Goldmark 02

AUTUMN 2016

goldmark

Price ÂŁ10

goldmarkart.com 01572 821424

g autumn 2016

Contents 2

Michael Rothenstein

6

A Conversation with Anne Mette Hjortshøj

10 Eduardo Paolozzi - Tottenham Court Road Study 12 Max Beckmann - Gesichter 16 Jim Malone at 70 - Review 18 Chado and the Chawan 22 Edward Middleditch - The River 24 Pablo Picasso - Portraits Imaginaires 28 Bob Gruen - Freedom 30 John Farrington - In Conversation

Crisp falling leaves; chill winds in the air: Autumn is well and truly here, and with it another special collection of pieces in our seasonal supplement. As well as two upcoming exhibitions featuring work by Eduardo Paolozzi and Anne Mette Hjortshøj, we’ve many delightful new arrivals at the gallery awaiting your perusal. We hope you find something to enjoy.

36 John Piper - Quiberon Bay 38 Pots and Food 42 Phil Rogers - 80 Guinomis 44 Eduardo Paolozzi - Bunk 48 Derrick Greaves - Rose, Black and White 50 A Festive Selection 54 Sid Burnard 58 John Piper - Coventry Cathedral 60 Ceri Richards

goldmark

Orange Street Uppingham

Words by Max Waterhouse

Rutland

except page 16 © Richard Phethean

LE15 9SQ

Photographs by Jay Goldmark, Vicki Uttley & Christian Soro

01572 821424

Design by Porter/Goldmark, October 2016

goldmarkart.com

ISBN 978-1-909167-38-4

michael rothenstein Michael Rothenstein (1908-93) was perhaps the most experimental British graphic artist of the 20th century. To the celebrated British printmaker Eduardo Paolozzi, his art pushed hard against the edges of the established print world, restlessly innovating while the work of others aped and grew stale: Michael Rothenstein works with amazing abandon…The phantasmagoria scrapes the back of the mind, hinting at not only our ancient past but also a string of brilliant metaphors reflecting the lunacy of the tabloids’ vision of contemporary life…

To unleash all this in the form of lucid metaphors shows a power to be envied.

The son of Sir William Rothenstein, the illustrious painter, printmaker, portraitist, and Principal of the Royal College of Art, Rothenstein began life surrounded by art. From an early age he was encouraged in his own studies, eventually enrolling at the Chelsea School of Art in 1923. Despite the obvious talent displayed in the landscape watercolours and drawings he produced throughout the 1920s, the combination of debilitating depression and a rare and encumbering glandular illness that stayed with him until 1940 meant that Rothenstein exhibited very little in his early career and his stylistic development came slowly.

After a first one-man show at the Redfern Gallery in 1942, the many diverse processes of printmaking began to attract the artist towards graphic work. In 1946, with his first editioned print – Timber Felling in Essex, produced for the School Prints initiative – he decided to venture fully into the world of printmaking. After a flurry of experimental works produced with the help of outside printers, in 1954 Rothenstein established his own studio in Great Bardfield where he began to produce from his own presses.

1. Cockerel, £1750

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

2∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

Sidey states in the catalogue raisonné that Rothenstein considered this to be one of his finest linocuts.

Working with a childlike curiosity, he tried his hand at every printing method available to him. His fascination led to a myriad of new techniques which he developed on as many different media: driftwood and sheets of iron, scrubbed with sandpaper or ground with power tools, became printing blocks whilst metal scraps, photographs and other refuse were incorporated into the process.

In Rothenstein’s studio, these constructed plates became works of art themselves, three-dimensional boards worked over with the same vigour and intensity as a sculptor

4∣

carving marble or cutting metal. The resulting images gained not just a depth of tone, touch, and texture embedded by block on paper, but a depth of meaning too.

Colour in particular became an important aspect of each print, Rothenstein drawing upon a childhood love of the vivid and vibrant: These are the most brilliant images: a Chinese vermilion background, blue figures, black trees, wonderful orange and purple ornaments…you see from a tiny kid I was curiously attracted by the wonderful kind of blatancy of festival colours…

contact us on 01572 821424

Over the next four decades Rothenstein ceaselessly dedicated his time to printmaking, at the almost total expense of his work in other media. In 1967 he moved to Stisted, Essex and new workshop premises with the Argus Studio, where he worked alongside several printers who aided with the printing of his more complicated blocks and plates. His imagery in these prints straddled a divide between figurative portraits, depictions of animals, especially the cockerel, and more abstract combinations of form, colour, and texture.

2. Timber Felling, £225

So relentless was his drive and energy that it seemed Rothenstein was making up for those lost years in the 1920s and ’30s. As well as pulling countless new editions from his eagle-crested Columbian press (which now resides in the Goldmark Atelier), Rothenstein also lectured extensively on his techniques and produced several publications, travelling frequently to talk to audiences about the importance of the print as a medium in its own right, and not merely a tool for reproduction.

His philosophy was that each print form need not to be treated as if it were a separate practice: My feeling is that each technique in printmaking is like a single instrument producing its own range of sound but that these instruments need not always be played separately as they have been in the past. We live in an age when transformation between techniques is made available through phototechnology and in this way the single instrument is less separate – it is

capable of merging, of being used in concert – of producing a symphony, with a new kind of orchestration.

A figurehead at the very forefront of the 20th century British printmaking renaissance, Rothenstein died at his home in Essex in 1993. His prints embody the same excitement and daring that galvanised their production: rich in colour and spectacularly textured, they represent an artist exploding the boundaries of traditional printmaking.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com 3. Untitled (Orange Motor Car), £1250

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣5

New exhibition in November

A conversation with

anne mette hjortshØj GG: Since we last saw you at your 2012 exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, what have you been up to?

AM: A week ago I carried downstairs the work for my upcoming Goldmark show, the best pots of four years with the kiln I built when I had my first exhibition with the gallery. So some pots are four years old, almost, and many pots are from the last firing that we opened yesterday. And it has been quite an unexpected adventure since that exhibition.

When I had my first show, I had my studio somewhere else on the island, so we moved to this farm and built a workshop and a kiln. It’s been a lot of ‘trial and error’, I think is the British way of saying we’ve been throwing out a lot of things and had a lot of new firings.

The Queen of Denmark came to visit your studio – how did that happen?

When the film from my 2012 exhibition came out it was shown on Danish television. And it happened that the Queen of Denmark that year would be coming to Bornholm on an official summer visit. The Queen herself is a ceramics collector and after she saw the film she asked if she could come and see

my workshop. She even stayed 12 minutes longer than expected; we’re a little proud of that.

It was a very strange, peculiar, but quite amazing experience. She knows a lot about pots: they have a very big collection in the royal family. We were invited to her boat for an official dinner the evening before and she told me, ‘I remember from my childhood my father always picked up ceramics in a certain way, looking at the back, just checking if the surface is ok and what the clay is like.’

Potters do that too.

You also mentioned that you’ve had a lot of potters get in touch to come and visit.

In July we were very lucky to have a Japanese potter from Mashiko who’s a friend of mine working in our studio for around six weeks in a kind of ‘artist in residence’ situation. He had a mission: he wanted to work with only Bornholm local materials, because I’ve been bragging a lot about the island. So we spent two weeks in my old car driving around discovering lots of new materials I hadn’t tested before.

I’ve never been to Japan, but I’ve been to Korea many times now, and it's a big

inspiration for me, this part of the world. I work with stoneware, and I work with traditional glazes, and I work with classical shapes, and a lot of it comes from Asia.

Are you influenced at all in your work by where you live on Bornholm?

I’m not local. Originally I’m from the mainland, but I’ve lived here now almost since I graduated. It’s been a potters’ island since at least the 17th century.

I think the inspiration from here is not something I think about, or that's visible, but how your clay looks when it is fired or when it’s wet tells you a lot about where you come from. I use a lot of different clay types and very few glazes. If you throw, the personality is very different from one clay to the other, and especially if you take the clay fresh from the ground. In a line of tea bowls you can see that even though it’s exactly the same amount of clay, they are so different from each other depending on the materials.

