Simon Carter
Photograph: Noah Carter
Simon Carter 2018
1. Essex Coast, Seawall, 2014 acrylic on canvas 130 x 160 cms 511â „8 x 63 ins
The Geography of Painting I seem to need a subject matter in order to paint and this subject
matter is invariably the coastal landscape local to my studio. Without subject matter the paintings seem to drift away from me and decisions seem to become arbitrary. So when asked about the paintings I usually start by explaining the subject matter. It is an easy thing to do and it avoids the complications of what the paintings might actually be about. They are not strictly about the subject matter and I’m not sure there is any real meaning to be extracted and discussed separately from the actual paintings; the meaning is the painting. Just over three years ago I started visiting Beaumont Quay, a few miles form my studio, to walk and to draw. There are several small quays around the Backwaters (or Hamford Water as it is officially known) that were once an important means of transporting produce in and out of the low lying agricultural lands. One abandoned quay, now a series of ponds cut off from the sea, is where barges delivered and collected from a foundry. Another has a granary, now converted to a home. Beaumont Quay has an old lime kiln, a small locked storehouse, and an un-mortared stone edging that came from the old London Bridge. In the basin just beyond the quay rests the skeletal remains of Rose, a barge towed there in the 1960s for conversion to a houseboat and now falling back into the mud. This quay, deep into the Backwaters, is the furthest reach of salt water, over four miles from the open sea. If you stand on the low seawall, with flat fields and ditches at your back, you face out onto a vast and secret place of saltings, mudflats, creeks, quays and islands. Populated by small sail boats in the summer and vast gabbling flocks of wildfowl and waders in the winter. Egrets lift croaking, out of deep channels like white moths. Redshanks whistle ahead as you walk. Kingfishers sit in the sluice heads and Marsh Harriers put up skittish flocks of Lapwing or Wigeon. As with all my work, these Beaumont paintings grew out of a desire to make something more engaged and profound than merely a view of my new found habitat. I wanted something that spoke about life as well as looking. A group of drama students came to visit me in the studio. They were piecing together a performance in response to an exhibition of my paintings at The Minories Art Gallery in Colchester. They were not reticent about asking questions, levering out of me parts of my inner life that I don’t think I have discussed with many other people. One thing they were intrigued by was the ‘emotional range’ of my work. Is that an acting thing? I think I’m quite level-headed and am not prone to fluctuating emotions so was not sure what that range in my work was. It is through these Beaumont Paintings and another concurrent sequence that I have begun to explore such things. All my paintings are about such things as this, about an inner pilgrimage and affairs of the spirit (whatever that means). But they seek to convey any meaning in a way entirely and only accessible by painting: to transfigure observation into paint. The paintings are made not only in relation to the landscape observed but also to things read and to other paintings seen. You cannot make paintings in isolation. Painting is a product of culture and its full meaning is articulated collectively as a culture. It has to be aware of its cultural context and what it means to be made in such a time and way. …so, when asked, I tend to talk about subject matter and geography. Simon Carter November 2017
2. I. Beaumont, 2016 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
A Poem for Simon Carter The last Messages of light From sky to water Echo Over the mud-flats Forking new diagrams Between arms of the sea On ground opened To the embrace of water Crepuscular in the thunderlight Swishing from bruise to rose All redolent of flux Dispelling respite with A drifting cargo of thought. Andrew Lambirth: November 2017
Carter’s Kingdom: The Beaumont Paintings ‘Poetry endows things with a circumstantial life.’ Braque
3. II. Beaumont, Flood Tide, 2016 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Simon Carter’s latest work, and especially a group of pictures entitled the Beaumont Paintings, takes as its focus a new location, just around the corner from his habitual haunts. For some years now, Carter has been painting the seven miles of coastline adjacent to his home town of Frinton-on-Sea in Essex, effectively the stretch from Clacton to The Naze. Now he has turned inland, to the backwaters. So it’s to Hamford Water and the area around Beaumont Quay, just beyond Landermere, that he has bent his gaze. The latter already has art historical associations: here Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson worked on many of their early collaborations in the mid1950s as Hammer Prints, designing wallpapers and fabrics, and decorating bowls, plates, cups and tiles with transfer images; they continued trading until 1975. More recently, the painter Luke Elwes has used Landermere as a base for his abstracted meditations on water and reflections. It’s an intriguing area of islands and inlets, of salt marshes and mudflats, of beaches, marsh grasslands and creeks. A nature reserve of special importance for breeding Little Terns and wintering Dark-Bellied Brent geese, wildfowl and waders, it is also host to such botanical rarities as Hog’s Fennel, known as a medicinal plant since the 17th century, and Slender Hare’s-Ear. Arthur
