COOMBE GALLERY Raw Material 28th MAY - 21st J U NE 2010 BRIDGET McCRUM
SARAH GILLESPIE
FRAN GYNN
COOMBE GALLERY
Raw Material Welcome to our exhibition, ‘Raw Material’, that I am delighted to see come to fruition. This has been a real metamorphosis borne from a kernel of an idea I had to bring these three outstanding artists together.
Raw Material
The nature of the work of Bridget McCrum, Fran Gynn and Sarah Gillespie meant that we had to come up with something special that enabled them to run with the concept. The idea of a sketchbook show was suggested which led into uncharted waters and many lively artistic debates. Each artist has responded with fresh work for this exhibition that provides a glimpse into the inner sanctum of the artists’ studio and provides an insight into the creative process.
28t h MAY - 21st J U NE 2010
BRIDGET McCRUM
SARAH GILLESPIE
FRAN GYNN
20 Foss Street, Dartmouth, Devon TQ6 9DR t. 01803 835820 e. mark@coombegallery.com
www.coombegallery.com catalogue design & layout: Antony Riley· Stella Maris
cover images from top left: Fran Gynn, Bridget McCrum, Sarah Gillespie
Shoreline II - Mixed media on linen Bridget McCrum
We are delighted that Bridget McCrum, Fran Gynn and Sarah Gillespie have agreed to participate in this exhibition. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Rowan Lange for her in-depth interviews reproduced in this catalogue and Antony Riley for his tireless work on the overall design. Mark Riley Director Coombe Gallery
COOMBE GALLERY
COOMBE GALLERY
Raw Material This May the Coombe Gallery in Dartmouth presents the work of Sarah Gillespie, Fran Gynn and Bridget McCrum. The show is entitled ‘Raw Materials’ and is designed to describe simultaneously the nature of the materials utilized by the artists and the more sketchlike nature of the work than that which is commonly found in a gallery. In creating such a premise Mark Riley of Coombe Gallery has provided these artists with the chance to draw back the veil and reveal more of the intriguing process that takes place behind the closed door of an artist’s studio. He has asked them to provide a glimpse of work in the making rather than the polished finished product we more often expect and get to see. This was a concept that excited the artists involved due to the rare opportunity of indulging with such freedom and exploration but it has also confronted them with a number of challenges perhaps not so immediately apparent. On getting together to discuss the direction of the show and to look through each others sketch books it soon became apparent to Bridget, Fran and Sarah that while it is one thing for an artist to produce sketches for their eyes only it is quite another to produce sketches they would be happy to see hanging on the walls of a
gallery. It was this I was pondering as I bumped my way down the long drive to visit Bridget McCrum on a cold afternoon in early March. I find Bridget sitting in her house overlooking the Dart surrounded by the soft curves of her sculptures and the wings of the many birds that adorn her walls. When I ask her if she always dreamed of being an artist I begin to appreciate just how much Bridget’s sense of travel, love of the past and her art are inter-connected. She talks of a famous two-seated figure and a Greek column with a ram’s horn capital on it that she saw in a book as a young child. She vividly recalls the need she felt to see them, something she now recognizes as ‘not what most six year olds want to do.’ Bridget seems to have collected much of her inspiration as she travelled as if by osmosis. Her work is the result of a lifelong interest in ancient artefacts and in travelling to those parts of the world where these artefacts originate. The palette she uses seems infused with the colours of these places, the sandy yellows and earthy reds of the desert, the intense blue of Mediterranean waters that sharply contrast with the dryness of the air and rocks that surround them.
Whilst there are individual events, places and pieces that have inspired her; hieroglyphics on a wall at the new library in Alexandria; an olive grove backed by the Atlas mountains; the black and red life drawings of a man in Cape Town; a tiny carving of a bird in a museum in Damascus; a Vietnamese knife blade; a horned pebble in a museum in Algeria; or a ladle from Slovenia; Bridget’s work feels like the reflection of an embodied experience, the result of a lifetime’s travel. In museums around the world she has discovered many of the tiny treasures, arrowheads and carvings, which provide the inspiration for much of her work. Alongside these ancient influences Bridget has been inspired by a number of more contemporary sculptors. It is wonderful to hear her talk about Brancusi’s studio in Paris and I get a sense that she gains as much inspiration from sitting there amongst his tools and the remnants of his work as she does from the work itself: ‘I love going to his studio in Paris. There are lots of places you can sit and gaze into this room that is full of Brancusi’s and lots of machinery and stone. It’s lovely, a very good place to go when you are there I think, you can find a certain peace.’
