I had a wonderful day of gallery-hopping in London with a painter friend on Saturday. We went to a lot of shows; the ones that resonated most with me were Phyllida Barlow at the Serpentine, Angela de la Cruz at Camden Arts Centre, Jenny Saville’s ‘Reproduction Drawings’ series at Gagosian, and Audrey Reynolds at Arcade. I’d never even heard of Audrey Reynolds before. As my friend said, ‘she really is a painter’s painter’. I loved the work and I also loved the piece that Jonathan Griffin wrote accompany the show. He writes beautifully about stains: ‘there is something reassuring about the indelibility of a stain. It is an index of an event that refuses to budge, a memory that promises to hold fast until we choose to discard it, along with the surface it’s anchored in. It is also personal: a stain belongs, by and large, in private and indoors’. Reynolds’ work has a quiet, delicate lightness of touch that stays in the mind for a long time. She also makes me think again about trying different supports, such as wood (perversely, since I have so many fresh new canvases stacked up in the studio!), and different media, such as household paint.
http://www.arcadefinearts.com/