That’s the signature, that's where I come from. Variations in colour and depth and structure and - what is the word in English? In Danish we have a very good word, stoflighed; it’s an old word, but I think it’s coming back. Stoflighed –

Anne Mette’s studio in Bornholm photographed by Jay Goldmark

contact us on 01572 821424

∣7

I spend most of my time in the studio working on my wheel, and I like the process, but sometimes it’s nice to get away and do something different. So I started making these press-moulded square bottles, in which you have a flat canvas that you can work on and that can show off the glazes.

I see the materials in a different way when I look at this canvas, when I see a picture more than I see a three-dimensional object.

What is it that you enjoy about working with the Goldmark Gallery?

texture, or materiality - is important to me. And that’s what clay is, all these things that are just underneath the surface.

Just recently you opened the kiln after your last firing – are you worried or relieved when the pots emerge each time?

It’s not a very long firing in our wood kiln between 24 and 30 hours. But it takes a long time for the kiln to cool, so we wait for five days before we open, which is nice, because you can look at everything with fresh eyes. I never judge the pots when I first open the kiln. It’s not a big kiln, but there are a lot of results to deal with: all the different clay types, the new shapes, old shapes with new materials, and you have to leave that alone for a little while.

This way of firing involves a lot of risk.

It’s difficult when you have a bad firing, and expensive - not in the sense of money, but it costs a lot of energy. One

very satisfying thing with being a craftsman is that you make things and at the end of the day you can see that you’ve done something. It’s a very straightforward satisfaction. But then, if there’s nothing left after the firing…

On the other hand, there are so many other treasures you can get with it. If you fire in an electric kiln, what you put in is what comes out. But when you work with a wood kiln, and salt glazing, you get surfaces, colours, combinations that have nothing to do with what I did: it’s the kiln you can thank. It’s nice to be able to say this is beautiful, not because I made it, but because the glaze and the slip and the firing came together in a very beautiful way.

If you are a craftsman, you work with your own things, it's a never ending, ‘I did this, I did that’; it’s too much sometimes.

So it’s nice to have a colleague in the kiln.

Have you got any favourite pieces from your upcoming show?

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

8∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

Sometimes people come and visit and they ask me where and how I sell my work. And then I get a little quiet, because I don’t really know how to explain to people that I ship everything in a box and the gallery takes care of the rest. I say that this gallery is in a small town in the English countryside, but there are more than 20 people employed there.

People don’t get that either. And I say to them that I can make what I want. There is no, ‘and then we want you to do this and that’: it’s up to me. That’s nerve-racking, because I can’t blame somebody else for what is good or bad, it’s my responsibility; but it’s kind of crazy that a gallery like this exists.

I am really bad at selling work. I can’t do it. I just like to be in the workshop, making and firing and glazing, like I know many potters do, so it’s crazy I can just take the best pieces from each firing. It’s very hard to decide which is best. But that's a very good challenge too, of course. It's a lot of never-ending discussions with yourself about shapes, glazes, slips.

So there are the Mr Goldmark pots, and there are the not Mr Goldmark pots. And the Mr Goldmarks have been going upstairs, where I don’t see them. I just keep working for the next firing.

Anne Mette’s Mr Goldmark pots can be found on our website

eduard0 paolozzi Tottenham Court Road Study

Skip down the Tottenham Court Road tube station escalators onto its subterranean platforms and you’ll see why many critics believe Eduardo Paolozzi’s brilliant mosaics made for one of London Transport’s finest public commissions.

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s the capital’s transport department began a lengthy campaign to modernize its labyrinthine network of underground stations, appealing to a number of artists to aid with the redesigning of station layouts and redecoration of their interiors.

As the grandfather of Pop Art and with a formidable reputation as a sculptor and printmaker, Paolozzi was an obvious choice: modern, internationally renowned, and universally acclaimed.

Approached in 1979, the artist immediately engaged with the given brief, as his own account of the

commission reveals: I thought always of the people who use the Tube. What happens when a platform is crowded?

What happens when people pass quickly through the station on the train? Will people relate to the metaphors I sought in connection with life above ground – cameras, music shops, saxophones, electronics? ...My ‘alphabet’ of images for Tottenham Court Road reflects my interpretation of the past, present and future of the area.

Inspired by the station’s location amidst neon-bright hi-fi stores and camera shops, Paolozzi began work by producing monumental studies for the later mosaics.

Initially drawing out his intricate designs in miniature, these sketches were then enlarged and transferred to screens before being printed on enormous melamine panels. Colour was then applied by hand, the ceramic-like surface

of the plates lending Paolozzi’s oils a translucency to mimic the vibrant colour of the final mosaic pieces.

Installed throughout the station tunnels half a decade later, the reception of the finished mosaics was an instant success: to the esteemed art critic Richard Cork they were no less than a tour de force of modern art; to Roger de Grey, then president of the Royal Academy, Paolozzi’s work constituted a remarkable event in the development in public art in this country, showing how art can transform our everyday surroundings.

With its sprawling pipes and wires and blueprint layouts, this panel represents an essential historic relic of the project, demonstrating the ease with which Paolozzi’s creative mind moved from the small-scale to the colossal. Superbly composed and truly iconic, it makes for a genuine once-in-a-lifetime piece.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com 4. Untitled Study, £22,500

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 11

Max Beckmann Gesichter With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the collective German conscience was faced with seismic change. Never before had nations had to contemplate such routine and industrial slaughter as took place in those four years; never had societies been burdened so heavily, not just with the physical realities of such killing – and what visceral realities they were – but also with sustained emotional and mental realities. How should – how, even, could – society consider and react to so momentous an event as that Great War? This was the question with which a young Max Beckmann concerned himself. Born in 1884, Beckmann had by the mid1900s begun to nurture an artistic career at a time of great change in the world of art. Impressionism had met its peak, and emerging was a band of raw and revolutionary artists – expressionists, fauvists, artists of so-called ‘new painting’.

Critics of his early work grouped him with the revolution: his paintings were ‘visionary’ and ‘modern’, and he has since been termed a German Expressionist, though this was a label from which Beckmann continually and vocally fought to distance himself.

These pre-war years, as he noted in his Creative Credo of 1918, were a time of business interests, a mania for success and influence. Allocated work as a medical orderly when war broke out, however, Beckmann was suddenly faced with the hideousness of blood-soaked operating theatres and truncated victims, whose dispersed limbs had been left on the mud-lands of the front. Looking straight into the stupid face of horror, he could not help but reassess his place in this new world: it is unsurprising that the wartime period saw as immense a transformation in Beckmann’s style and approach as is evidenced in the Gesichter suite, arguably the most emphatic of Beckmann’s life and career.

Produced between his first experiences of war in late 1914 and the ceasefire of 1918, each image in Gesichter cannot be divorced from the influence of the ongoing conflict.

Nevertheless, Beckmann’s perspective in this period is varied and subtle, often approaching wartime themes from the quiet unease of urban and domestic life behind the battle lines. In images like The Yawners or Café Music, Beckmann depicts scenes that are ostensibly mundane, everyday, seemingly unencumbered with the kinds of visceral and emotional brutality we see so prominently in prints like Madhouse or The Large Operation; but his claustrophobic reduction of space, the energy of his drypoint incisions and the alternately expressionist and cubist, jagged and rasped, thickly bitten lines contribute to an underlying unrest that perfectly encapsulates how the terrors of war trickled through to the consciousness of civil society.

In the aftermath of the conflict, Beckmann’s printing work began to attract the attention of critics, one such – the art historian, collector and publisher Julius Meier-Graefe – offering to produce a portfolio for Beckmann in 1919. The years that followed Germany’s defeat saw intensely concentrated graphic production amongst artists: reparations were harsh, and the economic turmoil the war had left in its wake meant that the print, which could be produced cheaply and in great numbers, was far more viable than a reliance on canvases alone.

In Beckmann, however, the change of focus to the graphic medium coincided with fundamental changes in stylistic approach. Printing served not just an economic purpose, but (more importantly) an artistic developmental purpose too. It was a clarity of vision and depiction that Beckmann sought; drypoint, in which the line is everything (lines in which

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com 5. Playing Children (detail), £6,000

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 13

14 ∣

contact us on 01572 821424

6. Self Portrait, £12,000

Hofmaier, the authority on Beckmann’s prints, suggests he achieved an incredible purity...which often astounds), became the artist’s graphic tour de force.