COOMBE GALLERY
Through Henry Moore Bridget discovered that as you walk around a piece of sculpture it should turn with you and for this reason one should always view a piece from all sides to ensure that it doesn’t freeze from any one vantage point. From Bill Tucker she was first introduced to the idea of taking ancient tools and artefacts and metamorphosing them into something new. Another artist who played an important role in Bridget’s life, as much as a friend as an inspiration, was Elizabeth Frink. The two bonded over a love of horses and drawing when they met at a home in Devon where they were sent by their parents during the war.Years later when Frink came across Bridget’s work at the RA she mentioned to a mutual friend that she had seen them and that ‘what’s more they’re good’. She became a staunch supporter of Bridget’s work being one of the first to encourage her to produce her sculpture on a larger scale. Whilst Bridget lives and works on the banks of the river Dart she claims she rarely gains her inspiration from it declaring ‘there are too many trees interrupting things’ and although I am surprised by this, in view of the sheer simplicity found within her work, I have to admit it makes
COOMBE GALLERY
sense. Her work seems driven by a desire to capture the very essence of the objects she portrays. Whether she is talking about Gozo and ‘its barren looking landscape’ that she rather likes, or about an early Cycladic head that influenced her due to the fact that ‘there was practically nothing there and I just thought I really wanted to make this complete expression on his face without putting anything on it’, or about a pebble she saw in a museum which looked a bit like a sheep on which someone had carved the simplest of ram’s horns, everything speaks of a certain minimalism, a reduction of sorts. A paring down of things to their bare minimum so that all that is left is the very essence of the thing itself. There is something wonderfully direct and clear about Bridget’s approach to things that I think allows her to get to the essence of her subjects and to simplify many things that most of us have a tendency to overcomplicate. Her work is reminiscent of the art of haiku yet while the Asian approach to painting aims to utilize a single brush stroke at a time the same cannot be said of Bridget’s work and as she herself admits, she works hard to get her lines just right. Bridget shows me how, in order to get a good line, she stands to the side of a painting and casts her eye slowly along Shoreline V Mixed media on linen
Shoreline III Mixed media on linen
COOMBE GALLERY
the edge of a line which causes any errors to become immediately noticeable. She goes on to talk of the importance of lines in her sculpture. Her love of fading these lines in and out, making them connect up and then disappear again. It is the use of these lines that tie her paintings and sculptures together so well. Her paintings are undoubtedly infused with the eye of the sculptor and whether it is the cliffs of Gozo or the wings of a bird, the objects represented possess a form that is almost 3 dimensional. Bridget learned to paint at art college under the eye of Leszek Musjynski for whose teaching skills and artistic abilities she will always be grateful and with whom she is still in touch to this day. It was Leszek who taught her the art of layering colours in a Rothkoesque manner that is clearly portrayed, not only on her canvases, but also in the patternation of her bronzes that she chooses to do herself rather than leave to the foundry. Details such as these are important to Bridget like her ‘scribbling’ which she feels is increasingly necessary to ensure her work retains a natural hand crafted appearance rather than something that has merely been sent off, lasered and worked on only with the use of power tools.
