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
says the gallery’s co-founder Matthew Hall. ‘For the average buyer looking for the freshness of a new work to decorate their home, the conceptual-art market can be a minefield. Bewildering aesthetics and the endemic opacity of pricing put many people off buying art altogether. Increasingly, we meet new clients who display a palpable sense of relief when they discover paintings they can relate to and enjoy—and, what is more, can afford. ‘There are some very talented young artists out there who aren’t getting the publicity they deserve because their natural buyers have been swept up by the headlinegrabbing creations that have dominated the press since the Sensation exhibition of 1997,’ Mr Hall elaborates. ‘The traditional skillsbased sector of the market has tended to be eclipsed by the work of conceptualists,
of his pastel portraits of big cats and elephants for about £60,000. Among ‘emerging talents’ is the young American painter David Grossman, whose soothing, Symbolist landscapes the gallery is currently exhibiting online. ‘He trained in plein-air painting and travelled widely, but now lives back in Colorado in the US and has a growing international following. I discovered him about five years ago and this is our second show of his works; we sell every one.’ Several dealers mentioned the revival of interest in technical ability and quality of execution. Craftsmanship, too: the lacquer paintings of decorative artist and gilder Tuesday Riddell are doing well at Messums, as are the works of printmaker/painter Emily Sutton at the Scottish Gallery (www. scottish-gallery.co.uk). ‘Emily’s work is so accessible and underpinned with acute 82
We are a filtration process, cutting out the dross, informed by experience and taste observation, composition and discipline,’ says the gallery’s managing director Christina Jansen. Trained as an illustrator, Emily is one of the St Judes’s circle of artist-printmakers (the gallery also represents Angie Lewin and Mark Hearld), whose popular prints, designs and illustrated books exude a Festival of Britain spirit, unpretentious, affordable and full of joy. Her forthcoming show of paintings, ‘People and Places’, will go online at the Scottish Gallery in June.
Matthew Flowers, managing director of Flowers Gallery (www.flowersgallery.com), the London gallery founded by his mother Angela Flowers 50 years ago, notes that some artists with whom they’ve worked for years, believing in them even when their paintings were out of fashion, are flourishing again. ‘They have the crafts and skills and know the basics—life drawing and how to use paint.’ He cites Lucy Jones as an example. Known for her vibrant landscapes, she got a lot of traction early on in her career, but was rather side-lined in the 1990s and early 2000s. More recently, she has experienced an upsurge of interest, particularly for her latest works, which Mr Flowers describes as sizzling. Born with cerebal palsy, she has defied all barriers and stuck to her course, producing works of a consistently high quality that will stand the test of time.
Courtesy Scottish Gallery; Long & Ryle; Jonathan Cooper Gallery; Flowers Gallery; Messums Wiltshire and the artist; Panter & Hall
A light-filled contemplation of the world beyond: John Monks’s 39in by 65in new Distant Landscape is with Long & Ryle at £33,000
‘You could get an incredible Lucy Jones work on paper for about £5,000.’ The roll call of artists shown by the Flowers Gallery over half a century includes some of the leading names in modern British art: Tom Phillips, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Michael Rothenstein, Terry Frost, Peter Howson, Lucian Freud, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Patrick Heron, Bridget Riley, Sean Scully, Anish Kapoor, Alison Wilding and Ken Currie. By contrast, the living painters shown by Pall Mall-based Panter & Hall (www.panterandhall.com), which discovers and promotes artists to a clientele that includes many Country Life readers, are producing work mostly in the under £20,000 price range. ‘My impression when meeting buyers at the many contemporary fairs we attend is of a gradual, but definite, drift back to an interest in traditional, representational work,’
Top: Dog Dream by John Kirby, 2018, £20,000, with Flowers. Above: Ladybirds hibernating in a pea pod by Tuesday Riddell, 2020: gold leaf, silver lead and paint on japanned board 83
Above: A sizzling landscape by Lucy Jones: Too Much Yellow, 2018 (63in by 79in), £30,000, with Flowers. Left: A Strange Encounter by Simon Quadrat, 2019 (40in by 40in), £9,000, with Panter and Hall many of whom have no discernible talent and simply float in the slipstream of the original Sensation artists, who did, indeed, create a vibrant contemporary British art scene of which we can justly be proud.’ With the deluge of work now available through social media, much of it mediocre, the lower end of the market has been saturated, which makes the role of the dealer ever more worthwhile. ‘We are a filtration process, cutting out the dross and presenting a selection informed by experience and good taste,’ explains Mr Hall, adding that most dealers he knows gained their knowledge not from any formal art training, but simply from years of looking. ‘Of course, subjectivity enters into it, but I’m a firm believer in the objective values of good and bad art. Rightly or wrongly, we are supremely confident in our judgement.’ All the dealers to whom I spoke stressed that, for most of their clients, the investment value is not a priority when it comes to choosing a contemporary painting. ‘Ultimately, most people want to buy a work of art 84
Easter Still Life with Tulips by printmaker/painter Emily Sutton, 2020, touches on her own interests as a successful book illustrator
because it’s beautiful and speaks to them in some way,’ says Mr Hall. ‘I view with despair the notion that a gallery can suggest guaranteed financial returns on an artwork and use such spurious claims as a sales pitch. A buyer has to ask the obvious question:
if a dealer genuinely thinks that a work will double or treble in value in a year, why are they selling it?’ Mr Hall admits that, as do all dealers from time to time, he has fallen into the trap of buying a second-rate work because it was
by a well-known artist and seemed cheap. ‘We soon learn that image is everything in the picture business. If a painting is beautiful to the eye and technically superb, with a strong, appealing subject, then a signature is a bonus, not a necessity for a successful sale.’ 85