4. III. Beaumont, Cut Farm acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Sluice,
2014-15
Ransome adopted Hamford Water as the setting for his novel Secret Water, the eighth book in the Swallows and Amazons series. Carter has known the area since childhood. The Beaumont Paintings are 14 canvases to be exhibited and seen in a particular order, which is not necessarily the sequence in which they were painted (or finished). Initially Carter did try to arrange them chronologically, but decided that they made more sense presented as you see their subjects when walking through the landscape. (For instance, the Landermere peninsula is the subject of the last two paintings in the series. The very final painting, of Landermere and its reflection, was actually the first of the series to be completed.) Carter worked on two or three paintings at a time, with sub-groups emerging in 2015 and 2016. You can see shapes developing and certain motifs recurring, like the head of a sluice or a metal ladder running down the sea wall. The paintings are a uniform size, measuring 100 x 120 cms, and all are painted in acrylic. Carter has adopted the horizontal format, familiarly known as ‘landscape’, rather than a square or an upright (‘portrait’), and presumably he is happy with the implications of this. He paints pictures about a specific place which are informed by direct
5. IV. Beaumont, Sluice High acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Tide,
2017
observation, and they are presented in a landscape format. Therefore, is it too much to suppose that they are in some way simply landscapes? And yet Carter wants to paint ‘landscapes’ which are also just paintings, with no subject other than themselves. He wants us to see his paintings as abstracts. Can they be both? Yes. These paintings take their origin from a love of the land, but they end up as equivalents to the experience of looking at (or being in) landscape, rather than attempting to be transcriptions of the natural world. We should do all paintings the honour of seeing them first as paintings - as artefacts made of paint and canvas, with certain formal qualities: tone, colour, line - rather than as depictions of some subject, obvious or obscure. But the English are an irredeemably literary nation and prefer to find a narrative in a painting than examine how a dab of paint takes the light and changes in relation to its neighbours. Carter asks us to look at what he does with paint as well as to respond to the theme of a particular place. Why 14 in the sequence? These decisions can seem arbitrary, but it’s worth mentioning that there are that number of lines in a sonnet, and Carter, a
6. V. Beaumont, Incoming acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Tide,
2015
great poetry reader, has been much influenced by the sonnet form. He began working on the Beaumont Paintings in November 2014, making numerous drawings and A1 colour studies by way of research. The 14 paintings are here supported by a group of the studies, making a lambent core to the exhibition. During the painting of the series he was reading and re-reading Seamus Heaney’s ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ from the collection Field Work (1979), with their richly precise evocations of place and time, which are also very much verbal constructs to be enjoyed for their artificiality. Likewise with Carter’s paintings: they are not natural responses to landscape, but artificial pictorial constructs made in parallel to nature, not attempts to imitate it. This tidal inlet of saltings and grazing marsh is a marvellous thing in itself, and Carter has no hesitation in celebrating it, but to a great extent, it is an excuse for making paintings. (Perhaps for some artists all subjects are just an excuse for the practice of their art.) In this meeting place of earth, air and water, the locus of nature’s endless alchemy, Carter finds a metaphor for his own painterly transfiguration. A lot of his time is spent inventing structures and exploring possibilities - trying to find the right physical expression in paint of his understanding of a very particular place. It’s all about paint
7. VI. Beaumont, Spring Tide, 2015 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