Meier-Graefe selected nineteen of the best original images from Beckmann’s wartime output to be produced in a standard edition of 60 and a deluxe of 40. The title Gesichter – translated literally as ‘faces’, but also ‘visions’ or ‘appearances’ – was suggested to Beckmann, incorporating the various characters bored, brutalised, deranged and disillusioned that he had portrayed and which constituted his image of a now post-war German society.

In his Creative Credo, written not long before Gesichter’s publication, Beckmann writes passionately of his artistic principles:

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality. The stronger my determination grows to grasp the unutterable things of this world, the deeper and more powerful the emotion burning inside me about our existence, the tighter I keep my mouth shut and the harder I try to capture the terrible, thrilling monster of life’s vitality and to confine it, to beat it down and to strangle it with crystal-clear, razor-sharp lines and planes.

Today, some one hundred years after the Great War, and at a time when so much of our remembrance is recounted through the narrative of British poets, artists and writers, Beckmann’s Gesichter offers us an alternative perspective from ‘the other side’, in parts equally profound and poignant, and of undeniable artistic significance and value.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com 7. The Large Operation, £7,500

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 15

Review

jim malone at 70 40 Years a Potter Even a lavishly produced catalogue cannot do justice to this body of work by a man at the very peak of his powers. To create a show of this quality has taken a lifetime, culminating in two years of hoarding the best pieces from each kiln firing.

Stand back from them and you can admire the beauty of their line, form and proportion, but come closer and you enter a world that exemplifies the spectacular qualities which an oil and wood fired reduction stoneware kiln can create in the hands of a master. The subtleties with which Malone's glazes transform over the rims and incised marks is breathtaking – mustard and olive satin matt

breaking into black, glossy rivulets, blacks breaking into a pixellated 'night sky' of rust coloured oil spots – and as a devotee of brushed slips I love the hakeme bottles and yunomi with iron motifs. These illustrate the deft freshness of a hand which has the unselfconscious looseness of 10,000 practice strokes.

For those who might think they don't like 'brown and green pots' and equally for those who might think they know what a good reduction stoneware pot is – a category in which I would put myself – this show was for me and will be a for you a total revelation.

Richard Phethean potter, teacher & writer

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

16 ∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

Chado and the Chawan

POTTERS AND THEIR TEA BOWLS Those lucky enough to have watched or taken part in a Japanese tea ceremony will know its peculiar intimacy. As the ceremony unfolds a strangely profound connection develops between host and guest through the calming ritual of each of its movements: the delicate swish of a matcha whisk; the graceful lowering of a wooden ladle.

Making a chawan – the bowl used for the preparing and serving of tea in chado, the ‘Way of Tea’ – is one of the greatest challenges a potter can face. To be suitable for the tea ceremony, potters must work their chawan forms to demanding specifications. The bowl should be light enough to handle with ease, yet heavy enough to have presence in the hand; too thin, and the tea will lose its heat too quickly; too thick, and the bowl will feel clumsy and unwieldy, heat failing to penetrate to the hand as it is clasped.

Practitioners of chado often have strict standards for the vessels they use, and will look carefully at three areas of a chawan with particular scrutiny: the rim, which must be smooth enough to be wiped clean in the ceremony and avoid snagging on a guest’s lip; the interior surface, which should be uniform so as not to damage the light blades of the whisk; and the foot, or kodai, which must accommodate the host’s fingertips as they hold the bowl between the thumb and fingers of one hand.

Perhaps most important of all, though, the potter must offer in a chawan something of themselves. The very best chawans are thought to have captured the essence of their maker,

something deep and personal in their form and decorative gesture that could only be of that person, sometimes at the expense of practical consideration. Between these opposing limits – between artistic and functional balance, the requirements of the ceremony and the impetus to offer something unique – the individual spark of a potter is often kindled.

It is no surprise that with the international and intercultural movement of ceramics in the last century, where the cliché of ‘East meets West’ has evolved and branched out into more complex aesthetic senses, more potters have undertaken the task of making chawans and, more generally, tea bowls. In a world of increasing mechanization and digital industry, the intimate, tactile warmth of tea served this way seems ever more vital.

Presented here are 6 potters from around the world, each making tea bowls according to individual styles and influences, mixing the hand-me-down techniques of national tradition with signatures of personality to create pots of enduring feeling and worth.

Kang-hyo Lee teabowl photographed by Jay Goldmark in South Korea

contact us on 01572 821424

∣ 19

1. Ken Matsuzaki

2. Lisa Hammond

3. Kang-hyo Lee

Apprenticed to Tatsuzo Shimaoka, himself the apprentice of the revered Shoji Hamada, Matsuzaki could well have made a living off the Mashiko name, aping those who came before him for easy money. Instead, he took the harder (and infinitely more rewarding) route of determining a deeply personal ceramic style quite removed from that of the Mashiko tradition.

Characterised by thick, showy Shino glazes which gather in white globules, emerald Oribe, and golden Yohen surfaces, Matsuzaki’s chawans are often quieter than his larger work but sit with an emanating presence that draws the hand and eye in

A tireless champion of ceramics whose work has earned her an MBE, Lisa Hammond has been producing exceptional pots for over 20 years now. Frequently inspired by Japanese ceramics, tea bowls have remained a staple in her throwing repertoire, decorated with her characteristic soda glaze or hand-applied crackle slip and Shino surfaces.

In the last 18 months Lisa has also undertaken a 7-week residency in Mashiko, Japan, with fellow potter Ken Matsuzaki as part of a cultural exchange, making use of the local kilns, clays, and glazes to produce some very special, truly unique chawans.

The resulting pots demonstrate Lisa’s extraordinary versatility and show just why she is one of Britain’s top makers.

Lee’s Punch’ong pots reveal his roots in his native traditional Korean ceramics, but the dynamism of his decoration, balanced by a calm in colour and form, result in beautifully personal ceramic pieces that could only be attributed to his hand.

Many of his tea bowls are decorated with hakeme brushstrokes – gye yal in Korean – white slip being scratched and swept across the surface with dry straw brushes to reveal dark grey clay beneath. The technique stretches beyond the 1500s, yet feels energetically fresh and modern in Lee’s bowls.

8. Ken Matsuzaki, £1250 9. Lisa Hammond, £750

20 ∣

contact us on 01572 821424

10. Kang-hyo Lee, £550

4. Anne Mette Hjortshøj

5. Koichiro Isezaki

6. Kazuya Furutani

Situated on the remote Danish island of Bornholm, Anne Mette Hjortshøj is another young potter to have successfully established a distinctive ceramic style of her own, one which carries on the mantle of past Scandinavian potters, such as Gutte Eriksen and Gertrud Vasegaard, as well as much Korean pottery.

In their deeper V shape, Hjortshøj’s tea bowls owe something to Korean tea ware, and to the small-footed Tenmoku-jawan styled tea bowls of Japan which were often reserved for noble shogun guests. Her use of glazes, however, sees ‘Oriental’ styles sit side-by-side with European: black and brown Tenmoku or cream-coloured hakeme on one; pitted crimson and sapphire salt glaze on another.

The son of the potter Jun Isezaki, a Living National Treasure, Koichiro was born and brought up in Bizen, living and breathing the local style of pottery. Now an accomplished maker in his own right, Isezaki’s stoneware chawans combine the looseness and freedom of modern ceramics with the traditional, protracted pinewood firings of his hometown in Okayama.

Carved, curved, faceted, or torn, each tea bowl endures hours of slow wood-firing to emerge from the kiln coated in mossy olivegreen and caramel-brown shawls of woodash, Isezaki’s organically inspired forms perfectly suiting their natural surface textures.

Though in the world of Japanese ceramics critical acclaim is usually reserved for veterans of the craft, Kazuya Furutani is one of a number of young potters to have made waves in his early career. Having just turned 40 years old, since apprenticing to his potter father he has built four anagama kilns and exhibited in a growing number of solo shows.

Furutani produces both Shigaraki and Iga ware pots, subjecting his local stoneware clays to extremely high temperatures and large amounts of wood-ash to achieve the scorched surfaces and glassy spheres that pool on the side of his pots. Frequently bearing the skeletal remains of impressed seashells used to stop pots from fusing to the kiln, his chawans encapsulate the simple rustic imperfection that lies at the heart of the Wabi Sabi philosophy.

