JOHN LENDIS!
Works for Sale November 2015!
JOHN LENDIS
Say Goodbye, Say Goodbye, 2015! Oil on canvas! 120cm x 150cm! Price: £4500 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Train / Taxi, 2015! Oil on canvas! 120cm x 150cm! Price: £4500 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Angel with a Fox 3, 2015! Oil on linen! 100cm x 110cm! Price: £3800 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Angel with a Broken Rib, 2015! Oil on linen! 100cm x 110cm! Price: ÂŁ3800 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Angel 1, 2014! Oil on canvas! 60cm x 60cm! Price: £1600 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Kelmscott, 2015! Oil on canvas! 50cm x 70cm! Price: £1600 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Winter Fox, 2014! Oil on canvas! 26cm x 41cm (diptych)! Price: £600 ex VAT!
JOHN LENDIS
Landrover VI, 2014! Oil on linen! 180cm x 220cm! Price: £6800 ex VAT!
NOTES ON PAINTINGS! ! Say Goodbye, Say Goodbye! ! Stemming from his fascination with Jane Franklin (wife of Sir John Franklin, legendary but tragic explorer of the North-West Passage and before that Governor of Tasmania in the late 1800s), Lendis has produced many paintings on the theme of travel and the way that trains, taxis, boats, cars and planes move us from one place to another. It is in this state of journey, moving through the world and through time, that Lendis finds freedom and connection with history, poetry, the stories of explorers, artists and travellers in the past. In this ‘state of the passage’ (as Foucault calls it), there is a connection with these things of the imagination …. And a distance or isolation from the real, material world that one moves through. ! ! In his childhood, Lendis would skip school to go trainspotting in Nottinghamshire, riding trains all over the country and returning home in time for tea. The trains in his paintings are often from an earlier era – the Victorian and pre-War era of Romantic travel, with Pullman cars and overnight carriages; when trains were caught from London to Istanbul and the journey was a sophisticated, Romantic affair with just as much, if not more, importance than the destination itself.! ! The city in the background of this painting is contemporary. It is Lendis’ material world, existing as it does in the same frame as his internal, imaginative world. ! !
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The train paintings are similar to his taxi paintings, depictions of machines that connect people with different places in the world. They provide movement through the world, the joy and melancholy of leaving and arriving in places that are new and old at the same time. This painting is about leaving behind people and places, voyaging into the unknown and making new beginnings. !
NOTES ON PAINTINGS! ! Train / Taxi! ! A lot of Lendis’ paintings incorporate characteristics of painting styles from historical art periods; many contain references to the PreRaphaelites, Medieval icon painting, classical landscape paintings and works of Northern European painters from the last few centuries.! ! This painting loosely depicts the interior of a traditional London black cab, with its doors opened like wings, which also resembles a compartment on an old passenger train and, similarly, a traditional 3-panel medieval altarpiece. Lendis has long worked with the idea that medieval icons and altarpieces also operated as a means of transportation for the viewer from their everyday, material world to another place. Through deep contemplation of the icon or painting a viewer could literally be moved to devotion and a state of transcendence or communication with a heavenly world; to a state of grace that saw their daily concerns left behind.! ! “In these recent train and taxi paintings I have reversed the traditional approach to fine oil painting … where you sketch or draw a rough outline of the composition and main subject and then block in and paint up to a finished work. Here I have put the paint on in broad sweeps at the beginning, following this with layers of impasto and then numerous thin, floating glazes. Finally, I have finished the work with its drawing (in oil paint) on top.”! !
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“In Train / Taxi, the panel in the left-hand door depicts a city in the snow (a symbol of laying the past to rest or forgetting) along with a Victorian steam train that heads out of the left frame. The centre panel shows a bridge across a river (again, this is another symbol of connection and departure), it is reminiscent of Whistler’s Nocturne series. And the right hand panel is based on a drawing I made of an X-ray of a 17th Century Flemish painting of Brugge. Above the figure is a painted Qantas plane … this was a daydream.”!