in the end – making a good painting that will exert a lasting impact on the nervous system of the viewer. He seeks deeper meanings: the presiding genius of a place, the numinous hidden in the everyday. Carter’s paintings seem to suggest that we take too much for granted and judge too often on appearances. Perhaps here the spiritual component of his work is located. One of his aims, whether conscious or not, is to demonstrate the ultimate mystery of the act of creating. The paintings actually begin with drawing in front of the motif, but the crucial aspect is then the studio time spent considering these plein-air drawings. As Carter says: ‘It is only back in the studio that I can see whether there is anything of interest or use in the day’s drawings.’ Now the process of re-interpretation begins, of translating marks on paper to more marks on paper, and eventually to marks on canvas. Carter comments: ‘I find the act of drawing in the landscape not only provides a record of information but also opens a gap between what is seen and what is painted, allowing both to have their proper place. It also adds to the lexicon of possible marks that might allow painting to address those things seen.’ He draws quickly and naturally, with enviable spontaneity. Painting, by contrast, is an intense and
8. VII. Beaumont, 2015 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
lengthy labour, and much of it is an attempt to get back to the effortless ease of the drawings. In those first drawings, Carter is searching for a moment of resonance or recognition that supplies an added significance to the landscape. If you like, a moment of revelation, or Joycean epiphany. Yet that is not the explanation of a painting, merely a starting point. Carter is specific about this: ‘I don’t think the paintings are about that kind of personal meaning. I just need that to start the process.’ But he has also said: ‘You don’t want to stop at what you know, you want to push the bounds a bit.’ The paintings are very much explorations of the unknown, about what might be possible, rather than what is. During the genesis of a painting, he might return to the motif and make new drawings, and quite likely he will also make drawings from the painting itself. In previous years he has worked a lot on a light-box, re-drawing a landscape study, taking out expression, simplifying and concentrating on the design. With the Beaumont Paintings he has had less recourse to the lightbox, and his location drawings have led to larger studies in oil pastel. On
9. VIII. Beaumont, Channel, 2016 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
canvas he tightens his focus on what he has discovered to see whether it will last or not. ‘Although the painting might end up as only a few marks,’ he says, ‘the process of making the painting is a prolonged and improvised discovery of those marks; marks that seem true and that return the painting to some relation with things seen. I seem to need those things observed out in the world, things that I have found engaging and compelling and around which a painting might start to coalesce.’ This is a stance he shares with many Modern British artists, from Sickert to Auerbach and Kossoff. It is not the plein-air painting of Patrick George, but the intense studio activity of other School of London painters, such as Michael Andrews or Howard Hodgkin. The great challenge is to achieve a sense of rightness, perhaps the illusion of certainty, in the way that those few marks have not only to look inevitable, but to be inevitable. And to continue so, against the threat of time. As he draws in the landscape rather than making colour notes, the colour is all in his head - either remembered or imaginary. Colour may be both descriptive (hence naturalistic) or invented, but is usually an essential part of Carter’s principal strategy to surprise himself (when he sees a picture afresh in the morning) as well as surprising and enchanting the viewer. He
10. IX. Beaumont, Dark Water, 2016 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
draws upon experience but he aims to avoid preconceptions. He wants the act of painting to be a process of discovery, rather as the act of looking can be, and each new picture to be a journey towards a deeper understanding of the world and our relation to it. The colours he uses are sumptuous, subtle, direct, sensitive. Carter mixes them on his palette, then mixes them some more on the canvas. There’s a rowdiness to some of his paintwork, a kiss-me-quick tease and daring; in other passages, the paint is sonorously tonal, even grand. Although Carter uses acrylic paint and Matthew Smith was a great reveller in oil, again and again whilst looking at these paintings I found myself thinking of that earlier master (for whose work I have profound admiration). There is the same all-out risk in paint application, the same nervous abandon and sensuous enjoyment. Smith enjoyed comparably fluid approximations of form (a similar shorthand) and syncopations of rhythm. Carter’s equivalents for landscape are maps and meanders of pigment, images as the embodiments of impulses, much like Smith’s. In their best work, all is energy and animation. Passion drives both artists: compare Smith’s Provencal landscapes with Carter’s East Anglian ones: the brush swirls and dives with similar impetuosity, paint and
11. X. Beaumont, Middle Sluice, 2015 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
