News

I’m very pleased to say that I’m able to put some new work on the website once more. It’s been difficult one way and another to even consider this, as family and friends will understand, but a few sunny days before winter set in took me back to the workshop after many months away. The result has been two Still Life paintings in memory of Liz, especially her scarves, which were a kind of signature of who she was.

A word about Still Lifes and titles in general here. The conventional form – Still Life with Vase/Tulips/Apples, for example – seems banal to me. I prefer a different form or source for a title – from popular music for example, and have Will and Joe to thank for the titles of these two paintings: ‘Yellow is the Colour’ and ‘For You, Blue’ (from Donovan, of course, and George Harrison).

I’ve also started what I think of as a series of paintings of ‘pathways’ – an all-too- meaningful theme, I’m afraid; but what fascinates me is the ambiguity of pathways – where the destination may be known or familiar, and in view, as it were, but literally out of sight. And there can be obstacles, delays, diversions, or mistakes. You can even get lost. And this is to say nothing about how our minds at the same time scurry this way and that, forward and back. So far these paintings are local to Ringmer and include three small preliminary sketches, but I hope to extend this series to include the Lewes ‘twittens’ (narrow lanes running North–South, to and from the High Street) with all their bends, high walls, doors that seem permanently locked, bricked-in window sites: everyday examples, that is to say, of an expected, but obscured, confined, and delayed destination. The titles of these  current works have the same source in long-remembered or favourite lines in popular music. For those who don’t know or only vaguely remember, ‘Step One … Step Two … Step Three’ is from the early rock-and-roller, Eddie Cochran.

The last entry on the website for this News commentary was, as you’ll see, December 2019 – February 2020. The gap of over two years tells you and us everything about this strange long episode, beginning more or less with the first lockdown and which has been difficult, one way or another, for everybody. Friends will know of Liz’s illness, hospitalizations, and ongoing treatment during this period – one in which the door to Blue Door Workshop remained closed and our combined art work was limited to two Christmas cards. Occasionally, Peter has found time and inclination since to try using pen, pastel and coloured pencils on small indoor studies of local trees and hedges after short local walks. He’s also just embarked on a set of illustrations to episodes in James Joyce’s Ulysses which marked the centenary of its first publication earlier this year. The (impossible?) target here is this year’s Bloomsday on June 16th in Dublin – where our son Joe will be a lively and erudite participant.
As we write this now, however, we have just completed a special week when we opened (and cleaned up) the workshop once again to show our combined work over previous periods and to call for people near and far to visit personally or visit the website to choose a work or works in return for a donation to the people of Ukraine via the International Red Cross.
This has been a heartening experience in a number of ways, in people’s generous and supportive response, and not least in encouraging us to think we just might be able to return to painting, lino-cutting, and collage and see these activities again as a part of normal life.

High Days and Holidays

          This year we holidayed in Andalucia, the Lake District, and Antibes in the South of France. Pete managed to draw and paint a little along the way but this was at the edges of things. Our short stay in May at Coniston in the Lake District was a walking holiday but we (re)visited John Ruskin’s house Brantwood and were very impressed by and learned more from the Ruskin Museum in town. This provides a wide and well-illustrated guide to his own art in drawing and water-colour, his art criticism – as, oddly, both defender of the young Turner and vilifier of James McNeill Whistler – and his social philosophy. His morally grounded thinking across these spheres inspired a radical mission to bring art and design and a pride in labour to all and resonates through to our own times.

          At the end of June we stayed with friends Marc and Sharon in Antibes. They introduced us to a feast of galleries and museums –as well as to Antibes’ bountiful daily market and wonderful seascape. The names of major artists just kept coming: Picasso, Miro, Matisse, Chagall and Leger, along with literally walls of other painters and printers, as well as gardens and a workshop of sculpture. 

           To pick out some of the most exciting venues for us:

              The Picasso Museum is in Antibes where he was invited to stay and work in 1946. The exhibition is a testament to his endless invention and sheer productivity and included also the work of two other artists, memorably paintings by Nicolas de Staël (see below) who was himself a resident of the town where sadly he committed suicide.