NOTES ON PAINTINGS! ! Angel With a Fox 3, Angel with a Broken Rib, Angel 1 and Winter Fox! ! Angels have been incorporated into Lendis’ paintings on and off over the past 30 years. He uses them as a symbol for something that appears in our world, but which we do not fully understand. “I use the idea of angels. I don’t necessarily discount that they may be real or that they may be messengers from another world in the way that artists of the great religious paintings used them, but I use them as a symbol of ‘otherness’ in this world. Of a presence of something that isn’t logical and cannot be comprehended.”! ! “The fox has a similar meaning for me. It symbolises that great, howling, force that is impossible for us to comprehend but which seems to drive us in instinctive ways, whether that be expressed as fear, love, hate or desire. The fox is that wild face of nature that doesn’t care at all about humans or civilisations, which just relentlessly keeps on going, forever … in a cycle of creation and destruction that never ends.”! ! To date, Lendis has produced only three paintings which combine both the fox and angel in the one work. “I am pleased and puzzled by the combination of these two great unknown forces in a single painting. It is ambiguous and the paintings don’t really have room for anything else. This type of ambiguity is vital to my work and it makes me feel as though I am nearing some ‘truth’.”! ! “The painting, Angel 1, is similarly intuitive. Here, nature (the landscape of trees) forms the angel’s wings, while the angel holds the work of humans (in the form of a city) in her arms. Whether the fire that consumes this construction is comprised of the flames of passion, creativity and desire or those of destruction and change is not determined. Whether the angel delights or despairs at this is also an unanswered question.”!
NOTES ON PAINTINGS! ! Kelmscott! This painting, named after William Morris’ manor house in the village of Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, is part of a large body of works that Lendis has produced based on the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris. In the 1960s, before setting off to travel the world, Lendis studied textile design and lacemaking at Nottingham School of Art and Design. He has always had a fascination with pattern and he often constructs his paintings ‘across the surface’ in a way that a fabric designer might compose a textile design; with no hierarchy of subject and no use of traditional Renaissance perspective, except as featured ‘excerpts’ in the work.! ! This play with pattern and the surface of the image stems not only from the designs of 19th Century Nottingham lace-makers and the fabrics of William Morris, but also from the traditional Middle Eastern tiles and architecture experienced by Lendis in his three year journey from England to Australia in the 1970s. Medieval icon paintings, Aboriginal art - these genres also possess the flatness of the painting, the play of forms against each other, the jostling of the subject matter to be at the forefront of the painting, and the influence of these art forms is also clear in Lendis’ work. ! ! On his permanent return to the UK in 2009, Lendis moved to the Cotswolds and to a landscape that seemed haunted by the PreRaphaelites. So many of this group of artists spent numerous summers in the area and Lendis sought out the actual places that they used as locations for some of their most famous works. He has spent many days drawing on-site, as the basis for paintings located in the same landscapes, but infused with the history and myths of those who had been there before and collaged with Lendis’ personal, contemporary, experience of the place.! !
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This painting is based on drawings that Lendis made at Kelmscott Manor in 2010. The drawings are of two small rooms at the very top of the house, “which I took to be the children’s rooms when Morris and his family, friends and colleagues came to stay.”!
NOTES ON PAINTINGS! ! Land Rover VI! ! “This is the sixth painting in a series based on my memories of the Land Rover I owned while living in the wilds of North-Western Tasmania during the 1970s and early 1980s. It was an ex-army series IIa SWB ragtop; fitted with long-range fuel tanks, hand throttle etc. In the summertime I took off the doors, roof and windscreen and, even though it was periodically soaked, it didn’t seem to have any adverse effects on the car. It was an amazing vehicle that we took into the most remote parts of the wilderness: up impossible slopes, through rivers and bogs; and it allowed us access into breath-taking country that is rarely seen. Never once did it fail. After being submerged in a river it was winched out and in the morning I dried the plugs and battery terminals and it started second go. ! ! Throughout this series of works, the accuracy of that physical car drifts in and out of the painting, just like my memories of that life drift in and out of my mind. Here, the interior of the car and the world outside seem to dissolve into each other as if in a dream where you kind of merge with the world around you and the world you are thinking about. The composition is similar to that I used in Taxi / Train – based on a 3-panel altarpiece. Here, the left hand panel depicts the Rollright Stones (an ancient stone circle close to where I live in the Cotswolds, England). The centre panel is inspired by an artist, Albrecht Altdorfer, who many historians consider to be the very first true ‘landscape painter’. And the right hand panel incorporates one of the oldest symbols that I developed in my work: a pink cloud. This symbol, which for me is a sign of pure happiness, comes from a line in John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row, where the protagonist is wandering down a street and looks up to see ‘a pink cloud towed across the sky by angels’. ! !
