- Venue
- Annely Juda Fine Art
- Location
- London
Annely Juda Gallery recently showed the latest paintings by Edwina Leapman. Yesterday was the last day of the show, but the experience was so vivid it can be described. Sensuality compels description.
Leapman’s latest works impress with the weight of many decades of experience of laying paint on paint on canvas. She participates in and expands a tradition of abstract painting that makes paint inhabit a sensory dimension that suspends you between sight and touch and mood. I walked into the gallery’s sky lit top floor and weirdly it was like walking into the quiet of a garden, your eyes drawn here and there by fragrance, colour and pleasure.
Describing paintings in words is usually a pain, but these invite you to push the boat out and try. Maybe this is because they are open: a series of brushmarks are painted in rows across a richly coloured solid ground. The ground is like velvet brushed up by the strokes with a different light/colour cast.
But no that’s not quite it.
The ground has a depth, absorbing light and yet exuding colour, whether green, purple, blue, grey.
.. that sounds inadequate too.
Maybe “Deep green velvet” or “Deep velvet green” is better at evoking the presence of that painting’s ground. A differently accented colour paint is laid on top: strokes in lines. The colour of the paint on paint is so finely tuned that the colours vibrate, back and forth, in a shimmer. The strokes are rough-edged while the rhythm is mysteriously natural, heavy on the left and dwindling. Read as incisions they suggest the compression of natural forces like edges of shale. But just as easily they read as traces of freer movement that picked up the paint and dropped it as it drifted, hopped or fluttered away.
The rhythm resists any comparison with calligraphy. The message is not in the mark, but the strokes make the ground ‘sing’, like skidding horsehair on a string. The marks impress because they are amplified by the body of the ground, like a soundbox.
The tension is musical and this was as close to a musical experience as any exhibition of painting I have seen. No known music was evoked; it was fresh, not ‘sampled’ or derivative. Comparison with Rothko would be like comparing Schoenberg with Messiaen; they created different sound worlds. Leapman’s work sets up a distinctive hum of awakening, like a dawn chorus and you find yourself seeing these daubs of colour twinkle as if set in the skies of other planets.
But enough of my impressions. Now I want to demonstrate how these paintings connect. Let me finish with the poem that caught my eye on the way home on the tube. It is the only poem I saw. I had never seen this poem before. That it should appear to me at that moment is ..well..that is beyond description.
The way lives touch,
touch and spring apart,
the pulse synaptic,
local, but its stretch
electric – as when cities
lose themselves in velvet
under winking planes,
binding black hostilities
with gold chains.
-Anne Stevenson b1933 Poems on the Underground
Althea Greenan
London, March 28 2010