11. Anne Mette Hjortshøj, £145 12. Koichiro Isezaki, £950 13. Kazuya Furutani, £1365

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 21

22 ∣

edward MiddlEditch The River Edward Middleditch’s The River reveals the artist for what he truly was: an exceptional painter dedicated wholly to nature, and one whose work has been grossly undervalued.

Born in Essex in 1923, Middleditch’s career in art began after service in the Second World War, enrolling at the Royal College of Art in 1948. Alongside contemporaries including Derrick Greaves, John Bratby, and Jack Smith, he became one of the leading lights of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ school of painting that defined the British art scene of the early 1950s.

Yet despite being one of the movement’s most talented members, Middleditch remained essentially an outsider. While his colleagues devoted themselves to themes of social and political realism, he was enticed solely by the intrinsic patterns of the natural world: running water, sunlight and shadows, and the abstract forms made by flower heads and rural landscapes.

In The River, a remarkable canvas that perfectly reflects the style Middleditch made his own, this love of organic abstraction is clear to see: wooded rows become a repeated golden frieze, throwing shade across the river banks; dappled sunlight through the trees bounces off the water, casting shimmering circular patterns over the still green surface.

It has been said by those who were closest to the artist that he seldom spoke of his experiences in the war. In the tranquil imagery of paintings like The River, a war-torn mind could well find solace.

Serenely calm and quiet, this is a standout piece from the oeuvre of an otherwise insufficiently celebrated artist.

14. The River, £14,500

contact us on 01572 821424

∣ 23

PABLO PICASSO Portraits Imaginaires

By the year 1969, Pablo Picasso had become a living legend. A household name to even the artistically uninitiated, his villa, NotreDame-de-Vie, situated just beyond the village of Mougins in the Alpes-Maritimes, was beset throughout the summer by peering tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the master at work.

Fame and approbation, however, came as a contradiction to Picasso. In years gone by he had overturned traditional views and values in the art world. He was a rebel and revolutionary, one who believed in the genius of children over the technical repression of formal teaching and realistic representation.

Yet now at the grand old age of 87, and with the emergence of Pop Art, performance ‘happenings’, and the birth of the art ‘concept’, he was viewed as part of the same establishment he had once torn down – the now-revered relic of a once-radical era.

Critical acclaim brought with it sterility, and nothing killed the creative mind like outpours of public adoration.

There lay open to him two options: to retreat gratefully and gracefully from the public eye and withdraw happy with his legacy; or to thrust himself back into the contemporary art scene with renewed energy and vigour. With Picasso, there could be only one choice, the astounding result of which was the Portraits Imaginaires suite.

The sheer volume of Picasso’s final years is breathtaking to behold, the numbers seemingly impossible for so old a man to have

24 ∣

accomplished. Carsten-Peter Warncke, in the second volume of his Pablo Picasso (Taschen 1992), reveals the statistics for the artist’s unbelievable output: 347 etchings between March and October of 1968; 167 paintings from January ’69 to the same month a year later; 194 drawings from December ’69 to January of ’71; 156 etchings from January 1970 to March ’72; 172 drawings between November ’71 and August ’72; and a massive 201 paintings from September 1970 to June ’72, all produced between the ages of 87 and 91 before his death in April 1973.

Picasso’s final years were a creative frenzy, in which the artist seemed constantly to be attacking canvases, plates, prints, and any other material that came to hand. So, when in 1969 a large delivery of art supplies arrived at his Mougins studio, fuel for the next furious cycle of production, he was not content to use the new inks, paints, and brushes alone. Everything – from the hairy string and thick paper wrapping of each parcel to the corrugated cardboard boxes in which they had arrived – suggested a potential surface for experimentation, and he quickly went to work painting a series of 29 portraits in unusual style.

Produced in oils and gouache applied directly to the unprepared boxes and paper sheets, these bizarre portraits feature the moustachioed musketeers that dominate his final works, alongside depictions of Balzac, Shakespeare, and abstracted female faces.

In his twilight years, faced both with imminent death and future

contact us on 01572 821424

150. 30.3.69.I, £3,500

16.

17.

18.

19.

16. 5.3.69.I, £3,500 17. 6.4.69.II, £3,500 18. 14.3.69.II, £3,500

26 ∣

contact us on 01572 821424

19. 23.2.69, £3,500

Picasso’s final years were a creative frenzy, in which the artist seemed constantly to be attacking canvases, plates, prints, and any other material that came to hand. immortality as the 20th century’s greatest artist, Picasso had begun to ruminate on the persona of the artist, returning time and again to Rembrandt and the idea of the ‘creative genius’.

In these ‘imaginary’ portraits which so clearly channel Rembrandt’s directness, his love of costume and the power of the subject’s gaze, Picasso announced to the world that he was the modernday master, a final reassertion from his endless well of wit and creativity before his inevitable apotheosis as a God of modern art.

So pleased was Picasso with the results of his experiment that he sought out a printmaker to reproduce them as a suite of lithographs, a search that led him to Marcel Salinas. An Egyptian by birth, Salinas had abandoned a career in law to become an artist himself. Unable to make a stable living as a painter, in 1955 he had applied for a job in a Parisian atelier, learning the skills of modern lithography and quickly becoming a renowned publisher in his own right working alongside such major artists as Max Ernst and René Magritte.

Two trial proofs were demanded of Salinas before work on the suite was begun. So impressive were they that Picasso offered Salinas top billing alongside his own name upon publication, the only printer to earn such an honour from Picasso in a lifetime of atelier collaborations. With the artist closely supervising, each portrait was reproduced by hand, drawn directly onto its lithographic block before being printed for inspection.

Picasso offered his corrections and alterations before marking

the prints with ‘bon à tirer’ (literally ‘good to pull’, indicating his satisfaction with the print quality), the entire process taking over a year to complete. Once published, each block was destroyed and the two editions of 250 each – ‘F’ for the French market, ‘A’ for America and the rest of the world – were hand-numbered ready for distribution.

One of the very last print suites Picasso ever published, the Portraits Imaginaires are the culmination of an inexhaustible mind’s many years of creation, a kind of swansong celebrating the various evolutions of the artist’s style over the decades of his career. Here are his beginnings as a young portraitist and innovative founder of Cubism (see the condensed positions of mouths, noses and eyes, sometimes stacked one atop another); here are the abstractions of the 1930s and ’40s, the invocation of so-called ‘Primitive’ art and its stylised designs; here is the mythologising, the flavour of heroism evoked in his later matador paintings.

Such is the cult of Picasso that it can be difficult to separate the man from the myth, a separation made more complex by the fact that so many of the outlandish accounts of his career are invariably true. In the Portraits Imaginaires, we are confronted with the undeniable skill of the artist, a flair and passion that defied his weakening age and which cannot be disputed by even the most cynical of critics.

Picasso was, by all accounts, the greatest of his time: were proof ever needed, this suite would suffice.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 27

New exhibition Spring 2017

bob gruen freedom Led Zeppelin; The Clash; Blondie; there are few rock ’n roll superstars of the last forty years to have escaped the lens of Bob Gruen, one of the industry’s most prominent and prolific photographers.

We are thrilled to announce that Freedom, the gallery’s first major photography exhibition, will be arriving in the New Year with work by the legendary Gruen. Freedom has long been the driving force behind both his own work and the lives and music of his subjects, an idea encapsulated in his internationally famous shot of John Lennon by the Statue of Liberty.

Featuring Gruen’s most iconic images, Freedom will offer visitors an incredible insight into the lives of the many rock and punk stars that hung around the notorious CBGB and Max’s Kansas City music clubs in the 1970s, from a riotous Sid Vicious and sultry Debbie Harry to the magical, mysterious David Bowie.

Gruen wasn’t just a brilliant recorder of this scene; he also became an integral member of the early downtown crowd.

The exhibition will chart his meeting Andy Warhol at Max’s to accompanying the Sex Pistols on their ill-fated American tour, the triumph of The Clash in New York City, and at home with John and Yoko in their Dakota building apartment.