              Secondly, The Maeght Foundation in Vence offered a thematic organisation of an amazing range of artists across several rooms (only a few images of which are included below) and the marvels of Jean Miro’s sculptures in its grounds and gardens. This sunny outdoor scene had colour, comedy, delicacy, mass and magic: enough for Marc to nominate this setting as the preferred heaven of his afterlife

                The third, and perhaps most informative of exhibitions we saw was at the Leger Museum in Biot. The scope and variety of his work displayed here was a revelation as was the information – in the best notes we’ve ever encountered in a gallery – on his association with fellow artists and movements over his life-time across Europe and in the USA. The massive mosaics of his work on the exterior walls of the Museum were simply a marvel to behold. Be good to have these in a heavenly garden too.

                 And then, finally, as examples of directly sacred work, there was Matisse’s chapel in Vence and Chagall’s depiction of the opening chapters of the Bible and Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’ in Nice.

                               All in all, our touring visit was quite an education. Has it influenced our own work? Not directly, but we both feel encouraged and emboldened to try more and try differently.

            And so, on into August. We are showing at Art Wave once more, over two weekends, 17^th -18^th and 24^th – 26^th, after having missed last year. Unfortunately Liz’s print work has been hampered by illness, but we both hope to be able to show some new things, along with pottery by Rosemary Land, and some digitised portraits of stars and pop icons by our son Will. Here’s one:

The main news has to be that we are booked in for this year’s Art Wave in late August. Peter meanwhile has some postcards of Andalucian villages and Moorish design made during a holiday in February included in an exhibition of postcards in Eastbourne, held under the aegis of the Devonshire Collective gallery and workshop. Here’s one of the postcard designs.

Liz has now joined a print group there and is being encouraged to use new techniques such as monoprinting and collagraphy. Currently she is working on lino/woodcuts of The Owl and the Pussycat and Lewes Castle.

Peter’s picture of Lewes station’s defunct signal box is destined for the Runaway Café on platform 2. He has done a commissioned painting of Chalcot Crescent, Primrose Hill; two studies of Blakeney shore line (another short holiday); further studies of our nearby Norlington Lane; more small paintings on 18x 13cm panels of ‘things’ bringing the total to 24 (see the Portfolio) and a set of drawings featuring early C20th moderns (James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Bertolt Brecht and others).

                       ‘The tiniest place imaginable’. Vivien (Vivienne) Eliot with Eliot’s first corona typewriter in their flat in Crawford Mansions, Marylebone.

He’d like to find a way of introducing a sense of movement, a changed angle or elementary narrative into otherwise stationary views, making them more like movie stills or frames in a comic strip. Perhaps this is one way.

Our visits to galleries and shows have been sparing (though we have seen a lot of films) but have included the exhibitions of Anni Albers’ work and Pierre Bonnard’s paintings, both at Tate Modern, and a double exhibition at Charleston, practically on our doorstep. So here’s a few words on these.

Anni Albers at Tate Modern. This comprehensive exhibition was a revelation in its display of the range of Albers’ innovative work in weaving first as a student and then, alongside Joseph Albers, as a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar and subsequently at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She is renowned for her technical experiment and geometrically patterned weavings. Of particular, additional, interest, brought out in the exhibition, was her creative investigation of the relationship between pre-written languages and text and textiles and the representational and abstract qualities of woven threads resulting in her ‘pictorial weavings’. In later work she further investigated the visual and structural affinities between weaving, 3-D design and architecture. The overall impression was of an adventurous, productively sustained project which crossed boundaries, including the gendered compartmentalisation of weaving as domestic and female.

Pierre Bonnard. The Colour of Memory. Tate Modern.

We visited this exhibition with friends Marc and Sharon. It covered Bonnard’s career from the 1900s to the mid1940s. His own words ‘I leave it … I come back’ and ‘the presence of an object … is a hindrance for the painter’ are an apt description of his practice. Objects, interiors and landscapes were regarded as starting points, prompting an exploration of colour rather than a pursuit of representational fidelity. Clearly Bonnard was reluctant to ‘finish’ a work, either in its surface or as a statement. Characteristically he would prolong or revisit a work, even over several years, in a search for the emotional inspiration of its beginnings. A striking prose example of this was his late work Correspondances (1943), a series of fictional letters between members of his family, set in the 1890s, a period of happiness when he met his life-time partner and the subject of much of his painting, Marthe de Méligny.

