Goldmark 04

spring 2017

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Contents

spring 2017

2

Anthony Gross - Paintings

6

Scottie Wilson - Special Offer

8

Victor Pasmore

14 Camille Pissarro - The Thornley Suite 16 Mashiko Potters - Exhibition 20 Rigby Graham - Watercolours of Malta 26 Gavin Bryars - Concert 28 Robyn Denny - Generations 32 Gwyneth Johnstone - A Party

Proud-pied April dress’d in all his trim Hath put a spirit of youth in everything…

Though we’re no Bill Shakespeare, we have injected some much-needed colour in our Spring catalogue, with vivid oils, vibrant prints, pots and, especially, watercolours: washed over abstract Robyn Denny etchings, splashed across Rigby Graham’s scenes of Malta, and light and luminous in the wonderful work of Anthony Gross. We hope you find something to brighten your day.

34 Phil Rogers - Exhibition 40 Francis Davison - Green, Greys, Blacks with Rivets 42 Our Late Familiars - New Book 46 David Jones 50 Nic Collins - Exhibition 52 Goldmark Atelier 58 Carel Weight - Child’s Wonderment 60 The School Prints

goldmark

Orange Street Uppingham Rutland

Words by Max Waterhouse

LE15 9SQ

except page 34 © Phil Rogers

01572 821424

Photographs by Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro & Vicki Uttley

info@oldmarkart.com

Design by Porter/Goldmark, March 2017

www.goldmarkart.com

ISBN 978-1-909167-42-1

anthony gross paintings Anthony Gross seems to have suffered a fate similar to that of a number of underrepresented British artists of the 20th century. Though he considered himself first and foremost a painter and draughtsman, his legacy is that of an expert printmaker, highly proficient in the fields of etching and engraving. While his contribution to the graphic world was indeed immense, helping shape the British etching revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s, the belief in the secondary importance of printmaking beside painting held by critics and curators during his lifetime persists to this day. Though Gross was championed in the one, he has been comparatively ignored in the other, to the great detriment of his deserved reputation as one of Britain’s finest landscape painters.

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From the very early years of Gross’ career translucent watercolour and rich oils were a major preoccupation, used to describe the many places at home and abroad where he sought inspiration: rural British hedgerows; the exotic sights of Malaysia, India and the Middle East, experienced as an Official War Artist (of which he was among the most prolific); and the sun-baked valleys of south-west France, where he resided with his family for several months of every year from 1955 until his death in 1984.

Frequently the techniques of etching and ink drawing, in which he excelled, would inform and interchange with one another, his use of the pen bearing the same loose and lively qualities as his work with the etcher’s échoppe. In his informal watercolour scenes of Villeneuve garden picnics and pastoral outings, his descriptive line is typically light and lyrical: freely drawn, it dances over the page, looping around luminous patches of watercolour wash that shimmer like stained glass.

In even Gross’ most expansive landscapes, the viewer is often treated to peculiar details, animals, characters, flowers and plants hidden amongst his overlapping pen strokes. To the eye of Rigby Graham, a near contemporary and fellow topographer, these form part of a gentle wit in Gross’ work that continues to enrich: His love of detail, of snails, insects, beetles, dogs and small children create a feast of texture which enriches the overall image and at the same time can be read as asides, stage directions, or seen as a reflection of all the extraneous detail of life in street, pier or park. Gross’ whimsical Gallic view is as rich as bouillabaisse.

In the three decades that have passed since Gross’ death, relatively little appears to have been done to celebrate his achievements across so many media. Retrospectives, such as that in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, have been scant, despite a plethora of major public collections housing original works. While a select few will recognise his wonderfully idiosyncratic etchings, far fewer know of his early work in animated film, a genre whose demands of countless sketches no doubt contributed to the confident and spontaneous touch revealed in later drawings.

Above all, it is to our undeniable discredit that so little time has been spent looking at that work which Gross himself felt so important: the exquisite watercolours, oils and gouaches, brim full of life even now. In such intimate scenes, there is so very much to miss.

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Reader Offer

scottie wilson Scottie Wilson’s discovery that he could draw was as much a surprise to him as it was to anyone.

Picking up a bulldog pen in his second-hand store, he began to doodle one day on the top of a cardboard table. Within 48 hours the table was covered in tiny faces, flowers and stylised figures conjured purely from his imagination: The pen seemed to make me draw, and them images, the faces and designs just flowed out. I couldn’t stop – I’ve never stopped since. . .

Born in Glasgow in 1891, Wilson left for Canada after serving in the Scottish Rifles.

Though little is known about his life, it was here, aged around 40 years old, that he realised a passion for drawing, abandoning his job as a shopkeeper to make his trade as an artist. Intensely distrustful of dealers, he held few exhibitions, preferring instead to keep work for himself and display it in his own touring shows, charging nominal entrance fees. In 1945 he left Canada for London, just as galleries began to clamour for his work, and had drawings exhibited alongside Picasso, Klee, Mirò and de Chirico.

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Picasso and his contemporary Jean Dubuffet became great admirers of Wilson’s ‘outsider’ art, much of which they bought directly from the artist and at marginal cost.

The critic Bill Hopkins, one of few establishment figures whom Wilson came to trust, once described a journey the pair undertook to visit Picasso and Dubuffet in France: Both owned a few of Scottie’s pieces, and Picasso had come to see – and perhaps buy – some more. I vividly remember both artists eagerly admiring Scottie’s work, squabbling in their fierce, theatrical, Gallic voices over who would buy which piece.

These printed satin cotton designs, one of a number of textile collaborations with the distinguished Edinburgh Weavers, reveal Wilson’s fondness for line and decoration: birds perch on flowers like avian leaves and petals, merging with stalks, vines, and repeated geometric motifs, all printed in the luscious reds, purples and yellows achieved in the Edinburgh workshop.

In a special reduction extended to readers of our Spring Catalogue, we are delighted to be able to offer these satin cotton squares at ÂŁ495.

To order, simply call us on 01572 821424 or buy online at goldmarkart.com

victor pasmore With a life spanning the 20th century, Victor Pasmore was witness to the monumental changes within the art world of the last hundred years.

The wave of abstract art and its accompanying theories that swept through Europe and America until its mid-century peak changed many young artists’ outlooks irrevocably. Pasmore’s own grappling with abstraction, for which he is best known and which he began quite unexpectedly in the latter half of his life, anticipated a rush of British abstract art produced in the post-war 1940s and ’50s and secured his reputation as a master of artistic composition.

In contrast to his dramatic embrace of the abstract movement, Pasmore’s early art career was slow. Born in Surrey 1908, from 1927 he worked for ten years as a clerk for London County Council, only in the evenings giving art his attention whilst attending classes at the Camberwell School of Art. Gradually painting became the dominant force in Pasmore’s life, and after showing in the avant-garde Objective Abstractions exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1934 he began to focus on an artistic career.

In 1937 Pasmore co-founded the influential Euston Road School which sought to teach objective realism in painting, though the venture was soon put on hold with the advent of the Second World War. Though

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Pasmore was a conscientious objector, the Local Tribunal refused to recognize his status and in 1942 he was called upon for military service. Refusing orders, he was swiftly court-martialled and sentenced to 123 days imprisonment in a military centre.

As if fundamentally affected by the disruption of this wartime period, Pasmore emerged from the conflict to engage upon a major reappraisal of his artistic style. His abandoning of visual representation was sudden and total; in 1947, he began to explore geometric shapes and cubist figures, soon turning to the purely abstract with great inspiration from Kandinsky, Mondrian and especially Klee and revealing his first abstract paintings in a one-man-show at the Redfern Gallery only a year later.

So sudden and substantial a change as this was certainly profound for the artist, and so too for the art world: to the esteemed critic Herbert Read, Pasmore’s foray into abstraction represented the most revolutionary event in post-war British art, heralding a movement parallel to the New York Abstract Expressionists amongst Pasmore’s contemporaries and establishing him as Britain’s preeminent abstract artist.