As if these influential images were not enough, the exhibition will also include exclusive prints unseen before in the UK, documentary footage shot by Gruen in the ‘70s, and signed contact prints showing his original shot selections. Bob himself will be flying over from the States for the launch, making this a singularly rare opportunity to meet an industry giant in the company of his own work.

For more information call us on 01572 821424 or email info@goldmarkart.com.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com 20. Sid Vicious, £1450

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 29

john farrington GG: Tell us a little about the process behind your paintings, how you approach a canvas.

JF: I often play around with paint and have a sort of feeling when the effect of what I want is getting near. Then the secret is to leave it alone.

I’ve had phases. The painting I’m doing now is much more illustrative than a lot of the work I’ve done in the past. But I’ve always loved the use of colour, whether it’s sombre or bright. I’ll paint on anything, too. I’ve made paintings on bits of wood and old doors chucked out by builders shop-fitting in Bridgnorth.

If I can, I put things down on paper quite soon after thinking or seeing something. I’ve got sketchbooks full of undeveloped work that has never been taken any further. I start with a pencil drawing for the initial idea once it starts forming in my mind, and usually do a few more based on the same theme. I churn the ideas over in my head. I don’t always know where they come from, they just evolve, and there’s a painting.

I often refer back to things. I can refer back quite a number of years. That’s what I like about keeping the sketches. You forget if you don’t record in some way. I know a lot of people use a camera, but lots of these things you can’t record on a camera, because they’re thoughts, visual thoughts, really.

John Farrington in his studio photographed by Jay Goldmark

In Conversation

When I first lost the eye, I had to sort of hold onto the brush with my other hand to actually touch the canvas because I couldn’t judge the distance between the canvas and the brush. I think the work has gone flatter, more decorative, and probably more illustrative going back to its roots.

I’ve been in this studio since 1982. I’m a bit selfish: I paint for myself. I should communicate with people but it’s not an essential part of what I do.

What goes through your head as you begin a new painting?

You try to be fresh each time, and not laboured, and I think if you have one particular technique, and one way of doing things, that it can become a sort of laboured thing. I hope I never get to that stage.

I think you go with the flow of the piece of work you’re doing at the present time. But, underlying that, the stamp of your personality on each piece of work always shows through, which I suppose makes it recognisable. You can’t avoid that, I don’t think, unless you do something completely different, and in a different medium, or consciously try and develop a different style of working, or a different way of working.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 31

Are you particularly inspired by certain artists or places?

One of my first influences was Hieronymous Bosch, oh and Breughel. Here were two men who did things and very often there was no accounting for why. There was no logic – well, seemingly no logic - to what they did, but they produced the most fantastic pieces of work.

When I left school I went to work on a farm as a trainee dairyman up in Wales, and I think it comes out in my work. I use those recollections a great deal, whether it’s cows or pigs in a field. But they’re not painted like pigs really are.

Some people paint pigs beautifully, realistically. For me,

32 ∣

it’s the shapes on this rough churned up ground.

In the early days, I used to paint a lot of industrial landscape. Where I lived, in the Black Country, was a source of most of my paintings, so there was very little in the sense of rural landscape. It was just chimneystacks and rooftops. The only painting I’ve done recently that has that sort of feel to it is a canvas of the woman with the frogs.

When I was a kid, there was a lady who used to breed frogs, down the bottom of our garden. Looking through the fence I could see these big drums she used to keep them in. She talked to them, as though she were trying to make them into men like the fairytale prince.

21. Bird Table IV, £1750

contact us on 01572 821424

22. Mrs Paddock and The Frogs II, £1500

Mythical characters and fairytales often appear in your work – are you always aware of the story you want to tell in a painting?

Your career as a full-time artist began relatively late in your life. Has that changed the way you look at or think about your work?

I don’t think I’m very conscious of it but as I work I develop different ideas. Walking through some woods recently I saw two or three horse riders. I’m sure they were very innocent; then, suddenly, they’ve developed into these strange pictures of invaders on horses in ancient armour with figures looking through the trees, and heads of all these mythical woodland creatures on stakes.

I like telling stories with paint, particularly those that have been around for generations: I like the idea of the woman biting the apple, the serpent in the garden.

I think it’s nice to be able to look back on the work and to see that you have evolved over a period of time.

I’d certainly never give up painting now, at this stage. I suppose the other thing is if you didn’t do this, what the hell would you do anyway? You’d have to do something, wouldn’t you?

23. Forest Invader III, £1500 24. Birdman with the Geese I, £3,000

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 35

john piper Quiberon Bay John Piper’s strange and strikingly bold Quiberon Bay collage saw the artist return to the abstraction of 30 years previous at a time when his current work seemed as far removed from the genre as it could be.

A painter and printmaker principally working in depictions of buildings and countryside, Piper was known throughout his career as an experimental and technical artist who made the most of his chosen media. In his romantic vision of British landscapes, churches, castles, and stately homes were reproduced in virulent colour with brash and brilliant strokes.

In Quiberon Bay – an inlet off the south coast of Brittany – that same daring approach was applied, but with a return to the abstract visual language of shape and form that had moulded his early years as an artist. Brushed black swipes of wash evoking the dark surface of the sea are offset by jagged overlaid shapes in a variety of inky colours and textures, the use of collage lending each individual element prominence and presence.

It has been said that behind even his most strictly architectural and topographical images, there lie the compositional elements Piper developed in those early years of collage, construction, and assemblage. In this exceptional later work, the power of those same elements is felt in full force.

36 ∣

25. Quiberon Bay, £28,500

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

âˆŁ 37

pots and food For as long as we can remember at the gallery, every lunchtime we have sat together, gathered around a lowered table, and eaten a homemade meal from functional ceramic bowls, plates, and dishes.

Staff and customers alike are welcome to join, and in the simple act of eating together great stories are shared and new projects born.

There is a reason the Buddhist monk, shed of all other unnecessary possessions, retains only the robes that clothe him and the bowl that feeds him. Eating and drinking from vessels is something universal, almost primal, amongst human beings.

Whether quietly nestled in a bowl or cup or proudly presented on plates and platters, serving and eating food from handmade ceramics lends the act a sense of specialness, and of greater meaning. Food in pots becomes more than just fuel; it offers a moment to share with fellow diners, or a time to slow down and reflect on one’s own.

Almost all the pots we stock in the gallery were made with use in mind. Each of the makers we have worked with over the years has shared this sentiment, and their work has often reflected their own love of food, be it Jean-Nicolas Gérard’s joyful slipware plates that make bright red cherry tomatoes and fresh green salads sing, or Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s beautiful oval dishes that give quiet deference to the meal contained.

It’s not just the potters, either; to the celebrated chef and food writer Nigel Slater, the simple bowl, cupped or clasped in the hand, trapping the delicious aromas of its contents like a wine glass, offers the intimate reassurance home cooked food can bring at its best: There is something right about food in a bowl. The hot liquor on your spoon; the warmth of the bowl in your hands; the final scraping of spoon against china – they enable us to feel closer to what we eat .. . Our bowl can be as simple or as elaborate as we wish. A crude earthenware container, a delicate porcelain receptacle . . . Whatever we use, it fulfils the same purpose. To hold our food and enable us, should we wish, to cradle it.

Comfort food at its most satisfying.

Today, an ever-increasing proportion of our actions and interactions are digital. Our daily lives and livelihoods, for the vast majority of people, revolve around tapping in front of computer screens or swiping on a smart phone. We probably use our fingers and thumbs more than we ever have in our history, but rarely do we really hold and feel things. And while this new world has brought with it enormous benefits in its many digital connections, its virtual relationships, it is a world that is increasingly intangible.

Pots offer us an avenue for a more physical connection and interaction in our lives that is quite special. As with any true craft today, we don’t need something handmade by a craftsman when there are cheaper industrial alternatives; besides their obvious uses and their beauty, we make and buy pots precisely for the connection they offer us with another human being. What better way to enrich that experience than through the communion of food and drink, of breaking bread with family or feeding a guest in your home?

Functional pots are made to be held and handled. They fit between our fingers because they were made with and for hands.

In this sense, they put us back in touch, literally, not just with another person – their makers – but with our own humanity, something vitally important when so much of our handling is of things cold, metallic, unforgiving. And every time we use them again – every early morning when that cereal bowl reappears, or every evening when plates and dishes are laid out for dinner – that human connection is rekindled once more.