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Working at this large scale allows me to paint without self consciousness (sometimes it feels as though my paintings are made of 300 mistakes, each painted out by another) … the work becomes about drawing and painting, where the lines can falter, flow, be clumsy and just move around the canvas to express the beauty of an idea. I am very proud of this painting, it seems to sum up much of my work over the past 30 years, with everything that has been stripped out and all the unnecessary ideas kept at bay. It as much about all that has been simplified and is not included here as it is about what can be seen on the canvas.”!
BRIEF ARTIST BIOGRAPHY!
John Lendis at Idbury, Cotswolds!
John Lendis (b.1950) has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania, where he also gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting Major) for which he was awarded the University Medal. He has had over thirty solo exhibitions in Australia and Britain and been the recipient of a number of major grants to support his practice since 1997. His work is in the collections of the Government House (Tasmania), the State Government of Tasmania, the University of Tasmania, the Jane Franklin Museum and the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University where he was also artist in residence during 2006.! ! Over the last decade, Lendis’ work has attracted critical acclaim and reviews in Australian art magazines and academic journals including Art in Australia and The Australian. In 2005 he was interviewed for a special profile on Stateline on ABC television and his work is the subject of a chapter in the book Tasmanian Visions by Dr. Roslynn Haynes (Polymath Press, 2006). Lendis’ work is also a major focus in a PhD thesis currently being written at the University of Tasmania.! !
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Lendis is a painter of landscapes for whom the very idea of ‘landscape’ includes within it human emotions and memories. He grew up in Nottingham, but as a young artist spent years traveling through the deserts of Afghanistan, the Middle East and Asia, before arriving in Tasmania, where he established himself as an important contemporary Australian painter. He returned to live permanently in the UK in 2009 and now lives and works in a small village the Cotswolds.! ! Lendis’ work has always been about his personal relationship with the place where he lives. He continues to describe his life as being caught between two worlds – living three decades in Britain and three decades in Tasmania makes this feeling justifiable. While living in one country may be a physical truth, Lendis always finds his emotional and spiritual relationship to many places is equally true.!
SPECIAL OFFER: Free Delivery & Insurance ANYWHERE in the world until 31 January 2016 • Works are housed and may be viewed at the artist’s studio in the Cotswolds – or if you would prefer to view elsewhere in the UK or outside, this can be arranged on a sale or return basis. ! ! • I have extensive experience delivering artwork anywhere in the world and am very happy to organise freight and insurance quotations on your behalf. Packing, freight, any custom duties or taxes and insurance is payable by the purchaser. ! ! • The prices shown here are exclusive of UK VAT of 20% - if you are purchasing outside the European Union then you do not have to pay the VAT on purchase. (However, import taxes and duties may apply in your own country, of which I can advise.) At the present time, Revolver Days Ltd is not registered for VAT and so VAT will not be applied to the sale price until the threshold is reached.! • Purchasing paintings over a period of time (monthly payments) is an option, and I am happy to discuss this.! ! • All copyright in the works remains the property of the artist.! ! • More information about the artist can be found on the website www.revolverdays.com. If you would like copies of press articles, a detailed CV or any other information, I am very happy to email it.! !
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• If you wish to purchase a painting or would like further information, please contact Celia Broughton on +44 (0)7889 749 345 or email mail@revolverdays.com. !
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