It was not until the mid-to-late 1960s that Pasmore began working with other visual media, particularly printmaking, and with further experimentation from 1965-74 he produced the extended screenprint series Points of Contact and Transformations. Unlike the geometric shapes of his earlier paintings, these employed organic lines, spirals, waves and shapes. Flat bodies of colour juxtapose with hazed, sprayed background forms, contributing to a bizarre visual language far removed from many of his pre- and immediately post-war pictures.

Underpinning these seemingly disparate images was a fundamental knowledge of composition developed through the figurative work of his early career. Each screenprint reveals a linear narrative in Pasmore’s use of form, a rhythm between sculptural colour blocks and wandering lines that accounts for their success.

Pasmore’s brother, Stephen, has commented at length in volumes on his work, discussing the issue of how abstraction works as a vehicle for artistic expression.

In the past, artists had expressed themselves through representation of the visual world: the task of the abstract painter today, he has written, is different because he is striving to express beauty without recourse to the inherent appeal to natural forms.

When Pasmore died in 1998, at the age of 89, he left behind him a legacy as one of Britain’s most powerful makers of truly abstract art. In the latter years of his life, Stephen referred to his brother alongside the abstract artists who inspired him as the ‘music-makers’; for just as Kandinsky and other synaesthetes brought music, sound and colour together, Pasmore composed forms and colours in his prints which resonate within their compositions.

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camille pissarro the thornley suite As the paternal voice of Impressionist painting, Camille Pissarro was undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of the 19th century.

Less well known is his immense contribution to the printmaking of that movement, in which he was the most prolific – and certainly most original – of the peintre-graveurs.

The earlier years of his printmaking, from 1879-82, were filled with experimentation and innovation in etching and lithography, Pissarro constantly reworking or changing plates and trialling new techniques with each impression.

Despite the enormous enjoyment of working with prints, which Pissarro saw as an art equal in value to oil painting, there was little demand for his work during his lifetime.

Ever the self-deprecating critic, Pissarro considered his achievements as amateurish: what a pity, he writes, there is no demand for my prints, I find this work as interesting as painting, which everybody does, and there are so few who achieve something in engraving. They can be counted.

Counted, Pissarro would be; but not without encouragement. Despite various successes in etching and drypoint, his forays into lithography were less frequent. After producing just one series of twelve lithographs in 1874, at the very advent of the Impressionist movement, Pissarro abandoned the medium. Rejecting the approaches of professional printers with whom he was reluctant to work, he would not attempt any impressions for another twenty years.

It was thus almost by chance that Pissarro ever produced any lithographs in his later life. Print publishers such as Ambroise Vollard and André Marty were championing the original lithograph throughout the 1890s and their invigoration provided Pissarro with an impetus to return to the medium (though he vehemently ignored the mainstream demand for full-colour prints, continuing to work almost exclusively in black and white). His distrust of professional printers remained, however. To Pissarro, the inking, choosing of the paper

coloration and pressing of the plates were processes integral to the artform: who could better envision and achieve their effects than the artist himself?

That Pissarro felt comfortable approaching French lithographer Georges Thornley was testament to the printer’s prodigious technique and sensitivity. The talented son of a Welsh immigrant, Thornley offered his cooperation in producing a series of plates based on the artist’s drawings, and the two developed a rewarding working relationship.

Pissarro had no doubt been convinced of Thornley’s ability after witnessing his previous joint ventures with dealer Theo Van Gogh, brother to Vincent, and Edgar Degas, with whom Pissarro had also collaborated extensively in the past, as well as his outstanding interpretations of drawings by Puvis de Chavannes.

The partnership proved a huge success. A portfolio was designed with twenty-five lithographs, executed by Thornley after Pissarro’s drawings and published in Paris, around 1895, in an edition size of 108, each artist signing the inserted justification page.

An embodiment of the honest, unrefined simplicity that is so typical of Pissarro’s work – we see peasant girls working the fields in these prints as often as we do splendid town houses – the series represents an immensely significant period of Pissarro’s output: the artist’s successful return to a oncetried form, in which a lifetime of experience and a honed impressionistic eye were put to exquisite use.

Speaking on the pleasures of art, Pissarro remarked that ‘all the sorrows, all the bitternesses, all the sadnesses, I forget them and ignore them in the joy of working.’ Looking at Pissarro’s prints – at the gentle portraits and calming vignettes – we too can feel that humble joy as earnestly as the artist.

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Introducing

Five Mashiko Potters Taketoshi Ito Shikamaru Takeshita Toshihiko Takeda Natsu Nishiyama Yoshinori Hagiwara

Mashiko

J A P A N

Exhibition 3rd June

MASHIKO UP AND COmING On June 3rd later this year Goldmark will be welcoming the next generation of Mashiko potters in a major exhibition organised by Ken Matsuzaki and with official support from the Japanese Embassy.

Lying some 60 miles north of the swarming metropolis of Tokyo, the pottery town of Mashiko rests sleepily beneath the shallow, sloping hill of Mount Takadate. In the autumn season, from peak to foot the mountain is blanketed in a coat of changing leaves as red pine and Japanese beech shiver from green to gold, ochre, and terracotta red. Siberian swans flock to Oyama Shimo-Ike lake for winter, its banks kissing the base of the hillside and teeming with local flora and fauna. It is a place of animistic spirits, of living rocks, roots, and rustling treetops. Little wonder it has attracted artists and craftsmen to its shadow for thousands of years.

Arriving at the local train station, visitors are met at the ticket barrier by an enormous, billowing stoneware pot topped with pools of wood-ash glaze. Venture further into town and you begin to spot clay in all its forms: delicate cups and flower vases on display in shopfront showrooms; rustic domestic wares heaped high upon roadside and market stalls; crumbling clods dried and caked on tools or stored as samples in workshop sheds; wet and pliable on wooden stick-wheels as local throwers give studio demonstrations; and, elsewhere, in the growing mounds of pottery shards piled beside potters’ kilns, the skeleton wreckage evidencing all too clearly the price of failed firings.

Clay has always been at the centre of Mashiko’s history. Early pottery fragments discovered in the outskirts of the town date back as far as the Jomon period, some 16,000 years ago at a time when local man had begun the technical process of making pots even before learning how to irrigate his crops.

The first distinct Mashiko-yaki – stoneware pots of a style particular to the area – emerged in the Nara period in the mid-8th century. Though in the following years Mashiko continued its production of ceramics, its iron-rich and dynamically decorated wares remained comparatively littleknown beside those of the famous kiln towns such as Bizen, Shigaraki and Seto. The story of Mashiko’s monumental success at the epicentre of Japan’s ceramic culture is an altogether more recent affair.

In 1853 the trained potter and farmer Keisaburo Otsuka established his own, individual kiln within the town district.

A local of the nearby Kasama ceramics town, Otsuka had discovered – as had early settlers before him – that the local geography of Mashiko included stoneware clay bodies naturally rich in iron oxide and kaolin minerals, ideal for making pots and glazes. Moving his family to the town while he set up his business, Otsuka became one of the first potters to synonymise the Mashiko name with ceramic trade. Given the

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Shikamaru Takeshita

Taketoshi Ito

Yoshinori Hagiwara

prefecture’s proximity to Edo, now modernday Tokyo, wares could be easily transported to the capital, supplying urban city-folk with rural, robust, utilitarian pots for use in the kitchen at home.