Use your pots.There is much pleasure to be found not just in the cooking and eating of food, but in the serving and sharing too.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

40 ∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

phil rogers 80 GUINOMIS Three different kilns; three very different firings; upwards of 9 months’ work throwing and glazing; every 80 guinomi set Phil Rogers puts together is truly a labour of pottery love.

A veteran maker of considerable skill and expertise, Rogers needs little introduction. Having taught himself to throw in the early 1970s, he has over the years established himself as one of the world’s leading studio potters. Alongside his proficiency on the wheel, he has published widely respected volumes on glazes and throwing techniques and has given lectures, workshops, and masterclasses all over the world.

In recent years we have worked closely with Phil to produce magnificent sets of guinomis, little Japaneseinspired cups originally designed for drinking sake, arranged in large custom-built display cases.

Now one of our most popular ceramics items, the idea for the project came almost by accident. When 80 beautiful individual guinomis arrived at the gallery for our 2014 exhibition of Rogers’ work, we decided to show them grouped together in a special shelved unit.

A photograph went up online: just three minutes later, a call had already come through from Germany asking for the whole set.

42 ∣

Unlike the now ubiquitous contemporary installations of identical ceramic ‘vessels’, Rogers’ guinomis are unique and thought-through, with careful consideration given to marrying every hand-thrown form to complimentary glaze and decoration. To realise their varied appearances, each set must be split over three separate firings in three different kilns, ensuring each cup can be positioned to achieve the very best quality and contrast of surface in the shifting atmospheres of each kiln.

From creamy Nuka to jet-black Tenmoku, woody pineash to milky hakeme, each guinomi cup captures Rogers’ ceramic style in miniature. Singly, they offer an intimate way to enjoy a dram of whisky or a tot of liqueur; collectively, they become a powerful work of art, their interchangeable order between shelves providing endless rediscoveries of individual pieces.

With each set totalling 80 exquisite guinomis, at £6000 they represent remarkable value and look spectacular on a wall.

This set (our eighth) is available for purchase now, but we can also take commissions for future sets and offer more information by email at info@goldmarkart.com or by phone at 01572 821424.

contact us on 01572 821424

26. Set of 80 Guinomis, £6,000

These are from set number 1 of 50, the only set with every print signed by Paolozzi.

New exhibition 29th October

eduardo paolozzi bunk Early summer, 1952. Eduardo Paolozzi, founder of the Independent Group of artists, presents a groundbreaking lecture to its members at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Entitled Bunk, Paolozzi’s talk starts with an optical projector. Under its white-hot lamp he slides projection after projection of clustered collages made from magazine clippings, newspaper shreds, commercial copy, pin-up postcards - all manner of refuse, poring over details and discussing their cultural and artistic value. In a single presentation, he changes the face of 20th century art forever: the notion of ‘Pop Art’ is born.

Where the title of the suite came from remains a debated topic: some critics note the word appearing as a detail in the more prominent collage Evadne in Green Dimension; others have suggested derivation from Henry Ford’s infamous pronouncement that History is more or less bunk… We want to live in the present. Certainly, Paolozzi’s Bunk collages, produced in post-war Paris throughout the late 1940s, formed a defining statement in British art: that the graphics of ad agencies and commercial business contributed more to the world of images than anything produced by contemporary artists at that time.

So visually and technically virtuosic were they, in fact, that they needed no alteration; only curation and collection on the page.

Material for the collages was sourced principally from American G.I.s stationed in the city after the war had ended, who willingly handed over the otherwise discarded popular magazines and pulp fiction novels from which he began to compile his images.

The medium of collage held a personal significance for Paolozzi. A child of the interwar years, he had grown up in a society in which

27. Evadne in Green Dimension, £3,000

contact us on 01572 821424

∣ 45

28.

nothing was left to waste. As a young boy, he had made scrapbooks from collected ephemera, sketching on pieces of recycled paper and unwanted broadsheet features.

All human experience is one big collage, Paolozzi once said; for the artist, literally so, it seemed.

Despite the significance with which they had been presented, however, Paolozzi abandoned the Bunk images after their emphatic reveal, only rediscovering them some 20 years later as he prepared for a 1971 retrospective at the Tate. It had taken the two intervening decades of Pop Art development to realise how prescient they had been; Frank Whitford describes in the portfolio foreword how farsighted the suite later seemed: According to one of those present [at the lecture], ‘the very notion of culture changed before one’s eyes’… Already in 1952 it was all there: science fiction, sex, technology,

the movies, mass advertising, comics, packaging. A source-book of images prepared for future historians and sociologists who may want to tell our story in pictorial symbols. The ephemeral had been raised to the level of art; the underrated, undervalued and misunderstood had been proposed as the key to an understanding of contemporary culture.

47 of the collages were chosen by Paolozzi to be replicated in an edition of 150 facsimiles, 50 of which would be produced as specials, signed and numbered by the artist himself (as illustrated here). Chris Betambeau of Advanced Graphics, a technician who had worked in the famous Kelpra Studios until the late 1960s, was sought out as the printer for what would be a challenging task of translation.

The method by which each collage was facsimiled was not just lengthy, complex,

and involved; it made for a strange and subversive statement in and of itself.

Individual elements of the original collage were artificially reproduced by combinations of lithography and screenprinting. These printed pieces were then torn, folded, and creased by hand to mimic the collated scraps before being pasted onto sheets, making identical ‘impressions’ of the original collage.

The process was both effective and absurd, as Paolozzi expert Rosemary Miles later wrote: The ‘original’ was of course unique, but made up of mass produced articles. It was then ‘mass produced’ itself but by an exceptionally skilled craftsman…

Technically, this was a highly sophisticated, paradoxical comment on production and mass production; iconographically it was an ultimate statement.

A technical and visionary masterpiece, Paolozzi’s Bunk presents us with a suspension of time, frozen moments from another generation that invite us into a visual world long since passed. In its combinations of photography and illustration, milk-skinned poster girls and science fiction androids, it offers a rich social and cultural tapestry from ordinary, everyday scenes; and in its exacting method of reproduction, it immortalized not just the time from which each collected element originated, but the creative act of the collage itself.

In a 1960 interview, Paolozzi spoke of how he was interested, above all, in the golden ability of the artist to achieve a metamorphosis of quite ordinary things into something wonderful and extraordinary… the sublime of everyday life. Ultimately, Bunk was always far more than the sum of its compiled parts: it represented an artistic, historical, and anthropological landmark, a powerful human document, and one of the most influential aesthetic projects of the 20th century.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

46 ∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

28. Never Leave Well Enough Alone, £1250

29.

31.

30.

32.

29. The Dynamics of Biology, £1750 30. It's a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps Your Disposition, £1450 31. Folks Always Invite Me for the Holidays, £1750 32. Meet the People, £2250

∣ 47

derrick greaves Rose, Black and White

Deftly drawn and delicately composed, Derrick Greaves’ sublime Rose was one of a series of canvases that heralded major change in the artist’s later development.

Born in Sheffield in 1927, Greaves first came to the attention of the art world when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1956 alongside other 'Kitchen Sink' painters after graduating from the Royal College of Art. Drawing upon gritty scenes of working class suburban life, the movement sought to make political comment through muted palettes of browns, blacks, and greys.

By the end of the 1970s, however, Greaves had become disillusioned with the social realism of their earlier work. In a significant departure from his austere, representational style, he began to clear his paintings of unnecessary clutter and started implementing new stylistic and compositional techniques.

In these new canvases, later termed ‘collage paintings’, torn paper was carefully collaged and painted to create a textured background for the surface image. Line motifs were then drawn on top, the clarity and precision of the empty outline contrasting with the rough, feathered texture of the painted paper beneath.

In Rose, completed in 1982, these two periods of Greaves’ career – murky Kitchen Sink realism and bright Pop-Art inspired canvases – meet in the middle.

The lone vase and its flowers, combined with subdued background colours, recalls the melancholy of earlier still lifes; yet in its minimalism and its restrained abstraction, it marks a definitive moment of change in his approach.