COOMBE GALLERY
Like all good artists Bridget is very conscious of the pitfalls of landscape art. She says she stopped her pastel drawings of seascapes in Gozo because ‘you sort of get put off by lots of people doing seascapes.You just think there are so many around and I am not going to do that anymore.’ Whilst the reduction of detail and the strength of colour and boldness of form found in Bridget’s Gozo landscapes could never allow them to come close to the clichés embodied in many seascapes she is right to be aware of the dangers involved. Nature, despite her infinite variety and wealth of beauty, can often prove the hardest of subjects to capture and it is difficult for artists to depict it without falling into the realm of cliché. Bridget realizes that the way she tries to get around this is to choose the least obvious landscapes to depict but she admits she still struggles at times and is not immune to the frustrations many artists face in attempting to translate life into art. She believes it’s often ‘because what’s happening in real life actually doesn’t always look very good on paper.You have to change things to make it work.’ Bridget’s bird sculptures are a good example of a successful translation of life into art for whilst reminiscent of the arrowheads and knives from which Flight 2010 Mixed media on linen
COOMBE GALLERY
she drew inspiration for their shape they have been subtly stripped of the violence of their intended use and in this way they remind me of the pieces of glass that Fran Gynn finds on the beach, once so sharp and threatening, now softened and subdued by the power of the sea. They still possess power and strength but it has been transformed to embody the essence of something else altogether, in this case the sensation of freedom epitomised by the wings of a bird in flight. This is a process of transformation from one object to another and success seems to lie in the artist’s ability to render this transition whilst still allowing the object of inspiration to retain a hint of what it was both before and after the metamorphosis it has undergone. In this case an axehead and a bird. These may appear to be very incongruent objects but in the hands of the artist’s imagination they are the result of a successful converging of influences. A few days later I visit Fran Gynn and I find myself pondering the possible links I may find between her and Bridget’s work as I walk, buffeted by strong winds, along the seafront at Slapton sands. Fran’s house and studio are
COOMBE GALLERY
beautiful calm white caverns adorned with her works. Small intriguing passages lead from one part of the house to another opening unexpectedly into light, spacious rooms. It is through these that she leads me talking all the while about her work that surrounds us. The first thing I quickly realize is that Fran Gynn is not concerned with painting beautiful conventional landscapes. She finds nature alone ‘too sickly’ and is drawn more to ‘the human relationship with it’. What Fran looks for in a landscape is ‘some evidence of man in it somewhere.’ She refers to the Ley at Slapton as ‘too pretty’ and worries that, as a subject, she would never succeed in ‘de-prettying it’. We discuss whether or not it is ever possible to depict a sunset with any hope of success and she cites a painting by Luc Tillmans of a white sun setting against a grey sky as the only painting of a sunset that she thinks came close to avoiding the inevitable clichés inherent in such a task. Whilst her work is driven essentially by the landscapes that surround her, especially the beach on her doorstep, Fran Gynn’s work cannot be understood in terms of these landscapes alone. Her pieces are narratives concerning man and his environment and, whilst man himself is not often portrayed in her paintings,
they are largely inspired by and littered with the traces of himself that he leaves behind, the old discarded mobile phones, orange cartons, and an endless assortment of plastics with which the beach is often littered. Much of Fran’s present work was initiated by her discovery of what she refers to as ‘strange attractors’. Things ‘that grab your eye or interest you and you don’t know why’. For Fran these are ’things along the beach which spark off some kind of narrative for me or feeling’ and it is these that often provide the starting point for a piece. The walls of her studio are hung with ‘strange attractors’ that have punctuated each of her walks. They hang jewel-like around her as she works; ‘putting together found things’ like ‘the sea taking things and making them part of something else.’ Most of us walk along the beach and are drawn to a particular stone or interesting shaped piece of seaweed that speaks to us and it is this act or impulse that Fran’s work reflects. Fran’s walks take the form of a conversation with her surroundings and her work is a translation of this for the viewer, a glimpse of the thought or ‘strange attractor’ that initiated that conversation and led to an ongoing
COOMBE GALLERY
narrative. Her work is driven by narratives and she is quick to point out that it should not be viewed as purely abstract. I am struck by the fact that, like Bridget, Fran is a collector. Collecting is something she has done since she was a child when she took over the garden shed as her art house and started to fill it with pieces of china and fireman’s buttons. At that age Fran was pretty sure she wanted to be either an artist or a Zoo Keeper. She laughs about the cupboards and draws in her studio that are full to bursting with treasures of all shapes and sizes; objects of inspiration that have been transformed into works of art or remain on the shelf amongst the others patiently waiting their turn. She has piles of photographs to remind her of what she has stumbled across in her many walks and the narratives they initiated for her. Much of Fran’s work is influenced by her interest in ecology and I realise that, by using discarded objects found on the beach, not only is Fran constructing a narrative about man and his environment, but she is creating work that, by its very nature, is recycled. Just as the sea creates its own patterns of recycled objects on the shore, Fran, by isolating elements of these patterns and rearranging them for herself, helps to extend the