But if any one person could lay claim to having encouraged the extraordinary mass migration of potters and craftsmen to the town over the last eighty years, it was Japan’s most celebrated potter Shoji

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Toshihiko Takeda

Hamada. Having returned to his homeland after years spent working alongside Bernard Leach in St Ives, Hamada resolved to set up a workshop in Mashiko in 1930. Inspired by the Mingei folk-craft principles laid down by friend and mentor Soetsu Yanagi, and accompanied by Leach and fellow potter Kawai Kanjiro, Hamada quickly developed a worldwide reputation for reviving the faltering demand for handmade pottery in

Natsu Nishiyama

the wake of the mechanised butchery of the First World War. Despite espousing many of the precepts he and Yanagi had developed in their years travelling together and visiting rural potteries in Korea and Britain – anonymity of the craftsman; form following function; an aesthetic ostensibly rustic and unrefined, realised in locally sourced materials – Hamada was quick to see the benefits his newfound celebrity afforded him and the craftspeople who surrounded him. His sumptuous work, an embodiment of the core tenets of Mingei elevated to the level of fine ceramic art, commanded ever higher prices at grand public exhibitions, helping to put Mashiko on the world map in a way that no other pottery town, not even the famed six ancient kilns of Japan, had ever managed before. Even today, the greater proportion of the near-four-hundred potters and studios working from the town are heavily indebted to his ceramic style, producing lesser pastiches of what is unmistakably the work of a rare genius.

By 1955 Hamada had been designated a ‘Living National Treasure’ by the Japanese

government and was now one of the wealthiest artists in the country. His sizeable country house, nestled among trees and moss-topped rocks on a local hillside, became a major tourist attraction for wouldbe disciples and visiting vacationers alike, looking to observe the master at work.

Beautifully designed with courtyards, dark polished wood floors and a dedicated throwing space, it has been kept as it appeared in its entirety during his lifetime, while housing the studio spaces of Hamada’s son and grandson, Shinsaku and Tomoo. Today it stands as a heritage museum, cherished not only for its record of the processes and the pots that brought

Mashiko its celebrated status, but also for Hamada’s own personal collection of handmade furniture, tools, ceramics and artefacts, a rich collection of culturally diverse objects that tell a mutual story of Japan’s history of craft, and indeed that of the wider world.

The legacy of Hamada and his great influence on Mashiko pottery plays out in the landscape of the town. Walk further along the trundling lane past the entrance to Hamada’s retreat and you will find the home of his apprentice, the great Tatsuzo Shimaoka, who was himself appointed a Living National Treasure during his lifetime; a little further still, and you come to the

workshop of Ken Matsuzaki, Shimaoka’s pupil in turn. Unlike many of the local Mashiko workshops, both Shimaoka and Matsuzaki were able to free themselves of the sometimes suffocating influence of so talented a teacher, and both have produced work worlds apart from the now ubiquitous, calligraphic brushwork and rust-red khaki glazes that made Hamada a living legend.

On June 3rd later this year Goldmark will be welcoming the next generation of Mashiko potters in a major exhibition organised by Matsuzaki and with official support from the Japanese Embassy. Five up-and-coming makers representing the town – Taketoshi Ito, Shikamaru Takeshita, Toshihiko Takeda, Natsu Nishiyama, and Yoshinori Hagiwara – will be gracing the gallery upper floor with their work, the first cultural exchange of its kind between Mashiko artists and a UK gallery.

In its simple, direct, and unpretentious approach to work, the success of Mashiko lies in its remarkable ability to do away with divisions between genres: here art, craft and design become one and the same, blurred and blended in the studio production of beautiful, supremely functional, contemplative and contemporary objects.

Ceramics remains its lifeblood; the town lives and breathes its processes, sometimes literally so, as when the climbing noborigama kilns are lit and the upward draft of air through flame throbs a steady pulse, inhalation and exhalation, like the beating heart of the town itself. Back in 2011, when the great earthquake rocked eastern Japan, many of these were irreparably damaged or destroyed, and it has taken some few years to rebuild kilns and confidence as lives and livelihoods are restored. Six years on, those kilns are alight again, their well-fed chambers roaring; long may they continue to burn bright.

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rigby graham watercolours of malta The Maltese landscape is not kind to the outdoors painter. This is especially the case when one’s chosen subjects are abandoned limestone quarries, archaeological ruins, dilapidated churches and wartime bunkers. High winds whip up clay and chalk-dust; cactus thorns hook at trouser legs and catch on ankles. Closer to civilisation, the hot reek of rubbish bags attacked by stray dogs and the persistent pestering of locals and tourists make concentration and quiet an impossibility.

Yet this is exactly the environment in which Rigby Graham – a man for whom defiance became a full-time occupation - would sit, rooted to a portable aluminium chair, and paint in vivid colour.

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Directness and a lack of pretence typified all aspects of Graham’s life, none more so than his watercolours. A disciple of the school of Minton, Place and Towne and a young contemporary of Piper and Sutherland, artists who reinvigorated the English school of watercolour painting, Graham was drawn to the medium’s immediacy and returned to it regularly throughout his long career. Such painting was always undertaken outside and ‘in the moment’, making of each work a record of the place, the experience and all its concomitant frustrations: heavy rain, gales, an undergrowth that fought back; difficult weather and scenery, and an even more difficult temperament.

Dereliction remained a favoured subject of Graham’s. Historical landmarks were painted from perspectives that saw much of the main subject obscured, either by eyeheight nettles, barbed-wire, pylons, telegraph poles, or wire cables drooping and slicing across the sky overhead. Unlike the idealised vision of idyllic countryside presented by many working in the topographical genre, Graham’s landscapes bristle with evidence of the human impact on place over the last hundred years, what he termed ‘our detritus’: I never need to look for such things; they are everywhere.

Most people are immune to them or only notice them exceptionally. Just as in this country there are more rats than human beings, so too I believe there are probably more poles, pillars, pylons and fence posts than rats.

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Unlike so many artists who use watercolour, Graham paints with the colour and not the water, producing powerful glowing pictures rather than the washed out efforts of so many lesser practitioners.

Graham was frequently attracted to the Mediterranean island rock of Malta, where he had become acquainted with local poets Charles Flores and Victor Fenech. From 1970 until his recent passing in 2015 he visited the island seven times, producing over ninety watercolours of varying subjects unrecognisable to the casual tourist: monolithic rock formations, crumbling ruins, and view lines from gritty coastal stretches that look up past wire fences at the fortifications above. In 2008 a number of these paintings were compiled alongside poetry by Fenech to offer a quite different image of the post-colonial destination than the panoramic views usually presented to visiting sightseers.

While a great many of those who choose watercolour as their medium either muddy their colours, blending paint until it loses all vibrancy, or water down to an anaemic wash, Graham’s work was always wrought in rich, bright, and often unmixed primary colour.

As Malcolm Yorke describes in his biography

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of Graham’s life and art: [Those] accustomed to the British watercolour tradition, or to seeing genteel offerings at the Royal Academy Summer Show, recoil in shock on entering a gallery of Graham’s work. Where, people ask, did he find all these tart greens and citric yellows and pepper reds? Why is the sky scarlet or green, the rocks blue, and the sand so primrose? In short, his watercolours put the stress on the colour, not the water.

Few native landscape artists can lay claim to the strength of vision and the conviction of touch that characterised Graham’s work.

In his lurid reds and yellows, sapphire blues and shocks of green all tamed by an assertive black pen line, he brought to an all-too-often tired category of painting an energy that was sorely lacking. We are confident that, with the passing of time, reevaluation of the history of British topographical art will see Graham take his place alongside the best this country has ever produced.

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Goldmark Concert 1st July

gavin bryars & friends

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The Sinking of the Titanic & Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet The music of Gavin Bryars falls under no category. It is mongrel, full of sensuality and wit and is deeply moving.

He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle. With a third ear maybe... Michael Ondaatj

Book Now 60 Seats Only

Back in 2012 we were treated to a rare performance from world-class composer and musician Gavin Bryars with his small acoustic ensemble in the intimate setting of our gallery front room. We are thrilled to announce that on Saturday 1st July later this year Gavin will be back to perform newly arranged versions of two iconic pieces - The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet - one after the other without interval. These chamber arrangements of Bryars’ two earliest and best-known pieces have been created specially for the occasion; we can’t wait.