Subtle and sophisticated, Rose ranks among the very best works we have seen from the hand of this respected artist.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

48 ∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

33. Rose, Black and White, £18,000

a festive selection As the leaves turn brown and the chill winds blow, you can almost hear the rustle of tinsel and the jingle of December sleigh bells beckon.

With just two months to go until the start of the festive season, we thought we’d try and get a head start with our Christmas shopping suggestions. Here are seven of our favourite items available from the gallery for under £500.

contact us on 01572 821424

1. David Jones Engravings

2. Claude Flight Linocuts

David Jones was one of the most outstanding artists of his day. Chiefly known for his engravings in wood and metal, he was also a watercolourist and celebrated modernist poet, and famously worked alongside the eccentric engraver Eric Gill in the Ditchling artists’ commune throughout the early 1920s.

Typified by mystical imagery, his work amalgamated sacred and mythological symbols to great effect. Best celebrated are his many religious wood engravings, his illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels, and his copper engravings made for the 1929 edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, widely considered his most visionary work in the medium.

With the huge success of the Pallant House Gallery’s autumn exhibition this time last year and a major new book on Jones published by Lund Humphries in the last 12 months, his art has seen a recent surge of public interest. Our engravings range from as little as £75 to £550.

Born in 1881, Claude Flight led a life as busy as his bestknown prints and paintings. Coming to art relatively late in his career after disparate years spent as a librarian, engineer and beekeeper, he helped found the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1925 together with fellow artists Ian McNab, Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews.

A bastion of artistic learning offering courses in neglected printmaking methods, the school specialised in the otherwise little used technique of linocutting, a medium Flight taught and championed and which he advanced more than perhaps any other artist of his time.

Characterised by bold lines, colourful vitality, and subtle abstraction, Flight’s joyful linocuts remain the work for which he is best remembered and make for brilliant presents. At £195, they won’t break the bank either.

34. David Jones, £500

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

35. Claude Flight, £195

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 51

4. David Suff Etchings Gallery artist David Suff is a painter and printmaker who works in meticulous detail, employing a Pointillist-style technique and a lush colour palette in his intimate depictions of public and private gardens.

Frequently working on handmade paper, Suff starts by making detailed observational drawings of the landscape before building up his images slowly and methodically across prolonged periods of creativity. He has described how there is an important link between the symbol of the garden and spirituality in his work, which attempts to illustrate mankind’s constant search for the divine.

Particularly beautiful are his coloured etchings, where the depth of tone achievable in the printing process perfectly enriches Suff’s mysterious compositions.

Ranging from £150 to £340, these exquisite prints are the result of many dedicated hours of contemplation.

3. Jago Bike Screenprints After a successful first stint at the nearby Goldmark Atelier some years ago, urban artist Jago has returned once again to produce a series of three cycling screenprints celebrating life on two wheels.

An avid cyclist himself, the enigmatic artist can sometimes be spotted locally sprinting up and whirring down Rutland’s twisting country lanes, occasionally dropping by the gallery for his routine caffeine refuel.

These 8 colour screenprints showcasing the artist’s clean-cut style are all printed by hand in our atelier workshop, making for a beautifully smooth and rich surface finish.

At £295 each, they’d make the perfect present for the rider in your family.

5. Edward Ardizzone Lithographs An artist and illustrator of consummate draughtsmanship, Edward Ardizzone’s many book illustrations are recognised all over the world. Known especially for his enormously successful series of books featuring the young character ‘Tim’ and his illustrations to Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Ardizzone established an illustrative style that has endured throughout decades of changing fads and fashions.

In his lithographs he drew with an amazing quality of touch: each line was put down with both thoughtfulness and ease, resulting in images that are at once carefree and confident but which retain above all else an empathy with their characters.

Though for a time forgotten, resurgent interest in the world of illustration and graphic design in the last 20 years has seen an increased popularity in the work of Ardizzone and his contemporaries, and his work is just now beginning to receive the critical attention it has always deserved. Our lithographs are available at £250.

36. Jago, £200 37. David Suff, £340

52 ∣

contact us on 01572 821424

38. Edward Ardizzone, £250

Get a head start with our Christmas shopping suggestions 7. David Kirk Posters In their rich, flat use of colour and their stylised depictions of coastal, rural, and metropolitan landmarks, David Kirk’s ‘Town Prints’ series channels the graphic design of interwar railway posters as he brings iconic British towns to life.

Growing up in Somerset, Kirk graduated from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford in 1983 and has held regular successful exhibitions of his paintings in galleries throughout the UK. Now represented by Goldmark, his solo shows bring a palpable buzz to the local town.

His immaculate yet dynamic depictions of English towns and countryside are now widely collected and Kirk has established a large following for his paintings and prints. Carrying on the mantle of British artists Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Stanley Spencer, his prints – ranging from £305 to £370 - are becoming increasingly sought after.

6. Pablo Picasso Collotypes Though relatively unknown in comparison with his more frequently exhibited series of prints, Picasso’s Diurnes demonstrate the artist’s unfailing ability to innovate and make play with graphic techniques, as well as his unfaltering sense of wit and imagination.

Inspired by the natural beauty of the local Provence landscape, the Diurnes images were born of experimentation with the photogram, images produced without a camera by placing objects onto the surface of light-sensitive material and exposing it to light.

Paper cutouts of mischievous fauns, goats, forms, and faces were overlaid like masks to reveal images of the surrounding countryside beneath, using the photograph as a natural way to texture and tone each mythological portrait.

An important set of images representing his only significant foray into photography, they remain as clever and original as when they first appeared over half a century ago. At £350 each, they offer a highly affordable start to a budding Picasso collection.

39. Pablo Picasso, £350 40. David Kirk, £305

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 53

sid burnard an extract from Sid’s Book

With a studio in Borth, Wales, just off the sands of Cardigan Bay, Sid Burnard’s driftwood birds and beasts are assembled entirely from material sourced from beachcombing expeditions, strong local tides and frequent high winds dragging all manner of salty treasure up from the depths and depositing them on his doorstep.

In addition to becoming a full-time artist, Sid has also written a diary-cummemoir that offers an insight into his colourful past and unusual working methods. Available in both standard and deluxe collector’s editions, Sid’s Book is the culmination of 4 years of writing and a lifetime of living as a free spirit; here’s a short extract, straight from the stormy fronts of the west Wales coast:

41. O.A.P., £895 42. Sid’s Book, standard £25, collector’s £275

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 55

19.1.14 Secreted on the northern edge of the Dyfi estuary’s mouth, where the tonsils would be, clings a hidden boatyard; a sliver of shingle pinned beneath Cambrian rock whose hairline bristles with stunted oaks, worn like a verdant tiara. It’s a nugget to warm your cockles.

Yesterday, beach-combing took on a new phase when a friend and I went out in a 15’ Canadian canoe.

At this point the river is tidal, never idle. Murderous currents can toy with anyone and anything. Exploiting an incoming tide, we set out to explore the bight, investigating coves and inlets before easing along a narrow channel, slicing through banks of soft chocolate blancmange topped by green angelica marram grass. Hauling the canoe out, making fast, before squelching through black, brown, green and yellow mud and slime which oozed through our toes, then clambering up onto benign grass which became spiteful, pricking and scratching bare legs and feet. But what a landscape appeared. Sometimes this entire area becomes submerged. What we beheld was the result of this winter’s

storms coupled with the year’s highest tides. Debris of all types was strewn over acres, but mainly torn, twisted, petrified, desiccated driftwood of every size and shape. Deadwood Gulch on a grand scale.

We salvaged material for the boatyard and timber for me, a special prize being a fantastic three-dimensional curve of organic driftwood, measuring 186 cm long x 67 cm diameter x 64 cm across.

After foraging for five hours we stowed our cargo, loaded to the gunwales (if Noah had dealt in salvage it would have looked like this).

By now a strong onshore westerly had got up. Whilst the receding tide flowed beneath us, choppy waves hit head-on.

In the bow, I paddled like fury, sometimes remaining stationary despite my best efforts, not quite going backwards (I was NOT going to lose my bounty!).

‘Start the engine,’ I yelled over my shoulder to Harvey.

He imitated the ‘chug chug’ of an imaginary motor. It all helped to get us home.