What was our opinion? Here, clearly, was an oeuvre of commitment, integrity and originality. The paintings expanded our knowledge and in some ways challenged our taste and expectations, but did not (Peter would say) present a model to follow.

In Colour. Sickert to Riley; Philip Hughes. Charleston.

Charleston Trust currently stages two exhibitions in the newly converted barns, a striking addition to the Charleston experience. We went along with our younger son Joe who was down for Easter.

In Colour is curated by Cressida Bell, and presents a personal selection of over 20 works from the 1900s to the 1990s (book-ended by Walter Sickert and Bridget Riley) of interest in their use of various colour palettes, including the Charleston members Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and associate Roger Fry. The works themselves, not surprisingly across the span of several decades, are quite different in their subjects and execution. We found ourselves choosing favourites. Amongst many paintings she enjoyed, Liz picked out Roger Fry’s and Vanessa Bell’s views of Charleston pond, respectively from 1918 and 1919; Peter chose Euan Uglow’s ‘Quince’ (1988) and John Minton’s ‘Bridge from Cannon Street Station’ (1946) and Joe liked Bridget Riley’s abstract ‘Sapphire 2’ (1995).

The second exhibition was a thrilling introduction to Philip Hughes’s ecologically inspired landscapes. He has travelled, studied and painted across several continents including Antarctica and the works shown here were of the East Sussex Downs and St Ives, beautifully and precisely sketched in situ and selectively painted in bright segments, often across large sheets of rare, roughly textured paper. In a word they are terrific; not least as a fitting accompaniment to ‘In Colour’ next door. See his work if you can.

Mid-late October saw us making a flurry of visits to local galleries, some with an American friend who was visiting.

On 13th we attended an interview at the Towner with the artist Simon Ling whose work we had known from an earlier exhibition at the Tate (paintings of unnervingly unstable East End shops and buildings) a few years back, and whose new work in his first solo exhibition was on show at the Towner. This comprised a set of purposely untitled close-up paintings of chopped logs and of collaged sections of skeletons. The interview, which concentrated on his relation to objects, essentially the subject of his work, was fascinating. While Ling was content to think carefully in his own time about the process of becoming intently familiar with the subjects of his work, his interviewer was looking for comparisons with Heidegger, William Burroughs and Object-Oriented philosophical theory. The paintings and Ling’s conception of his engagement with their subjects do raise psycho-philosophical questions, but the interview presented us with quite different ways of thinking these through. We then revisited the exhibition with Ling’s preoccupations and experience in mind. It did mean we could literally look more closely.

The exhibition continues until 27 January.

On the 19^th we dropped in to the Private View of Fire! Art inspired by Bonfire Night at Keizer Frames Gallery in Lewes, curated by Laina Watt and including paintings, prints, photography and mixed media work by Peter Messer, Jo Lamb, Emily Warren, Marco Crivello and others. Lewes Bonfire took some explaining to an East Coast American friend who was visiting, but she could feel some of the heat it generates. The exhibition ran until the 5^th Nov. We’ve always admired Peter Messer’s work and especially liked the painting ‘Trouble Sleeping’ shown in a previous exhibition in September. Since then, and since Bonfire, we’ve had a chance to buy a print of this work. Visitors to 2 Church Villas will be able to appraise it for themselves.

Next we visited the newly converted barns at Charleston Farmhouse, now comprising an impressive exhibition space, an auditorium and a café. There were two exhibitions: both in different ways responses to and a celebration of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. One exhibition, including paintings, sculptures, collages, letters and a playlet on video also showed an original 1928 copy of the novel which included photographs confirming the association of the androgynous character Orlando with Vita Sackville-West and her family history. A second exhibition of black and white photographs by Zanele Mukoli ‘Faces and Phases’ addresses the question of sexual/gendered identity raised by Woolf’s novel and the very current debate on these questions, presenting specifically an ‘inside perspective’, says Mukoli on ‘black lesbian and transgender experiences … I have met on my journeys’ The result is sets of photographs of the ‘same’ person, presenting as male and female and in different social roles. The effect is stunning. A smaller third exhibit was of the dinner plates of ‘famous women’ painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant while they lived at Charleston. The exhibitions are open until 17^th February 2019.