Performers: Morgan Goff, viola; James Woodrow, electric guitar; Nick Cooper, cello; Audrey Riley, cello; Ziella Bryars, cello; Gavin Bryars, double bass

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generations

roByn denny bon à tirer ‘Bon à Tirer’. Three short words with a simple translation: ‘Good to print’.

‘Good to go’; the phrase sounds almost convivial, an off-hand comment you’d make to a friend or colleague. But in the world of printmaking and the artist-atelier relationship, no other words were as important. Here in the rarefied arena of the printer’s workshop, they become a challenge, a command: ‘Give me nothing less.’

Historically, the Bon à Tirer proof was the artist’s benchmark, the standard to which all prints in an edition would be held and their quality measured. Unlike the often confused ‘Artist’s Proof’ – a set of prints aside from the main edition which were traditionally given to the artist as part of payment for his commission – the Bon à Tirer represented the master print, the final revision. There would exist only one such pull; from it, the printer was to replicate in any further editioning as near as possible every nuance of tone, shade, colour and surface. And unlike the gifting of Artist’s Proofs, which remains customary practice even today, the printing of Bon à Tirer trials was almost

exclusively limited to the supreme Parisian ateliers printing for the titans of the 20th century art world: the Picassos, Mirós and Matisses.

One of strikingly few British suites to make use of a such a proof was Robyn Denny’s 1978 Generations, illustrated here. A series of 24 abstract etchings that make use of both severe and sensitive colour balances, from throbbing yellow to dusky violet, their bold, interlinear compositions typified the industrial style of Denny, whose work found inspiration in the colour-field Abstract Expressionism of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

The dusty, tactile quality of each image was the result of a complex process of layering printing methods with coloured washes. Quite how they were produced remains something of a mystery: most likely, an aquatint ground was printed before etched configurations were impressed on top, followed by brushed-on watercolour.

With pressure from the metal plates, embossed areas of the ground were

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imperceptibly darkened, and in a number of the prints colour was added later by hand to lend further luminosity to the final image.

The resulting surfaces are rich and textured, with a touch like the fine particle residue of pastel, brushing up against the raised black and white edges of soft-ground etching lines.

Combining rigid, architectural structure with an arrangement of colours dissonant and harmonious, Generations represents a series in which the printing process was intrinsic to the art itself (sometimes literally so, as when the embedded shadow of the etching plate forms its own rectangular element). Printed by the inimitable JC Editions and stamped with the atelier’s signature ‘chop’, the suite bears equal witness to the skill of its technicians as it does the vision of the artist.

In these extraordinary Bon à Tirer prints we can see the subtle details of layer and line that made such proofing a rare, but fascinating, necessity.

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In the eyes of critic T. E. Dickson, she painted ‘enchanting drama’; to Terence Mullaly, she was a ‘gentle, wayward poet of paint. . . unsullied by fashionable trends. . . pursuing a highly personal course.’

While the vibrant reveries of Gwyneth Johnstone’s work mark her as one of her generation’s greats, she remained throughout her life a perennial outsider.

Daughter of the notoriously talented Augustus John, niece to his painter sister Gwen, much of Johnstone’s childhood was spent in the shadows cast by the vivid personalities of her father’s family. By her late teens she had decided upon a career in art, inspired in part by the modernist canvases of Christopher Wood and the work of Paul Klee, and began her studies at the Slade School in 1933.

As with her domestic life, however, Johnstone’s early development was muddled by her many colourful yet conflicting teachers and influences. Though from her father she inherited both a tremendous industry and vitality of brushwork, in her time at the Slade she struggled. A season in Paris studying under the Cubist painter André Lhote only further confused matters, and while artist friends such as Mary Fedden, her husband Julian Trevelyan, and contemporary Alfred Cohen were hitting their stride, Johnstone continued to search for her own painterly voice.

It wasn’t until the 1950s, under the

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sensitive tutelage of Cecil Collins, that Johnstone’s personal style began to fully emerge. As if emboldened by the prolonged and varied progress that had preceded them, her paintings and black ink drawings from this time on burst forth with colour and dreamlike intensity. Her subjects - Arcadian shepherds tending their flocks, rustic lovers and Mediterranean fishermen – captured something of the pastoral bucolia of William Blake, but in their otherworldly depiction they were quite their own.

In A Party, the unique power of Johnstone’s voice resonates through each musical blue, each pop of vermillion red.

Attendees topped with abstract hats and daisy-chain wreaths become fairy tale revellers, framed within the cave-like room by floating mirrors and golden candle brackets. Illuminated by rich layers of colour, the scene becomes at once formal and fantastic, intimate and expansive.

Finally settling in Norfolk after whirlwind years flitting between London, Provence, and the Spanish Costa Blanca, Johnstone died at the age of 95, a Bohemian character to the last. In her enigmatic paintings – as exemplified in this canvas – she brought magic to the otherwise everyday.

GWYnETH JoHNSTONe A PARtY

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Exhibition During April

phil rogers An Interview with Max Waterhouse

This will be your fourth show at the Goldmark Gallery. Are you conscious as you work of making pots specifically for exhibition, or is it simply a case of choosing the best?

It’s a little bit of both. I have been putting pots aside for this show for eighteen months but, as I continue to make, I have images in my mind about how they can be displayed. That sense of unity and the arrangement of pots in a show is something of which I am very mindful. So, as I throw I try to create groups that will sit happily next to each other as cousins.

It has always been my thinking that an exhibition should not only be the best work available but also, in the main, the most recent. Hopefully those two things go hand in hand. My wood kiln is fired only three times in a two-year period and the oil kiln maybe three times a year, so to me a period of eighteen months is recent. Nonetheless, as with most potters I am sure I will be firing right up to the last minute in an effort to find those elusive exhibition pieces.

Is there anything new that you wanted to showcase or trial in this exhibition?

I have been working at creating a form of Buncheong for about three years now. Buncheong is a type of traditional Korean pottery that existed in its original form throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. It relies upon just three elements: a dark, ironrich clay; white slip; and a clear, sometimes greenish or grey glaze. Often this slip was swept on the pot with a coarse brush, a technique the Koreans termed Guiyal and which the Japanese came to call Hakeme. Decoration was made by drawing through the slip to reveal the clay body underneath, or by inlaying into stamped and incised patterns. Iron pigment was also used on top of the glaze to draw stylised birds, animals, and plants, often in a ‘naïve’ or ‘childlike’ manner.

When a kiln is only fired perhaps once a year, development is slow. I have been at pains to find my own vocabulary with the brush, and although they are quite different from the fluid ash glazes and the ‘in the clay’ decoration I am normally associated with, these new pots I think capture that same unifying spirit of form and touch. I am open to future refinements, but the Buncheong pieces that I have chosen for this show represent the most successful iteration of this new way of making.

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You have always looked to a broad range of influences, be it the way of working embodied by Hamada, Leach and Cardew or further back to pottery made in Medieval Britain, Germany, Korea, and Japan. Do you ever find yourself seeking out more current sources of inspiration?

I feel, justifiably, that I am largely self-taught. Many of the pieces from the potters and periods you mention were my absentee tutors and I learned a great deal from looking at, handling, and soaking up the essence of their work. I still look at the same pots I always looked at, and I regularly go back to them for reassurance on a barren day.

When I was at Newport College of Art, I was taught to work in a developmental way, that we don’t just paint one picture or make one pot: there should be an ongoing series of ideas that start from the same root but which can lead almost anywhere through succession. I think that any creative artist will, or should, reach a plateau in their career

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when influences have had their effect and a kind of overdrive kicks in where one is propelled from one creative idea to the next. At this point an individual style is already present, and one is able to work in a prescribed and considered manner, producing pots imbued with a personal hallmark.