image are one. Both deal joyously with the material facts of paint, and their pictures are above all else a celebration of the possibilities of paint. Constable, van Gogh and de Kooning are the key painters Carter constantly returns to for inspiration, for what he might do with paint. Along with de Kooning, he might look at other American painters such as Brice Marden and Alex Katz. I also detect some of the vigour of the remarkable marine paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, and the early dark watercolours of Norman Adams. Sometimes Paul Nash is not far away. He has also been looking at the chronically underrated John Walker (born 1939), an English abstract painter of real breadth and inventiveness, whose own work (particularly the Tidal Pool and White Reach paintings) has recently been reengaging with landscape themes. The context in which Carter’s work should be viewed is a wide one, for he keeps an open eye and open mind on all types of art. For instance, he was much impressed by David Smith’s Hudson River Landscape (1951), a socalled ‘drawing in space’ in welded steel. Smith described his sculpture as deriving ‘in part from dozens of drawings made on a train between Albany
12. XI. Beaumont, Middle Sluice acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Low Tide,
2015-16
and Poughkeepsie, a synthesis of ten trips over a 75 mile stretch.’ The genesis of the work is thus similar to Carter’s procedure. This is not representational or realistic sculpture, it deals with purely formal sculptural issues such as mass and weightlessness, solidity and transparency. Likewise do Carter’s paintings engage with the formal properties of paint: texture, colour, tone, illusion, flatness. His paintings are about building compositions of satisfying shapes out of exciting brush marks, using a mixture of careful structure and awkward juxtapositions, exact plotting and wild skirmishes with the paint. These pictures take on many layers as Carter plots and re-plots his co-ordinates (emotional and formal as much as topographical), painting out previous attempts in order to obtain a greater clarity, a more convincing spontaneity. He balances shape invention with lines of force, structuring possible paths both literal and figurative through the paint, mapping the ships’ roads with paint-routes of his own devising. Land encloses sky-mirroring creeks, channels and sluices. Sky changes colour lending intensity to the land. Water everywhere, skirmishing with the high ground, bringing movement and dissolving boundaries.
13. XII. Beaumont, Middle acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Sluice High Tide,
2016
In the Beaumont Paintings the sky is banded in different colours: khaki, silver, green, blue, and provides the emotional temper of the work, setting up a dialogue with the rest of the painting, almost like a predella panel in a Renaissance altarpiece, or the lower sections of Brice Marden’s recent Terra Verte paintings. The figure of the artist, shadowed over the subject, taking part in it, and very much a feature of earlier work, has been dispensed with, and the focus is on land, sky and water. Much of our response is supplied by our own imaginations, stimulated by the energy and animation in Carter’s brushwork, his calligraphic line, his stops and stoops and slashes with the brush. He has said: ‘The work should appear casual somehow - with the energy and excitement of new discovery and a self-effacing grandeur.’ But it’s not, of course, essentially casual – and note that Carter said that it should appear casual. Like all good art it is fundamentally serious, it’s just that its maker understandably doesn’t want it to become too earnest or precious. All art is a balancing act between extremes of form and meaning. In Carter’s case, between figuration and abstraction – for to say that the paintings are entirely autonomous and have no ‘subject’ would be misleading, just as it would be to suggest that they are simple records of the Essex marshes. The Beaumont
14. XIII. Landermere, Winter acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Sun,
2015
Paintings are like the Enigma Variations, a series of meditations around a single subject, with different ramifications of that subject explored in each variation. The word ‘circumstantial’, which appears in Braque’s observation at the beginning of this essay, has at least two meanings: full of detail; and adventitious or incidental. Both meanings apply to Simon Carter’s work. His drawings are full of detail, though quite a lot of it in his own shorthand or code and thus not easy for the viewer to decipher; and his paintings contain a strong element of the accidental or casual. These are the poles between which his artistic intelligence navigates. Painting becomes the process of making a separate but related entity to the thing seen. The painting must have its own identity, which is principally about paint, but it must also have something useful to say about Carter’s subject matter or motif. His long familiarity with the land he paints allows him to behave with the kind of freedom in which an idea for a painting may flourish and be transfigured. In the Beaumont Paintings he raises his game to impressive new heights. Andrew Lambirth Author and Art Critic
15. XIV. Landermere, 2014 acrylic on canvas 100 x 120 cms 39 3⁄8 x 47 1⁄4 ins
Photograph: Noah Carter
16. Hamford Water, 2017 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
