VAL ARCHER

Val Archer is one of the most perceptive and meticulous of contemporary painters. Her intensity of observation re ects a lifetime looking at the ideas surrounding what painting is, has been and can be.

Her paintings are generously coloured and deeply attentive to form and texture. Flowers, fruit and fabrics are set against complex, resonant surfaces to encapsulate feelings for places and cultures.

Val was born in Northampton, England, and studied at Manchester College of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Her rst solo exhibition was at the long-established Kunsthaus Buhler in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1975. She exhibited with Fischer Fine Art, London, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and with Noortman, Maastricht, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Val’s commissions have included illustrations and paintings for the Sunday Telegraph, BBC Good Food and illustrated books, the most notable being a collaboration with the Italian food writer Anna del Conte, The Painter, the Cook and the Art of Cucina. In the early 1980’s she co-created the Tate Gallery’s award-winning exhibition Paint and Painting about the history of art materials and of colour and technique in painting.

Travel has long informed and inspired Val’s work. Latterly this has included Libya, Portugal, The Netherlands, Southern Africa, Myanmar and Iran. In recent years, she has divided her time between her studios in London and Tuscany, recording the everyday natural and man-made objects that appeal to her.

In 1998, in recognition of Val’s position as a distinctive voice in contemporary still life painting, Chris Beetles Gallery staged its rst solo exhibition of her work. This close and exclusive association has continued to-date with regular exhibitions at its St James’s gallery of her latest paintings.

With pleasure features important new work and selected paintings from the past 25 years.

Chris Beetles Gallery Solo Exhibitions

1998Val Archer

2001Val Archer

2007Val Archer and the Art of Cucina

2011Val Archer: Touching the Surface of Time

2012Val Archer: An Italian Summer

2014Val Archer: Travels with my Art

2016Val Archer: The Still Moment

2019 Val Archer: Place and Culture

(loan exhibition at Nunnington Hall, Yorkshire)

All works in the catalogue are signed with initials and painted in oil

Prima dipingere, poi mangiare

First paint, then eat

This painting just evolved, I have to be excited about all the elements, flowers, vase, background and foreground. I used the fabric because it reminds me of water and the amaryllis were so intransigent, I wanted to throw against them something that was broken and fluid. The pomegranates have mosaics inside them like the background.

It started with the majolica tile background and I wanted to put pattern against pattern. The washed-out blue of the tiles contrasted with vast quantities of crazy, structural agapanthas from our London garden. The glass vase was to show full structural length of stems.

A friend lent the wonderful eggy-shaped celadon vase and I just put it down in the studio next to the faceted one and they were such a contrast I had to paint them. The mosaic is a floor from some Roman villa I saw somewhere ...

I found this extraordinary jug in Arezzo market, I loved its pear-shaped angularity and the anarchy of the hydrangea flower heads.

Both are associated with Iran, the wonderfully ornate tiles and being in Shiraz when the yellow roses were tumbling everywhere.

These milk pails were simply our wall decorations one year in Italy.

The background is a rusty yellow table top and was my starting point, the jug is from Arezzo market and I just loved the colours.

‘Cappelli Di Preti’ are priest's caps in Italian (the Spindle plant). The terracotta vase

I found in Pissignano's monthly market.

Jug from a potter who runs a shop in the centre of Cortona and it called to me from the shelf. The stripey material is from our front door curtain when I was a kid and the rest is just gorgeous orange things. Pomegranates from our tree and the ‘zucca’ from our neighbour Patrizia.

15 (opposite) ROSEHIPS IN CORTONESE VASE 30 x 22 inches

Again about a sense of place. The vase which I found in an antique shop in Cortona, is a particular design of pottery associated with the region and the rosehips were out at the same time I bought it.

Walking in the hills is my favourite thing to do and I walk every morning passing marvellous meadow grasses beside the road. The farmers don’t use pesticides so there are so many wild flowers, amongst the wheat that has escaped from farmer’s fields. The wind is always blowing so that is why they are leaning. I didn’t want to confine them in a vase, I wanted them to be as free and full of air as they were when I saw them each morning.

I enjoyed the balance and contrast of ‘la mezzina’ [Tuscan well bucket] a galvanised solid bucket with the airy, transparent, delicacy of the cow parsley and dianthus.

Mimosa is spring in Italy for me, frothy, funny, frivolous flowers.

I am really drawn to patterns but I don’t want the painting to be entirely flat, so I try to balance the pattern with something that is in the round and tactile.

Lemons from the tree that Italian friends bought me for my birthday years ago.

LEMONS

We grew them both and loved the together.

These things are all in my kitchen in Italy and we were so proud of the tomatoes that we grew that year.

I was in Italy and thinking about Sienese paintings. It was such an arid summer. The trees were so dry, the bleached, dead leaves were blowing off, all becoming autumn before autumn.

There were clouds of crackly Honesty growing by the side of the road and I had to paint them.

These are exactly the colours just before autumn in Italy, when there is a slight mist in the air which turns everything a hazy greeny gray. Heather grows against the lichen covered rocks on the hillside and the lace echoes the intricate structure of the heather.

I was trying to get the feeling of what it was like in Italy last October. The light coming through my studio window and the old olive picker’s basket, lent to us by our neighbour, Ugo, to pick our own olives for the first time.

In the church of San Francesco in Montefalco, there is a stunning fresco cycle by Gozzoli, tucked behind a corner against a mouldering wall is this beautiful brocade chair with puny, little twisty legs that don’t look right. I added the bum-like peaches.