You’ve spoken before of how people today have no need for functional pots; you’ve also written on the need for a ‘sense of adventure’ in modern pottery. What do you think is the role of the potter in contemporary society?

I think I coined the expression ‘a sense of adventure’ when writing about Lisa Hammond, and I stand by what I said.

The role of the potter today is not what it was 100 years ago. Cheaply produced metal and plastic have superseded the ‘country potter’ making inexpensive utilitarian wares.

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The advent of the ‘studio potter’ meant that we potters had a new role. Our pots are seen as an artistic expression and in our work we answer many of the same questions that a sculptor or painter asks themselves: questions about line, form, composition, light, shade, balance, and so on.

Our work is no longer exclusively concerned with ‘use’.

Pots, while possessing a practical function, can also have a contemplative role in the same way that a painting or a sculpture can grace an environment and command the space around it. Sometimes it’s not about utility at all.

Whatever we do make, I think that there has to be this ‘sense of adventure’ in the work. I want people looking at my pots to be able to see that I have somehow pushed my own boundaries a little, tried to expand the repertoire and succeeded by risking failure.

What is the role of the potter today? I think that our pots must have a personal signature. We are not the anonymous craftspeople that Yanagi or William Morris espoused: Hamada recognised this, and fully embraced the status of ‘artist potter’. We are making pots for a sophisticated clientele who want, in the pieces they buy, something more than a purely functional utensil. I think we must inject our work with a spirit of artistic endeavour that elevates the pot and places it alongside the best of two and threedimensional ‘fine art’. The Goldmark Gallery has contributed hugely to this end and continues to promote the very best of pottery as equal to any other art form.

2016 has been an uncertain year for most of us, and 2017 seems likely to bring more of the same. What do you hope for your future as a potter, and for the future of ceramics?

Ceramics is in a strong place: there has never been so much interest. The high level of sales at the Goldmark Gallery is proof of that. I have spent quite a lot of time in the USA over the years and there I see a very vibrant ceramic education system where many of the leading artists and potters are also professors. Unlike many of our own colleges, they manage to maintain both spheres of their creative lives.

For myself, I hope to go on doing what I do. I feel, however, that I may be coming toward the end of the wood firing aspect of my work. The wood kiln and its vagaries have taken up a lot of my time and energy. The amount of hard labour involved is daunting, from cutting the wood (I have just sawn and stacked 6 tons; I have another 17 waiting) to the loading and then the long hours and though there is no other way of firing that can give you its breath-taking colours and surfaces, a wood kiln can also kick you in the teeth, often for no apparent reason other than a streak of malevolence. I have had it both ways and have, on occasion, smashed as many pots as I have kept.

In truth, I still love what can be done with a limited number of materials, some locally won, in a reduction kiln.

Recently I have got back into testing glazes again after neglecting this area for a few years, relying on a library of around ten that I know will work. Wood ash has always held a fascination for me and I want to return to more experimentation.

The latest delivery of wood for the kiln may well be the last: 23 tons is enough for five firings over at least two years. So, whilst the end of this chapter may be in sight, it won’t be for a while.

see more of Phil Rogers’ work at goldmarkart.com

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green, greys, blacks with Through complimentary shades of light and dark, Davison has created an image that is at once intensely colourful and calm, of beguiling strength and serenity, and which must rank amongst the very best of his enigmatic masterpieces.

People often ask what is the aim, what is the meaning of the collages, instead of looking to see what has been made with paper instead of paint. So I don’t explain them. I look at them again and see that what was obviously a mess has taken shape...

The work of Francis Davison was never meant to be easy. In execution, the artist limited himself to the purism of found paper, cut or torn and never painted. In interpretation, he insisted at his only major lifetime exhibition that his work be hung untitled, unattributed, and without description. His tremendous personal shyness seeped into his exquisite collages, and it is only with time and contemplation that they begin to reward with their own peculiar, hidden resonances.

A student at Cambridge University, Davison initially intended to become a poet before taking up art as his vocation after a trip to St Ives in 1946, where he met contemporary school friend and abstract artist Patrick Heron. It was here, in the same town where he fell in love with his future wife, the artist Margaret Mellis, that Davison began to draw and paint; within a few years, his approach to the canvas had become increasingly simplified and stylised until, in 1952, he turned his attention solely towards collage.

Over the next thirty years Davison worked continuously and devotedly at his creations, from

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miniature paper patchworks to colossal six-foot arrangements of sublimely harmonious strips, circles and squares of pure colour. Though in their handtorn edges and tentatively shaved ribbons they appear haphazard, as if flung together, their configuration was the result of extreme focus and design, constantly rearranging until a composition of shapes and shades was resolved. Notes found amongst Davison’s papers in the years following his death in 1984 reveal something of the probing nature of his work: It’s flat, there are empty spaces, there’s slight relief, one piece of paper goes behind, another comes in front. There are false starts, crossings out, suggestions that are not followed up.

This work the paper is doing gradually arrives at something ‘made’, cutting away what is not wanted, adding more and taking away, more of this colour, less of that, simplifying, messing until everything is lost or saved…something modest appears, a satisfactory balance and stillness, a suggestive form.

In Green, Greys, Black with Rivets, that stillness is held within an exquisite balance of tone, movement and direction. The alignment of each element revolves around parallel right angles of green and earthen rectangles, their motion cushioned by the velvet textures of a black paper background.

rivets francis davison

view more Francis Davison at goldmarkart.com contact us on 01572 821424

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our late familiars

A New Book From Goldmark

our late familiars Witnessing the Palermo Catacombs words Iain Sinclair images Ian Wilkinson

Triggered by a fortuitous meeting with the publisher in the City of London, Iain Sinclair accepted the kind of Sicilian offer that can't be refused and left town for the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo. It proved to be a life-changing experience of death and all of its smoky mirrors. After years writing his way out of the labyrinth of London's East End, Sinclair found himself in a true labyrinth, where all the familiar ghosts were waiting, ready and eager to dictate their stories.

Ian Wilkinson has made many visits to the catacombs in Palermo.

These remarkable images are the consequences of two dreams and two coincidences.

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This sumptuous new book will be published later this year in both standard and deluxe collector’s editions.

Limited edition prints will also be available.

Contact us to register your interest.

Modernist; soldier; dreamer; David Jones was all these and more, one of few artists of whom we could truthfully use the word ‘unique’. With a recent Pallant House exhibition and a major new publication on his life’s work, there is a sudden, resurgent interest in this indefinable figure.

david jones Born in 1895 in south London, Jones’ considerable early talents meant that he was allowed to leave school to begin studying at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts when he was just 14 – too young, in fact, to attend the college life drawing classes. With the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted as a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915, fighting in the trenches for a full three years.

In 1916 Jones was shot during the Battle of the Somme and invalided in 1918. Though it provided the basis for his first prose-poem In Parenthesis, later celebrated by Eliot and Auden as a modern-day masterpiece, Jones’ involvement in the carnage at Mametz Wood haunted him for the rest of his life. He suffered trauma irregularly in the form of neurosis, and his first-hand experience of conflict – retold in his work through the shifting lens of violence, compassion, communion, and Christian sacrifice – bled through to his day-to-day living: visiting Jones in the 1950s, the composer Igor Stravinsky recalled a simple bedsit, possessions kept close to the

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mattress in military order, and the artist himself, a holy man in his cell, still living as if confined to a wartime bunk.

It was also during the war that the seeds of Jones’ spirituality were first sewn. Sent out to look for firewood in the woodlands surrounding Ypres, he stumbled upon an impromptu mass held in a ramshackle farmhouse. Something of the ritual, with its two points of flickering candlelight, white altar cloths and a few huddled figures in khaki, struck an accord: a moment of serenity in three years of madness. It was not long after returning to England, studying briefly at the Westminster School under the tutelage of Walter Sickert, that he converted to Roman Catholicism and left the London smog to work under the renowned engraver and stone carver Eric Gill.