17. Beaumont Quay I, 2017 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
18. Foundry Dock, 2017 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
19. Beaumont Quay II, 2017 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
20. Yellow Sky, 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
21. Green Sky, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
22. Gulls, 2007 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
23. Sun Breaking Through, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
24. Grey Cloud and Grey acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
North Sea,
26. Pink and Green II, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
2016
25. Pink and Green I, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
27. Pink, Green and Grey, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
28. Cloud and Grey North acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
Sea,
30. Freighter, 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
2015
29. Cloud and Sea I, 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
31. Cloud and Sea III, 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
32. Beaumont Quay III, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
33. Beaumont, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
34. Hamford Water, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
35. Beaumont Cut, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
36. Cloud and Sea IV, 2015-16 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
37. Green and Pink, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
38. Clouds over the Sea, Evening, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
39. Cloud and Sea II, 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
40. Frinton Beach I, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
41. Kirby Creek, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
42. Frinton Beach II, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
43. Dark Cloud, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
44. Yellow Sky, Dark Sea, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
45. White Cloud, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
46. Naze Marine, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
47. The English Landscape, acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
Track,
2017
48. The English Landscape, acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
Clubhouse,
50. The English Landscape, acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
Reedbed,
2017
2017
49. The English Landscape, acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
Gate,
51. The English Landscape, acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
Sand Bunker,
2017
2017
52. North Sea, High Tide acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
I,
2013
54. Grey Sea and Thin Cloud, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
53. The Naze, 2017 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
55. North Sea, High Tide acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
II, 2016
56. April, Looking North, 2017 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
57. High Clouds, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
58. Turquoise, 2016 acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
59. Thin Clouds over the acrylic on canvas 25 x 30 cms 9 7⁄8 x 113⁄4 ins
Sea,
2016
60. Seawall – High Tide, 2013 oil on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
61 Untitled, 2014 oil on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
62. Steps, 2013 oil on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
63. Seawall and Steps, 2013 oil on canvas 30 x 30 cms 113⁄4 x 113⁄4 ins
Works on Paper
64. Beaumont Quay, Basin, 2017 acrylic on paper 69 x 84 cms 27 1â „4 x 33 ins
65. Spring Tide, 2017 acrylic on paper 70 x 83 cms 27 1⁄2 x 32 7⁄8 ins
66. Towards Landermere, 2017 acrylic on paper 70 x 84 cms 27 1⁄2 x 331⁄8 ins
67. Basin, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
68. Middle Sluice, Green Sky, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
69. Truck, Kirby Quay, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
70. Orange and Black, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
71. Decoy, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
72. Middle Sluice, Blue Sky, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
73. Bright Morning, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
74. Orange Sky, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
75. Beaumont Study, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
76. Middle Sluice, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 84 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
77. Study for Channel, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
78. Beaumont, Tide Running, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
79. Cut Farm Sluice at Low acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
Tide,
2017
80. Creek, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
81. Cut Farm Sluice, 2017 acrylic on paper 77 x 84 cms 30 1⁄4 x 32 7⁄8 ins
82. Study for Flood Tide, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