COOMBE GALLERY
process the waves began. She is ‘interested by the way the sea rearranges things and turns them upside down so you see different things on the shore that you wouldn’t normally see together’. What Fran is attempting to do is ‘to make sense of them by putting them together’. Whilst some might infer that Fran’s inspiration comes from simply picking up rubbish from the beach, it is for her still a quest driven by her constant search for beauty. I am struck by the personal nature of inspiration and beauty and the different places or ways in which we all attempt to find them. Fran finds beauty in the things that man has left behind or discarded and the relationship between what they were before and what they have become now that nature has claimed, recycled and transformed them. She refers to this as the ‘beautifying of the waves’ a process that ‘seems to soften the edges of something that would probably normally offend me.’ She is often trying to simplify everything in order to focus in on a single narrative. This is clearly reflected in Fran’s beach tar paintings which seem overall simpler than some of her other work. As she says, ‘they are kind of honed in. All that information was too much and here Tidal Agglomeration Mixed miedia
Night Drawing Mixed miedia
COOMBE GALLERY
I am able to concentrate on the essence of something or a detail.’ She dilutes the tar with white spirit and the paintings are produced through numerous pourings or the use of a brush depending on the thickness of the resulting mix. Like Bridget, Fran is interested in a process of transformation, ‘a sort of transition where something becomes something else. Like these bits of plastic that were a boat and then became something else and it still has the essence of both things about it.’ I realise that, again like Bridget, the rendering of this transformation between life and art does not always run as smoothly as she would like. It can be tricky creating a transformation between what is there in front of us in reality and what works within a piece of work as quite often ‘there’s so much information there, somehow you have to deal with it or wrap it up somehow or take just one element of it.‘ Some sort of distillation or simplification needs to take place to allow for a successful translation of life onto the page. Fran felt that placing the actual object she had collected in the painting did not work due to being too literal and overbearing, but she has recently discovered a
COOMBE GALLERY
method of presenting ‘the strange attractor’ that works on the page whilst retaining a strong enough impression of it to keep the narrative alive. By painting thick acrylic on the objects she finds, for example on an old discarded mobile phone, she can then peel the paint off when it is dry and is left with a mould she finds easier to incorporate on the canvas and that helps her to achieve the ‘ishness’ that she is after. ‘Ishness’ seems a perfect word for Fran to use. I feel she is often drawn to things that are not exactly as they appear, objects that are in a state of transformation and that are sometimes difficult to pinpoint or label. A painting she has done of the dusk portrays the time of day she loves best when ‘anything can be going on and you’re not sure’ and when, in the fading light, everything blurs until it becomes one. I can understand why Fran is keen on the unframed or sketch like nature of this show as it allows the images to remain in a state of transformation rather than being boxed up and presented as something finite and finished. In this way the work can remain like the tide line that she continues to try to capture, something that has been left for the Beach conversations Beach tar, oil
COOMBE GALLERY
present moment as it is, but that is only waiting for the time to come when the sea will return and it will be brought to life again in some other form. On the day I visit her Fran has tied a painting to the sea wall in front of her house to allow the sea to pound and transform the canvas in question. It is this for me that epitomises Fran Gynn’s work. It is an act that is also symbolic of the truly symbiotic nature of the relationship that man shares with his environment. Having taken those objects recycled by the waves as her inspiration Fran now returns the painting to the sea encouraging it to provide the last brush stroke. A week later I embark on the last of my studio visits. I have been inspired by my time with both Bridget and Fran and feel surprisingly encouraged by the open nature of the creative process I have so far witnessed. As I set off to visit Sarah Gillespie, the artist whose work I believe differs most from the work of the others, I am intrigued and nervous to discover what similarities, if any, I might find. Both of Sarah’s parents were designers and as her father ran a design factory she gained access at a young age to a treasure trove of materials such as
COOMBE GALLERY
silkscreen, gold leaf, metallic powers and huge outsize bits of paper that could only help to feed the insatiable appetite of a child’s creativity. It wasn’t until her late teens however that Sarah recalls really getting into art. It was a time when she was unhappy at school and she vividly remembers the first feelings of respect that her work produced in those around her, a feeling that, as she rightly points out, is not often expressed by adults towards teenagers. She went on from school to spend an incredible, yet intense, year learning her craft in Paris before returning to art school in Oxford which seems to hold less wonderful memories and which initiates a conversation between us about the value of art school and the balance between being taught the essential tools of your trade and feeling pushed into producing work that is not your own, or struggling on with work that may be at odds with the taste of your tutors or others around you. Sarah is well known for her large incredibly intricate canvases which are awe inspiring in their detail yet still manage to possess an overwhelming quality of stillness. She refers to the ‘pre-seeing’ that is involved.