Jones first joined Gill and his community at Ditchling in 1921, becoming a member of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic. The commune aimed to combine domestic life, the labours of arts and crafts, and spiritual faith in a single location, a garden of paradise established in reaction to the industrial

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slaughter and the mechanization of man that the recent war had come to represent. While Jones’ style remained thoroughly his own – lyrical, loose, always softer in touch Gill offered guidance on the techniques of engraving in wood and copper that proved instrumental in the more conceptually advanced prints of his later years.

When Gill left Ditchling for the Welsh village of Capel-y-ffin in 1924, Jones followed him, continually refined his engraving methods and developing an ever clearer artistic vision.

Religious imagery became the major recurring theme of his work: his men, be they soldiers, sailors, or Arthurian heroes, took on the alternately pained and pious image of Christ; his women, the saintly aura of the Madonna and the sexual ecstasy of St Theresa. He excelled in the methods of wood and copper engravings, investing them with the lilting quality of line that characterised his drawings. Typified by mystical and Biblical imagery, his work amalgamated sacred and mythological symbols with scenes of imagined fantasy. Under Gill, he also learnt the crafts of typography and lettering. While to his tutor the written word was like sculpture – clean-cut, with the coolness of stone monument or epitaph – in Jones’ hand it became visual poetry, tender and romantic, flowing over and around the page and spilling freely from its lines.

In a catalogue that defies categorisation – he drew and painted like a craftsman, cut like a poet, wrote like a visionary – best celebrated are his copper engraved illustrations for the 1929 edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Hampered by a swiftly failing eyesight, these prints would be the last he ever produced, dedicating the rest of his artistic career to luminous watercolours, oils, and the tentative, delicate draughtsmanship that had underpinned his graphic output. As was to be expected of an artist whose words, both written and designed, were made to dance, he spoke of the drawn line as if it were language: [there is a] lyricism inherent in the clean, furrowed free, fluent engraved line. In the Ancient Mariner engravings he sought not merely to illustrate but to get in copper the general fluctuations of the poem...

Jones died in 1974. In the intervening years, he had been appointed CBE, published his last great work, The Anathemata, and been acclaimed by Sir Kenneth Clark as absolutely unique – a remarkable genius; yet he remains, to this day, a still little-known figure. Renewed attention to his output in books and exhibitions should offer hope, for there is a great deal more to be discovered in these beautifully intimate, personal, introspective works of art.

view more David Jones at goldmarkart.com

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contact us on 01572 821424

price guide inside back cover

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Exhibition 1st July

NIC COLLiNS tall bottle

‘A good pot is like a good story book.

It’s recording four days of its journey, from clay to pot: all that turbulence, flame, the way it’s packed and fired.

But you have to be able to read that story. And I’m beginning to break that code.’

If, like Nic Collins suggests, pots are to be read, his make for a ripping good yarn. Piled higgledy-piggledy in his anagama kiln, brushing shoulders, kissing, and jostling for space, the packed chambers appear more like a burial tomb than a production site. Scorched for over thirty hours in atmospheres surpassing 1300°C and caked in whirling wood ash, it is a miracle any survive to tell their tale in their orange blushes, green and purple beads, and their immolated scallop shell skeletons.

Of the many forms in Collins’ repertoire, however, it is his tall bottles whose stories are among the most terrifying. Their ordeal begins on the wheel, where they are thrown in their entirety, metre-high walls of narrow, wet clay somehow kept vertical in defiance of the laws of gravity. From base to neck and bottle-lip, each is coaxed evermore precariously until fully formed. Any miscalculation in centring the clay, and the task becomes near-impossible. That this is all realised on a traditional kick-wheel, momentum provided solely by Collins’ feet, makes the act all the more astonishing.

From wheel to kiln, the stakes are raised. In order to achieve the wildly varying effects a full-throttle wood-firing can offer, Collins often places his tall bottles beneath stoking holes on

the side of the kiln. As the chambers build up temperature, wood is added through these port-holes, incinerating around the closest pots and heavily dousing them in natural ash.

Frequently, these conditions prove too much: pots are knocked over by falling logs and baked on their sides, or cracked by errant pieces of kindling that bounce between the kiln’s fragile cargo.

Once fired and cooled, the kiln is unpacked and its contents surveyed. Due to Collins’ extreme approach to packing, much of the work is often found fused together, leaving him the unenviable task of choosing which vessel to save and which to put to the hammer. With their long shape and position at the base of the kiln, the tall bottles are among those at greatest risk and are regularly sacrificed in an effort to salvage adjacent jars and vases. Those that make it out alive are all the more special for it: relics of a petrifying process of earth, air, and a whole lot of fire.

The more one looks at the surface of these bottles, from blistering patches of scarlet to glistening shino glazes, the more of their extraordinary story they share - and the more thankful one is of not having to birth the next.

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goldmark atelier Enter the open plan space of the Goldmark Atelier and there’s no mistaking that this is a place of magic.

Cloistered around by printing beds, table-tops stained with paint and resin, and a ten-foot rack of stacked ink cans, the place is like an aluminium cathedral, each cast-iron press a printmaker’s altar.

Step through the door and it’s the smell that first hits you; not Catholic incense but the burning whiff of acid, and on its heels an intoxicating cocktail of unfamiliar fumes: inks, solvents, and piercing white spirits, all rounded out by the light smoking of etching plate wax. External light floods the room, not through stained glass windows but still-damp proofs pinned up to be examined as they dry.

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The minister of this heady church is master printer Ian Wilkinson, a chemical cleric who has worked alongside the likes of Eduardo Paolozzi, Paula Rego and Elizabeth Frink, as well as an expanding pool of contemporary and Urban artists, in a career of nearly three decades. Aided by his keen-eyed wife Jan and studio assistant Callum, Wilkinson and the Goldmark Atelier have established a reputation among modern print workshops that is second to none.

To showcase the invaluable expertise they bring to the gallery and their own graphic ventures, we visited Jan and Ian to learn more about the methods in their madness.

Screen Printing Though the Atelier facilities allow for all kinds of printmaking, a particular strength has always been screen printing.

A highly adaptable process, screen printing has been in widespread use by artists and designers since the late 1950s, popularised by Andy Warhol’s iconic images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell Soup cans. In principle, the method is similar to stencilling: fine, mesh fabric – traditionally silk, but more often synthetic mixes of polyester or nylon – is drawn tight over a frame to make a ‘screen’. Ink is then forced through the fabric with a rubber blade or ‘squeegee’ onto a paper sheet beneath.

Areas of the screen can be blocked out using a number of different solutions applied with a brush or freely spattered and smeared. Ink is then uniformly fed through the screen again, passing only through those areas left clear of the dried ‘blockout’. Multiple colours require multiple screens, making an image more difficult and time-consuming to produce for every extra hue added.

The Goldmark Atelier has a large working space incorporating two enormous screen printing beds capable of producing prints of up to 4ft by 3ft. Undeterred by more complex commissions, they have in recent years worked on screen prints featuring upwards of 25 colours, relying on Ian and Jan’s painstaking precision to register each fresh application of colour so that every layer is evenly aligned.

Their aptitude for the medium has helped establish a strong connection with a growing number of Urban artists specialising in screen printing, including Swoon, D*Face, Nick Walker, and the French godfather of stencil art himself, Blek Le Rat.

Monotypes The idea of the monotype is simple: a single, unrepeatable and unique print is produced by transferring an image composed on an impervious surface, such as glass or marble, to a sheet of paper. In reality, this simplicity opens the monotype up to a near infinite number of approaches and a naturally improvisatory process of working.