A further visit was to Farley House (formerly Farley Farm) the celebrated ‘Home of the Surrealists’. This was, for some reason, our first visit. We knew it was there but just not ventured the 30min car ride to Muddles Green, Chiddingly. Others may have the same experience. It is though really worth a visit. The gallery, next to the house, was currently showing recently-discovered photographs by Lee Miller who lived there with artist Roland Penrose from the late 1940s after a very full life of travel, modelling and photo-journalism. She looked, in her kind of surrealism, for the juxtaposition of unexpected objects or people and objects in uncanny situations. There is also a tour of the house which points out the work, including paintings, sculptures and decorations to the house itself, of some of its European visitors, including Picasso, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, along with works by Roland Penrose. Please note: both house and gallery have now closed for the winter, and will re-open on 7^th April 2019 with a new exhibition in the gallery.

We’d recommend anyone who hasn’t been to visit both Farley Farm and Charleston: evidence – along with other artists, notably Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Peggy Angus at Furlongs, as well as those based at Ditchling, including Eric Gill and David Jones – of the rich artistic history of the region. In the gift shop at Farley House we met Anthony Penrose, Lee Miller’s son. He was very open and enthusiastic about Farley but also very conscious of the varied artistic heritage available to us in Sussex. Someone should think of organising co-ordinated tours!

Thinking of Sussex artists, you may still be able to catch up on the following range of exhibitions at St.  Anne’s Galleries, 111 Lewes High Street and at other local venues:

• St Anne’s has a Christmas Show from 3^rd November until 23^rd Dec. which is open Saturdays and Sundays.

Sarah O’Kane is presenting the following:

• A solo exhibition of work, Studio Paintings and Other Stories by Charlotte Snook at Fisher Street Framers in Needlemakers from Dec. 1^st – 9^th.

We went along to this one, liked the work a lot, and bought a painting titled ‘Still Life, Blue Dress’.

• A  Spring Show including recent work by Julian Le Bas, Jo Lamb, Jane  Hansford and Kathleen Mullaniff at Lewes House.
•  A solo show by Nick Bodimeade in May to be held at his studio in Hamsey.
• A three week event in June, titled Moon Gazing to be held at the new Lewes arts venue Fitzroy House showing work by a range of artists in different media on the theme of the moon.

• And in October, a solo exhibition by Lewes based artist and author, Julian Bell, ‘When the City is built’ to be held at Menier Gallery, Southwark St., London.

On our own work, aside from deciding on this year’s Christmas card (two pictures on the theme of ‘Under the tree’), Liz has been working on a lino-cut of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. Can this perhaps inspire a set of works on fairy tales, songs, and rhymes? Peter has completed a work commissioned by two American friends, who wanted a reminder of Primrose Hill which they’ve grown attached to on their many visits to London. The result is a painting of Chalcot Crescent – the real-life street used in the Paddington movies where it’s renamed Windsor Gardens. The Browns’ house is number 30 Chalcot Crescent. In Peter’s painting, our friends’ grandson, – a Paddington fan – is standing outside this house.

Another picture is of Blakeney, North Norfolk, which we visited earlier in the year and a third project is a set of drawings of literary figures. This picks up on a group of three drawings Peter did many years ago of Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound, and Yeats and Ford Madox Ford. New drawings will be of James Joyce (this one is done), T. S. Eliot (in progress) Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. All of them C20th ‘moderns’ and a bit of a throwback strangely to the academic interests Peter thought retirement had, well, retired.

There was one big event in August: our Golden Wedding Anniversary on the 31^st. We took a brief but thoroughly enjoyable holiday in Blakeney, North Norfolk the week before and organised a ‘get- together’ of family and friends, new and old, at the Depot in Lewes for the 1^st September, during which we showed the film Guys and Dolls. One thing we didn’t plan for was the outbreak of a fire nearby (luckily after the screening). This meant we had to decamp from the Depot building itself to the lawned area in the grounds. Everything went very well in spite of this hiccup. Thanks to all for coming!