43. Gestaltist, £950

56 ∣

contact us on 01572 821424

44. Old Forest Birds, £2750

john piper coventry cathedral In the glowing yellows and reds of John Piper’s Coventry Cathedral paintings, you can almost feel the lick of the flames, smell the acrid smoke, as the building burnt to the ground.

Born in 1903, Piper was one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. With a life that spanned the last 100 years, he witnessed many of the major stylistic and thematic developments that rocked the art world throughout the pre- and post-war period.

During the Second World War, the city of Coventry was subjected to heavy air bombardment. On 14th November 1940 one particularly devastating air raid hit the cathedral, reducing the church to mounds of burning rubble. An Official War Artist, Piper drove to the site of the ruins the very next morning to find the fires still raging some 12 hours after the air raid had ended.

Determined to record the damage done, Piper painted two oils, an interior and exterior, in his typically bold and emphatic style. The unforgettable images he produced committed to

memory the extraordinary impact the Blitz had upon the British urban landscape, immortalizing a profound and poignant moment.

75 years after that fateful bombing run, Goldmark Gallery has produced limited edition screenprints after these two paintings to raise funds for the resurrected cathedral.

Handmade by master printmakers in our atelier, each of the 20 colours in these prints must be applied separately and painstakingly through individual screens, making for a complex process that would make the print innovator Piper proud.

Steeped in historical context and a reminder of Piper’s supreme ability as an architectural artist, these prints would make for a worthy addition to any collection. £200 from the sale of each print is being donated to the Cathedral, a cause Piper, who later designed the building’s staggering stained glass Baptistry Windows, would no doubt have championed. We have already raised £30,000.

45. Coventry Cathedral, 15 Nov 1940, £495 46. Interior of Coventry Cathedral, 15 Nov 1940, £495

∣ 59

60 ∣

contact us on 01572 821424

ceri richards Richards may have been by birth a working-class Welshman – with all the lack of social cachet that implies – who discovered his skills as a draughtsman while training to be an electrician, but his outlook was richly cosmopolitan, and his inner life absorbed with grand themes of birth, death and renewal.

Hilly Janes, The Guardian, 2002

Like so many greats of the art world, the story of Ceri Richards is one of unrecognized accomplishment and neglected genius. Though he represented Britain at the 1962 Venice Biennale, was himself represented by the Marlborough gallery alongside friends and contemporaries John Piper and Francis Bacon, and was described by Henry Moore, his one-time tutor, as the finest draughtsman of his generation and an artist of unique creative and imaginative gifts and achievements, Richards’ reputation as one of finest British artists of the 20th century has since fallen through the cracks.

Born to a working-class Welsh family in 1903, Richards’ early life was spent surrounded by art, music, poetry, and song.

Congregations in the local chapel first introduced the young artist to iconography and the sounds of the choir; a talented pianist (When I look into the mirror, he once remarked, Beethoven looks back at me), by his teenage years he was accompanying them at services. From his father, an amateur poet who would recite Welsh verses in the family home, he also developed a love of poetry that would heavily influence much of his later work.

As a young child at school he drew incessantly, his future promise heralded by prizes at local art competitions. Leaving school to apprentice with a firm of electricians in Swansea, his evenings he spent studying engineering draughtsmanship at Swansea College of Technology and life drawing at the Swansea College of Art, eventually enrolling at the latter fulltime. By the end of his course in 1924, his mind was made up: the life of an artist was his calling; the 200-mile journey from sleepy Dunvant to the Royal College of Art in London would be his pilgrimage.

Supported by a hard-earned scholarship, the Royal College soon became Richards’ educational temple, introducing him to a host of new influences that the artist sustained throughout his career. It was here that he first began his love affair with modern European painting – Ernst, Matisse, and especially Picasso became favourites – and began to paint seriously himself. Intelligent and emotionally attuned, he got on well with his tutors who also first introduced him to the many print techniques he would exploit in later years.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com 47. Costerwoman, £6,000

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

∣ 61

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

62 âˆŁ

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

Graduating from the college in 1927, in the 1930s Richards began to exhibit his first public work, surreal, semi-abstract paintings and boxed constructions inspired, amongst others, by the sculpture of Jean Arp. Placed besides prominent works of the Surrealist movement, they hold up to that period’s most important sculptures and canvases, possessing a lyrical and romantic quality that was conspicuously lacking from contemporary Surrealists and that would remain a hallmark of his work for years to come.

With the outbreak of war, Richards sought out work as a teacher, being appointed as the head of painting at the Cardiff School of Art until 1944 before moving back to London. The next ten years were spent developing an ever deeper and more personal vision within his art, one informed by the varied

themes of nature, death, and visual expressions of music and the words of poetry. With these complimentary branches of the arts he felt a profound affiliation that traced its roots back to his early upbringing, something he expressed a number of times in interviews and his own writing: One can generally say that all artists – poets, musicians, painters, are creating in their own idioms, metaphors for the nature of existence, for the secrets of our time. We are all moved by the beauty and revelation in their utterances – we notice the direction and beauty of the paths they indicate for us, and move towards them.

Of the many musical and poetic muses in his career – Beethoven, whom he depicted as a Promethean thief of creative fire, or Debussy, whose music soothed the angstridden exercise of painting – Dylan Thomas was amongst the

48. Prometheus II, £975 49. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (3a), £1500

contact us on 01572 821424

∣ 63

most influential and important. Though they met only once, in Thomas’ poetry Richards found not just the kindred sounds of a native Welshman, but an unspoken affinity for the natural world which both saw as a constant cycle of love and death.

One story tells of how on the evening of November 8th, 1958, awoken in a hot sweat and unable to sleep, Richards got up and sketched through the hours of the early morning, inspired by Thomas’ radio play Under Milk Wood. The very next day, the wireless brought news of Thomas’ death.

Richards’ sketches would form the basis of his illustrations for the 1972 Folio edition of Thomas’ play, published a year after Richards’ own death which fell, unbelievably, on the very same day as Thomas’ some 18 years later.

From the late 1950s until the end of his life Richards was closely involved with the renowned Curwen Press, for whom he made a number of exquisite lithographs demonstrating the supreme draughtsmanship he had refined all those years ago and which had underpinned the paintings and prints ever since. By now acknowledged as one of Britain’s most important living artists, with Marlborough exhibitions and a retrospective at the famous Whitechapel gallery, he was elected to represent the country at the 1962 Venice Biennale, from which he returned a triumphant prizewinner.

While all signs pointed to a glittering reputation that would see Richards join the likes of Moore, Sutherland, and Bacon in the vanguard of British art, after his death in 1971 he was

instead quickly and quietly forgotten. The eclecticism and eccentricism for which he is today celebrated ironically saw his name ignored at the time in favour of artists whose work was more easily defined.

But it is that poetic vision which characterized his work, argued Roberto Sanesi, the Italian poet, critic, and translator with whom Richards worked and who has since championed his achievements, that makes his art so compelling: [Ceri] seemed to want to gather every aspect of nature into his painting at once: the whole of the swarming earth in all its manifestations and mutations — its deep subterranean magic, its inorganic strata as well as its organic layers, the green world of plants and the world of man… It is a whole world of pity, passion and violence: pages written in sweat that disclose petals and corpses, rainbows and moon, Celtic crosses, flowers and landscapes germinating out of opened hands, limbs outstretched to the sky in gestures of abandon, communion and offering…

Though some little work has been done to redress the situation, including a major retrospective at the Tate in 1981, Ceri Richards remains a name unfairly unremembered in the art world. Thankfully, as Richards’ expert Mel Gooding has described, the power and poignancy of his images endures today: in the act of drawing waves of water and manuscript leaves, [he could] transform the natural world into an imagining, a poem, a print, a work that survives its maker.

view more and buy at goldmarkart.com

64 ∣

prices include frame, vat and uk delivery

50. Violin d'Ingres, £1250

At discover.goldmarkart.com we publish beautiful films and articles for new buyers and seasoned collectors alike, with new content posted every week.

See something you like and you can head

over to goldmarkart.com, our online shop, where we sell an extraordinary range of art and ceramics.

Cover: Garden at Anne Mette Hjortshøj’s pottery in Bornholm, Denmark.

Photograph by Jay Goldmark during a visit in September 2016 to film for her new exhibition.

goldmark Uppingham Rutland