Monotyping offers the artist a huge range of flexibility in constructing their image. Ink can be applied directly to the plate using any sort of implement – brushes, rags, combs and rollers – or removed by swiping away or spraying solvent onto the plate. Other techniques include placing the sheet straight

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onto an inked-up surface and then drawing on the back of the paper with pencils or sticks, leaving uneven lines of displaced colour when the paper is peeled clear of the glass.

The presence of the Atelier workshop in Uppingham, just five minutes away from the Goldmark Gallery, has enabled Jan and Ian to work closely with our gallery artists in long term collaborations, enabling greater exploration over a period of years. One such, with gallery artist Christopher P. Wood, involved a series of quirky monotypes incorporating elements of collage and freely drawn paint, with Wood often working on the plate right up until the paper was laid down to print.

Etching The sheer depth and breadth of tone achievable in the etching medium has attracted artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Hockney for over 500 years. Though many variants of the basic process exist, in the most common plates of copper, steel, or zinc are coated in a layer of wax through which lines are then cleared using various engraving tools. Often the wax layer is smoked black beforehand, making it easier for the artist so see their emerging composition.

Once an image has been designed on the plate, it is submerged in an acid bath. Acid ‘bites’ into the plate, dissolving the surface of the metal where wax has been scratched away and leaving grooves which then suck up and hold the ink for printing on moistened paper. Depending on the width, depth, and crispness of line desired, the plate can be immersed for anywhere between a handful of seconds to half an hour or more. The plate is then cleaned, inked up, and wiped clear, leaving only ink caught between the lines and pits hollowed out by the acid.

A large area of the Atelier is dedicated solely to the medium of etching. Equipped with three presses, the largest of which enables printing of up to a whopping 5ft by 3ft, the Atelier frequently produces etching prints in combination with other techniques available in the workshop, such as silkscreen printing, in an inventive union of graphic textures.

Woodcuts and Linocuts Woodcutting is generally thought of as the oldest of all printing processes. An image is carved using gougers, V-tools,

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and sharp cutters into a polished wood block which is then inked up and printed from.

Two basic methods have prevailed, each depending on the different qualities of wood available. One method uses hardwoods, such as pear and boxwood, which are cut into small knot and grain-free logs. Once polished these woods can be as smooth and hard as a metal plate, allowing for very fine, intricate carving work. The other method deliberately seeks out inconsistencies and natural grains in the block, using woods such as oak and sycamore cut length-ways into planks.

Cutting the wood this way reveals natural grain lines which can be used to great effect, but which make carving into the surface extremely difficult when working against the grain.

Closely related to the woodcut in terms of technique and process, the linocut (lacking the grain of natural wood) is easier to work with, producing images with a smoother edge and flatter, less textured planes of colour. Again, two methods are usually employed: in the first, multiple colours are printed from separate, individual blocks; in the second ‘progressive’ or ‘reduction’ method, a block of linoleum is cut, printed, recut and reprinted again and again, the area of lino being reduced as the image is built up colour by colour. While linoleum itself has little texture, caustic soda and other corrosive solutions can be applied to ‘distress’ its surface for greater variation.

For the relief printing methods of wood and lino cutting, the Atelier houses a handsome Albion press built in 1893 and a colossal 19th century Columbian press previously owned and used by British artist Michael Rothenstein, replete with its own crimson eagle counterweight. The studio also has an ever-expanding collection of antique, archival letterpress type with an accompanying Western proof press, all waiting for future experimentation.

Lithography Unusually for most modern print studios, the Goldmark Atelier owns a dedicated stone lithography press, enabling artists to work directly onto limestone to produce truly original prints.

Lithography remains about as near to drawing as one can get in a printing process. As the name suggests (‘lithos’ is the Ancient Greek word for stone), lithography was originally a method of producing prints from stone blocks. Today, the economy of zinc, aluminium, or plastic is often preferred, though at a cost to quality of image.

Combining old and new technologies has helped Jan and Ian tackle some of their more unusual or technically demanding projects, from printing 25-colour screen print reproductions of two John Piper Coventry Cathedral oil paintings to working alongside some of the industry’s most experimental Urban artists.

As a printing process, lithography relies on the antipathy between water and grease. The artist draws directly onto the plate using a greasy lithographic pencil. These lines and marks are then, by a chemical process, bonded to the plate and made receptive to oil and resistant to water. When printing begins, the plate is dampened with water which adheres to the unmarked areas of the plate and is repelled by the resistant lines. The plate is then prepared with an oil-based ink which is attracted to the oil-receptive marks but is repelled by the water.

Unlike printing methods where the image is carved into a block or plate and thus appears in reverse when printed, lithography can be printed direct (straight off the block) or ‘offset’, where the image is transferred to a rubber roller before being printed again onto paper, keeping its original configuration.

As a modern medium, lithographic production over the last few decades has declined dramatically, with very few presses working directly with stone blocks, making the Goldmark Atelier one of a shrinking number of workshops capable of offering the traditional stone-block process.

Digital Printing Despite a strong grounding in the printing methods of the past, Jan and Ian are as forward-thinking as they come.

Situated within the same building as 150-year-old presses, a further digital suite in the Atelier workshop includes three state-of-the-art, large format Epson printers capable of producing exceptionally accurate digital reproductions using the studio’s broad range of archival inks.

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Reader’s Offer

Just acquired untouched for a quarter of a century, the complete numbered edition

Ambiguity was the essence of the work of Carel Weight, where ostensibly ordinary scenes were made alternately strange, serene, and sinister. His images of peripheral London life, subtly undercut by an atmosphere of unfamiliarity, have seen his work represented in a number of high-profile public and private collections including the Tate, the V&A, and, most recently, that of the late David Bowie.

His predilection for the unusual can be traced to a childhood of uncertainty. Born in 1908 to a bank clerk and a manicurist, his parents prioritised careers over their new son, handing care of him over to foster-parents and tolerating only weekend visits. Criticised by his father, neglected by his mother, beaten by his schoolmaster and brought up surrounded by relative poverty, the artist recalled in later years how his early years were spent in an almost constant state of fear and anxiety.

Though by his adult life it was an experience he could put behind him, as one of Kenneth Clark’s celebrated Official War Artists and occupying the coveted position of Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, the dreamlike world in which he had sheltered as a young boy frequently provided inspiration for his well-known images of life in suburbia.

Child’s Wonderment, completed around 1975 and just seven

carel weight child’s wonderment years before a major retrospective at the Royal Academy, perfectly epitomises Weight’s indistinct approach. Stylistically, the image is a triumph of composition: the great sweeping motion from right to left through leaning sail boats, buffeted treetops, an ethereal disappearing handrail and the crooked form of the aged tree beautifully frames the titular child, swept up beneath the naked branches above. It seems a typical picture of a grey, British childhood.

But look more closely, and things are less clear. The boy, body lilting and hands clasped to the side of his head, echoes the ghostly figure of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Gazing out beyond the canvas, the source of his amazement remains a mystery: perhaps out of sight, perhaps all in his head.

The enduring power of Weight’s images was to make one see strangeness where seemingly there was none. When the London Zoo zebra house was bombed in the Second World War, unleashing one startled animal onto the city streets, Weight could not help but be drawn to so surreal a scene.

In Child’s Wonderment, this facility is felt most fully.

Presented with an intimate vignette of stereotypical, commonplace ordinariness, the more we look, the more we explore, the less certain everything begins to seem.

Screenprint, 60 x 60 cm, signed by Carel Weight in an edition of 95, printed at Curwen Studios and published by Fieldborne Galleries in the early 1990s.

Special offer £495 includes frame and delivery.

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the school prints Few public art endeavours faced with such adversity went on to achieve such scope of vision and quality of commission as the School Prints initiative.