The long period of time that is given over to sketching and photographing various areas of the Ley before deciding which image resonates with her enough to qualify for the long process involved in producing each of her paintings. If anyone has seen one of Sarah’s large canvases in the making they will understand the complex, time-consuming nature of creating such an image. It is no wonder that she is so careful in choosing an image that she feels can sustain her throughout a process that can often take a number of months to complete. As Sarah says, ‘it’s like endurance running as opposed to sprinting.’ Even before touching the canvas she has the image complete in her mind and although the images seem very specific she is careful to find something in each of them that transcends the image itself, ‘something that is universal to all of them.’ She shows me a work in progress that she is, at present, not happy with. She has become aware of a self-conscious spirituality that is entering the piece and, uncomfortable with this, she has put the canvas to one side for the time being. It raises a number of important issues that I have come across in conversation with Bridget and Fran. We talk about the difficulty of capturing landscapes in paintings and discuss
COOMBE GALLERY
why then so many artists continue to try and what it is they are actually attempting to capture. She suggests that ‘what we are wanting to paint is significance, signifying events and signifying places.’ While it was immediately easier to see the way in which Bridget and Fran took specific elements of a landscape to work with, thereby negating the difficulty of translating nature as a whole, it seems harder for me to understand the way in which Sarah succeeds in avoiding clichés with her vastly complex and complete scenes. Her Slapton paintings, however, like the work of both Fran and Bridget, are the product of a long, internal, and intense distillation. A distillation that may be less instantly recognisable due to the sheer quantity of detail embodied in the images but one that is no less evident or important. Perhaps when taking on work of this nature there is no escaping the clichés that surround you. For the artist it is perhaps a little like walking a tight rope that you may well fall off but one that you have to keep walking in order to discover what works and what doesn’t and the many different ways in which to succeed. As Sarah says ‘you just walk right on that line between what’s poetic and what’s a cliché.’
COOMBE GALLERY
Sarah’s new work appears to have taken her in a new direction from the Slapton Ley series and from the detailed matrices that she has been creating up until now. She has embarked on a series of still lifes that embody the opposite of much of her work to date. Producing at least one or two images a day, a world apart from the months it previously took, her working process has been simplified in every way to become what might be seen as a form of meditation. Sarah is revelling in the freedom this new work allows her. As she says, ‘there’s something very joyful about sitting down with something quite simple in front of you and doing your best to just translate it and not do too much more thinking about it than that.’ Yet whilst this work is freer it also seems to require a rigid discipline in concentration and in seeing that excludes all narrative. It appears to demand that the ego of the artist be excluded from the picture altogether. Sarah says that: ‘The thing that I have been trying with the still lives, and this is quite important, is what can I actually see sitting here with my two eyes, no lens, and no means of translation. What can I really see, what do I think I see and every time my mind has wandered off I’ve tried to
Japanese tea cup I Oil on linen
Wintersweet Oil on linen
COOMBE GALLERY
create the discipline to turn back. I am trying to eliminate all of the narratives. It’s a really beautiful thing to do.’ The resulting still lives really are beautiful and the epitome of themselves in terms of their inherent stillness. Sarah spoke of her favourite artists as Vermeer and Gwen John relishing them for the quality of stillness that their work possesses. She says of Gwen John, a character she is obviously intrigued by and who she has no doubt been influenced by, that after her much questioned affair with Rodin ‘she lived a very secluded life on her own, without a husband or children, in Paris and painted these paintings which are just so obsessive and very still and very quiet and very very beautiful.’ It is most definitely these qualities that her new work reflects, the quality of both beauty and stillness. I am reminded of the different taste and desires of artists. I think of Bridget speak in wonder yet fear of the detail involved in Sarah’s Slapton series, describing it as a jigsaw puzzle she wouldn’t know how to begin, while for Sarah her new work ‘feels scarily simple.’ She has always found the detail easy and describes it like knitting where ‘you just kind of anchor everything on the detail, like
COOMBE GALLERY