Repeated Hospital visits since January meant  we weren’t able to participate in Art Wave this year We did, however, take in 2 Ringmer and 3 Lewes locations over a couple of days. As always, even on such a limited acquaintance, the work we saw was varied, skilful and innovative. We both feel we’ve got to catch up with ourselves and are sure to plan for Art wave next year. Unfortunately, Liz’s class in lino-cutting has ceased, although at least one workshop day has been planned, and she has now joined a drawing class at St Andrews in Lewes.

Amongst other things (books, films, choir, yoga) September saw us resuming our visits to Galleries. Here’s a brief mention of four shows we went to:

At the Towner, Eastbourne.

9^th Sept. Edward Stott: Master of Colour and Atmosphere (16 May- 16 Sept).  Stott (1855-1918) was a British artist born in Rochdale whose paintings of rural scenes in particular earned him a reputation as ‘the poet-painter of twilight’. After a late start he came under the influence in the 1880s of French naturalist and early impressionist painting. This gave his painting its admired rendering of light and atmosphere though at the cost, in our view, of the vitality and definition (in a painting such as ‘Feeding the Ducks’, 1885) which was more akin to the similarly ruralist work of the so-called Glasgow Boys (James Guthrie and George Henry amongst several others). After his success in Paris, Stott returned in 1885 to live and work in Amberley. West Sussex. Here, his continued commitment to depictions of everyday life and settings employing local people gave way to careful and sombre works on religious themes.  I’m afraid we hurried past these last works.

        Edward Stott, ‘Feeding the Ducks’,1885

  Edward Stott, ‘Labourer’s Cottage – Suppertime’ 1893.

At Tate Britain

20^th Sept. Aftermath, Art in the Wake of World War One (5^th June -24^th Sept).

We’d postponed visiting this exhibition but were in the event much impressed by the range of work displayed (from British, Belgian, German and French artists) and by its narrative organisation. Thus the display moves room by room from depictions of iconic aspects of the conflict itself (ruined landscapes, abandoned helmets), through grand public memorial ceremonies and generic sculptures, to bitter, satirical portraits of the maimed along with registrations of deep social and psychological disorder, and so to signs of broad change and a recovered or re-imagined world in the longer post-war period.

As the exhibition shows too these stages of reaction and response were marked by the adoption of different media, from paint, drawing and sculpture to photography and collage – whose cut-ups and juxtapositions told their own tale of jangled social and inner disturbance. Amongst many memorable works the Dadaist works by such as George Grosz and Otto Dix are perhaps the most striking in their innovative form and boldly politicised critiques of the war’s after-effects

         George Grosz, ‘Grey Day’, 1921.

   John Nash, ‘The Cornfield’, 1918.

A key motif through all this to our eyes was machine technology; first of all in the automatic weapons, the tanks, and aircraft introduced in what was the first advanced industrial war and subsequently in the post-war advent of newly industrialised labour and the appearance of new workers’ organisations. While some (John Nash’s ‘The Cornfield’ here is an example) turned to the solace of the natural world, others (as here in Paul Citroen’s Metropolis) responded to new urban environments as a multi jig-sawed portrait of the modern world or as a beacon of new hope. New York City assumed a lasting symbolic role in this respect, but as the double title of C.R.W. Nevinson’s painting in the final room (‘New York – an Abstraction’ and ‘The Soul of a Soulless City’) showed, the new life of the new mass city could also appear empty.

        Paul Citroen, ‘Metropolis’, 1923.

                  CRW. Nevinson, ‘The Soul of a  Soulless  City’ (New  Y0rk –An Abstraction), 1920.

Keizer Frames Gallery, Lewes.  

24th Sept. Peter Messer, ‘Tricks and Resolution (22^nd Sept. – 7th Sept)

Simon Keizer curated this excellent small exhibition of new work by the Lewes based artist Peter Messer. Many will know Peter Messer’s extraordinarily meticulous paintings in egg tempera of familiar – but not so familiar, scenes in Lewes. We both found the works in this selection as engrossing as ever.  Personally, Peter was pleased that while several somewhere secreted a comic or surrealist aside which upsets the otherwise normal and everyday, some paintings were ‘straight’ – which, in the context, was itself a little disarming. Messer had also included a written statement of his aims which in its unpretentious claims, less for himself than for the craft of painting, was itself winning and inspiring for anyone who wants to paint expertly.

Peter Messer, ‘Bitter Winter’