That the project ever came to fruition, let alone with such longstanding success as it eventually did, is astonishing; that some few prints from the series have survived, yet more remarkable still.

The story of the School Prints begins with Derek Rawnsley.

Idealistic and adventurous, Derek was something of a renaissance man: an athletic pilot fresh from an illustrious Oxford career, where – legend has it – he had on one occasion flown from Australia to Abingdon in second-hand Tiger Moth to avoid missing the start of term, breaking a world record in the process.

In 1935 he set up the first iteration of the ‘School Prints Ltd’ business with a simple yet revolutionary idea: to bring quality reproduction prints of fine artworks to schools for hire, with the aim of introducing a world of art to young children who otherwise lacked the means or opportunity to visit galleries and museums themselves. Within two years he was operating out of an office in Bloomsbury, and had begun persuading schools to sign up to the scheme with a catalogue of almost 150 prints.

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By 1939, the same year war broke out across Europe, Derek met Brenda, his future wife. They married in February of 1941, though their communion was to be tragically brief: on the eve of their wedding night, Derek was posted to Cairo as an RAF pilot. Brenda soon signed up with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in an attempt to join him, but the pair were variously stationed in different locations. In early 1943 he was killed in an aeroplane accident, leaving Brenda behind and his nascent undertaking in the hands of an assistant.

Despite having no knowledge of art or business, little money and even less man-power, Brenda took on the School Prints scheme in commemoration of her husband’s aspirations, determined to uphold his cause. Her ambition was immense: unlike Derek, she would settle for no less than original prints, rather than reproductions, commissioned directly from the most important contemporary British and European artists; these would be sold, not hired, an astounding proposition that few primary schools of the time would have given consideration.

To aid in the project, Brenda sought out key figure in the art world to collaborate. Among a small number, she attracted the attention of Herbert Read, a renowned critic and champion of radical young artists paving the way in modern British art.

Together, they gathered an advisory panel drawn from the world of art education and child psychology, ensuring subject matter was both suitable and educational for primary age children. Collectively, the panel would select artists and choose appropriate images from submitted sketches. Their parameters, both in terms of quality and content of image, were strict; rejection rates were high while standards were stringently upheld.

Commissioning letters sent to the artists whom the panel deemed suitable explained the project in further detail, requesting a small rough draft for them to consider. Brenda was advised on limitations for each print which would maximise their ease of production and presentation: no more than six colours were to be used in each composition, which must include an illustrated border so as to allow schools to

price guide inside back cover

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display the works either mounted in a frame or pasted directly onto the classroom walls. In subject matter, the artists were given free rein: providing the image remained innocent, the desire that each print be representative of real, fine art indicative of the artist’s imaginative skill remained of paramount importance.

Major obstacles continued to dog the project, most noticeably that of sourcing the labour and materials for so many prints (though the final edition size was never documented, the number almost certainly ran into the thousands). During the post-war period, resources such as paper sheets and cardboard were heavily rationed, forcing Brenda to navigate the hazy waters of the black market in a last-ditch attempt to collect enough supplies from whatever sources she could find.

Of the 24 prints eventually commissioned in two sets of 12, almost all were produced as auto-lithographs, meaning the design was drawn directly onto the stone block by the artist.

From her very first involvement with the initiative, Brenda had

been determined that the School Prints series would offer children the very best in original art while accommodating a necessarily large edition; auto-lithography was as near a process to original painting or drawing as could be realised within such limits, with no intervention by assistant, technician or machine between the start and finish of the final image.

In composition and conception, the artist was entirely responsible, resulting in works that were highly individual and representative of each illustrator’s unique stylistic flavour.

In the last ten years the Goldmark Gallery has had the incredibly good fortune to have acquired some of the last caches of School Prints lithographs in public and private circulation. Given the purpose of the works and their treatment in their natural environment, where they were pinned, glued, taped and pasted like posters, often in direct sunlight and surrounded by less-than-careful children, extremely few have survived, and even fewer in mint condition such as those illustrated here. A select number have become iconic images of their time, and are still recognised by visitors to the gallery

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whose childhoods were spent growing up with them: John Nash’s homely Window Plants, or the beautiful, centrifugal motion of Harvesting, in which farmers chase rats round a stylised crop of uncut wheat; Julian Trevelyan’s Harbour, with its scratched abstract clouds, unshaven sailors and their black feline companion.

Most sought-after of the lot, however, was L. S. Lowry’s Punch and Judy scene. The image is Lowry, through and through: the ordinary mass of people, all walks of life, gathered in a vignette of stark, simple colours. It is a print Lowry evidently felt fond of, and which, as he explains, was typical of his painterly outlook: I am a simple man and I use simple materials: ivory black, vermillion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white – and no medium.

Lowry’s print has proved so popular, in fact, that in recent years it all but disappeared from the market, until another recent stroke of good luck befell the Goldmark Gallery once

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more when we discovered a rare stash of Punch and Judy prints wrapped in perfect condition. Given the great displacement of the School Prints after they were sold to schools and passed on amongst future generations, we suspect this must be one of the very last collections of this fantastic print still intact.

In today’s world of cut funding, art enfants terribles, and sanitised education, future reimaginings of the School Prints venture seem woefully improbable. That the project proved as successful as it was, even during the liberal, socially-minded world of post-war Britain, was no doubt a surprise to Brenda and her team, though a testament too to her vision and her husband’s, and to the generosity of its contributors both financial and artistic. While an equivalent contemporary project may seem far off, we can still marvel at the work invested in this series of prints and the extraordinary visual feast it left behind.

price guide

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We have many of the items featured in this magazine in stock.

As always, prices include frame, vat and uk delivery.

Phone us for a chat on 01572 821424 or see more and buy online at goldmarkart.com

Price guide page 3. Anthony Gross, Landscape (Tree) 1950, pen & oil on board, £2750 5. Anthony Gross, Terry’s Birthday Party – Flamstead, pen, ink & watercolour, £4,000 7. Scottie Wilson, Edinburgh Weavers Tapestry Design, satin cotton, £495 8. Victor Pasmore, Transformations 6, screenprint, £1,950 8. Victor Pasmore, Untitled (The Image in Search of Itself), screenprint, £750 10. Victor Pasmore, Green Darkness, screenprint, £1,500 15. Camille Pissarro, Portrait de F. C. P. (Félix Pissarro), lithograph, £2,250 14. Rigby Graham, Zebbug, gouache, £1,450 15. Rigby Graham, Landscape with Girna, watercolour, £1,450 16. Rigby Graham, Marsaxlokk, watercolour, £1,450 28. Robyn Denny, Generations, etchings & aquatint with watercolour, £950 31. Robyn Denny, Generations, etchings & aquatint with watercolour, £950 33. Gwyneth Johnstone, A Party, oil on board, £10,000 35. Phil Rogers, Oval Bottle, hakeme with iron brush pattern, £350 36. Phil Rogers, Dish, combed chrysanthemum, salt glaze, £350 37. Phil Rogers, Large Jar, tenmoku, £1,600 38. Phil Rogers, Tall Bottle, straps and pellets, ash and Kington stone glaze, £3,250 39. Phil Rogers, Set of Six Plates, hakeme with iron brush pattern, £375 / £550 41. Francis Davison, Green, Greys, Black with Rivets, paper collage, £15,000 47. David Jones, The Curse, copper engraving, £550 48. David Jones, Female Yahoo Embraces Gulliver, wood engraving, £200 49. David Jones, Her Love is Like, pencil, £3450 51. Nic Collins, Tall Bottle, shino and natural ash glaze, £1,250 58. Carel Weight, Child’s Wonderment, screenprint, £495 35. L. S. Lowry, Punch and Judy, lithograph, £2250 36. Julian Trevelyan, Harbour, lithograph, £350 38. Clarke Hutton Harlequinade, lithograph, £250 40. John Nash, Window Plants, lithograph, £750

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

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