scaffolding. It’s actually much harder to paint much less.’ This difference between Bridget and Sarah reminds me of another important distinction in the way the two work. While lines, as we have seen, play an important role in Bridget’s work, Sarah talks of first discovering the work of George Seurat and the relief she felt that she had found an artist sketching without the use of lines. It was the first time she had come across an approach that she could relate to and which allowed her to embrace a new drawing technique that she felt fitted so well with her view of the world: ‘His drawings are extraordinary painterly drawings that don’t use lines at all. They are all tone. I was really influenced by them. As soon as I realised that you could draw like that I knew that was the way I was seeing and that’s why I was struggling with where to put a line because I don’t see a line.’ One of the first questions I asked Sarah at the beginning of our conversation was about the relationship between emotion and landscape painting: whether she attempts to capture the emotion that a landscape might stir in her or whether she imbues that landscape with a reflection Start Bay - Heavenly blue Oil on linen
COOMBE GALLERY
of her own emotions? We agreed it was not an easy question to answer and the relationship between emotions and a piece kept coming up. Sarah is sure that she doesn’t set out to paint an image with an emotion in mind and that it is more of an organic intuitive feeling that may stem from the process of painting itself. She says that she is ‘not conscious of wanting to say something’ and is often surprised by the emotional impact the resulting picture might embody. She will recognise what is working within an image and when it resonates in the right way but it is very hard to put into words exactly what this process is or how it comes about: ‘It’s really difficult to describe. It’s like a tuning fork, very much like a tuning fork. I’m conscious that what I am doing is looking and waiting for this image to resonate in a certain way and I couldn’t tell you how it is in advance but when it does it I am good at hearing it. That’s the only way I can describe it.’ She makes an important point that if an artist is too conscious while they work the finished piece often, all too clearly, reflects those feelings of self consciousness. I think back to her spiritual canvas that has been put to one side. Recently speaking alongside Brian Patten at
COOMBE GALLERY
‘Ways With Words’ in Dartington, it is clear that Sarah has been influenced by much of what he said. Brian spoke of the intrinsic danger in getting old of repeating oneself and more importantly of becoming a cliché of oneself. Sarah talks of herself as a mid-career artist and seems all too aware of the fact that ‘you start looking for subject matter that is your subject matter.You catch yourself thinking well that would make a good Sarah Gillespie painting or that would make a good Fran Gynn.’ A quote of Lucien Freud’s that Sarah has come across and that she reads to me seems to provide a certain comfort for artists in the face of this commonly felt fear. Freud writes that: ‘My object in painting pictures is to try to move the senses by an intensification of reality. Whether this can be achieved depends on how intensely the painter understands and feels that about a personal object of his choice. Because of this painting is the only art in which the intuitive qualities of the artist may be more valuable to him than actual knowledge or intelligence. A painters taste must come out of what obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what is suitable for me to do in art.’
In this way, by sticking to their passions and following their obsessions, artists should be able to avoid becoming a cliché of themselves. The job of the artist must be to remain true to their own intuitions, to allow free reign to their ego, and to embrace ‘self indulgence as their discipline.’ Sarah puts it well when she says that ‘you sort of have to trust that if you are sufficiently stimulated and obsessed and interested, whichever of those words you chose to use, that’s all it takes for you to pursue it and then to apply your craft.’ It seems it is the strength of an artist’s feeling for something, anything, in life that is necessary to create a successful transformation of their obsession into an image that sparks similar feelings in the eye of the beholder. For this show the artists involved have been freed from the restraints of producing a finished piece and encouraged to revel in the materials and tools they have chosen to work with, be it limestone, ink, tar, paint, or linen. The very nature of the show reveals the constant searching and exploration that an artist engages with every day in their quest to ensure that their work remains vital and alive. What we are getting to see is the artist’s brush poised in mid stroke, their paint in mid flow, the canvas in it’s natural state
and the hammer and chisel in action. Sarah worries that ‘Mark’s original idea was for all of us to rifle through our sketchbooks but he ended up challenging all of us. I don’t think he’s getting what he thought he was getting’. For me it is for this very reason that I am eager to see the resulting work of all three artists hung side by side on the walls of The Coombe Gallery in May.
- Rowan Lange April 2010
www.coombegaller y.com