bear hands, very macho, and of masses of people coming to worship at the foot of the leader, and war..

you can find the cultural antecedents of the publicity campaigns of the likes of Putin here, although it has to be said done far more beautifully. What is significant is that by the time of Darius the imagery celebrates the diversity of his empire, to show his geographic reach, but at the same time showing a state comfortable enough with itself to acknowledge the cultural differences within its population. And in the imagery of these galleries are the starting points of the Greek aesthetic. So Greece presents a culturally homogenous imagery, however its basis is in cultural exchange with its neighbours. There is a pair of small galleries (Room 18) explaining the origins of the imagery on the Parthenon just before the main gallery including the image below which explains this is detail. And it is interesting to me that some

how so often when we look for cultural antecedents in the West we stop at Greece. And yet there has always been cultural exchange with the rest of the world, and that exchange is entangled with trading, trading of goods and trading of ideas and technological developments, the only difference is whether those bonds of trade sit in the bounds of agreement and respect for difference, or insularity and war like exchange.

This week London is hit by the result of the ideologies violence, Syria for years by the ideologies of war. Re-reading the Iliad brings to the fore how much war like behaviour is based on vengeance. The only way to end this is with a thirst for justice not revenge.

 

To add, I apologise for the side ways images, this happened as I imported them and I can’t see a way to rectify that…

www.artfromlondonmarkets.com

Last weekend I went to the New Forest, and took some photographs as the basis for creating abstract spaces in a brown / green spectrum resonant of my childhood memories. My work seems to be taking an auto biographical turn………….

I feel so lucky that this is where I grew up

and for the dramatic sky on the day of our walk

this place holds memories of the extremely happy and extremely sad

and above all an enormous sense of your own smallness in the landscape

I will be using these photos and others I took that day for inspiration with colour and to refine down the elements

which create that sense of space

and allow me to hold onto the emotional ambiguity

both soothing and

threatening

that they can embody

these wild spaces contrasted with the

more manicured private spaces of people’s gardens

which in this part of the world inevitably contain traces of the wild

coupled with planned order and

 

restricted boundaries

private ownership and
order

I can feel a new project coming on.