83. Hut, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
84. Towards Landermere, acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
Winter,
2017
85. Creek and Island, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
86. Autumn High Tide, 2017 acrylic on paper 60 x 72 cms 233⁄8 x 28 1⁄8 ins
87. Still Afternoon, towards acrylic on paper 60 x 84 cms 233⁄8 x 331⁄8 ins
Landermere,
2017
Simon Carter Born in Essex 1961 1980-81 Colchester Institute, Essex 1981-84 North East London Polytechnic
Selected Solo Exhibitions 2018 2017 2017 2017 2016 2015 2014 2014 2013 2011 2010 2010 2010
The Beaumont Paintings, Messum’s, London Simon Carter, Linley Belgravia, London, curated by Messum’s Signs and Wonders, Hayletts Gallery, Essex Approaching the Remote, The Minories, Essex Simon Carter: Paintings, SEA Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands The Series Paintings, Messum’s, London A Walk in the Park, Art Exchange, University of Essex The Crypt, Marylebone Church, London The Shapes of Light, Messum’s, London Borderlines, Messum’s, London Representation, The Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk Promenade, University of Essex 7 New Paintings, Messum’s, London
Selected Group Exhibitions 2017 2017 2017 2017
2017 2017 2017 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2015 2015 2015 2015 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2014 2013 2013
Anything Goes? Contemporary British Painting, Art Bermondsey Project Space Drawing into Landscape, The Crypt, Marylebone, London Contemporary Painting: In Good Health, Menier Gallery, London Contemporary Masters from Britain, touring to Yantai Art Museum, the Jiangsu Art & Craft Museum, Nanjing, Jiangsu Art Museum, Nanjing, and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, China Contemporary Masters from the East of England, The Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk RWS Contemporary Watercolours, Bankside Gallery, London. Painting and History, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China Slippery & Amorphous, Bushwick International Exposition, Art Helix, New York Messum’s, Art Toronto, Canada The Tutors Show, The Atrium Gallery, Seawhites, West Sussex Colchester Art Society: celebrating 70 years, Firstsite, Essex Belrose Highlights, SEA Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands At Sea, The Gibberd Gallery, Harlow Slippery & Amorphous, The Crypt, Marylebone, London Art Toronto with Messum’s Contemporary British Watercolours, Maidstone Museum, Kent and tour Contemporary Watercolours, RWS, Bankside Gallery, London The Brentwood Stations of the Cross, Brentwood Cathedral, Essex Contemporary British Painting, Huddersfield Art Gallery @PaintBritain, Ipswich Art School Gallery, Suffolk Easterlies, Abbey Walk Gallery, Grimsby, Lincs Art Toronto with Messum’s Contemporary Watercolours, RWS, Bankside Gallery, London Action: Abstract Painting, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery Art Toronto with Messum’s East Contemporary Art, Waterfront Gallery, UCS, Ipswich
2012 2012
Marmite Prize IV, exhibition touring nationally New East Anglian Painting, Ipswich Art School Gallery, Suffolk Toronto International Art Fair with Messum’s Bacon to Rego: Great Artists, Abbot Hall, Cumbria Toronto International Art Fair with Messum’s Sketch 2011, Rabley Drawing Centre, Wiltshire Contemporary Perspectives on Watercolour, Mall Galleries, London Threadneedle prize exhibition, Mall Galleries, London Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London Toronto International Art Fair with Messum’s East Coast Influences, Messum’s, London
2012 2012 2011 2011 2011 2010 2010 2010 2010
Curating 2015
Contemporary British Watercolours, Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery, Kent The Brentwood Stations of the Cross, Brentwood Cathedral, Essex @PaintBritain, Ipswich Art School Gallery, Suffolk New East Anglian Painting, Ipswich Art School Gallery, Suffolk
2015 2014 2012
Collections Abbot Hall, Cumbria Angel Hotel, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk Astro Lighting, Harlow, Essex China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China Colchester Art Society Permanent Collection East Contemporary Art, UCS, Ipswich Epping Forest District Museum Falmouth Art Gallery Ipswich Borough Council Jiangsu Arts and Crafts Museum, China Jiangsu Museum of Art, China King Edward VI School, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk Komechak Art Gallery, Chicago, USA Madison Museum of Fine Arts, Georgia, USA New Hall School, Chelmsford, Essex Paintings in Hospitals Priseman Seabrook Collection Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Salthouse Harbour Hotel, Ipswich, Suffolk St. Edmundsbury Borough Council The Sketchbook Project, Brooklyn Art Library, New York Swindon Museum and Art Gallery Tianjin Academy of Fine Art, China University of Essex Yantai Art Museum, China
CDXXXVIII
ISBN 978-1-910993-30-9 Publication No: CDXXXVIII Published by David Messum Fine Art © David Messum Fine Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Steve Russell, Noah Carter Printed by DLM-Creative
www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545