Balm for the soul Mary Miers discovers the coronavirus has not dulled the taste for well-executed paintings inspired by Nature, nor impaired the dealer’s nose for sniffing out emerging talent
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OULD we be looking to artists to lead us into the new Eden? The thought occurred as I asked six well-established gallery owners which of their contemporary artists are currently most in demand and why their work is striking a particular chord. Covid-19, it seems, has intensified what was already a growing interest in works inspired by the natural world, with landscape painting—in an echo of its flowering after the First World War—proving particularly popular, together with botanical art and other works on environmental themes. ‘People are sitting at home looking out of their windows. Landscape means so much to us; we’re British, we can’t help it. It’s a metaphor for everything,’ says Johnny Messum of Messums London and Wiltshire (www.messumswiltshire.com), whose two recent exhibitions of works by artist and environmentalist Kurt Jackson—watery scenes that explore fragile landscapes as they change over time—have been sell outs. ‘There’s so much anxiety and uncertainty at the moment, people are turning to art to help lead them through,’ says Sarah Long, co-director of the London gallery Long & Ryle (www.longandryle.com). ‘We’re looking for paintings that feel optimistic, but also that have a depth, even a certain spirituality or sense of longing.’ She singles out John Monks, whose recent painting Distant Landscape, rendered in thick impasto, the paint poured on and scraped with a palette knife, the surface glazed in layers, views its subject from a huge, ambiguous space filled with shafts of light: ‘Never before has he connected the light within and beyond with such weighted contemplation and relevance.’ 80
Landscape means so much to us; we’re British, we can’t help it. It’s a metaphor for everything With art proving a positive distraction from these troubled times, dealers have adapted nimbly and imaginatively, as Huon Mallalieu’s recent Art Market columns so hearteningly reveal. With more time to spend exploring the growing number of illuminating website portals, people are becoming better informed about the artists they admire, discovering new interests and being inspired to think about adding to their own collections, or buying a present for a loved one. Artists,
many of whom find lockdown little different from their normal, solitary working lives, are responding with stimulating new works and dealers, who have had to radically rethink their exhibition plans, are reporting better business than they had dared to hope. ‘What’s so extraordinary is that, recently, we’ve been selling to people we hadn’t heard of before, mostly in the fifties–sixties age group,’ says gallery owner Jonathan Cooper, who has been promoting professional artists at the more traditional end of the market since 1988 (www.jonathancooper.co.uk). ‘An LA film director bought one of Rosie Sanders’s botanical paintings online the other day, as did a Scottish banker as a birthday present for his wife.’ Mr Cooper displays figurative drawings, paintings, photography and sculpture and runs about seven shows in a normal year, as well as attending art fairs. Unchallenging and
Above: Hannah Mooney’s Co Donegal Landscape I, 2018. Above right: Ramiro Fernandez Saus’s watercolour After the Storm, £3,000, with Long & Ryle. Right: Tree with Birds by David Grossmann, 2020, £11,000, with Jonathan Cooper well-executed, these attractive compositions, mostly of animals and the natural world, appeal to a clientele he describes as ‘typically Country Life/Field readers; moneyed, professional’. He puts his success down to ‘not following the market, but going for what I like. It’s all in the eye of the dealer; I’m looking for a look,’ he says, adding that he’s interested in artists who know how to draw properly and understand their subject. One of Mr Cooper’s bestselling discoveries is the wildlife conservationist painter Gary Stinton, who was unknown when he took him on 20 years ago and can now sell one 81