ART

ISSN 2044-2653

Eric Ravilious issue // Janette Kerr RWA

// Richard Hamilton // Jan Yoors // Brian May CBE PhD FRAS

Together, we value the things that you value

Eric Ravilious: travelling artist 08 Spring 2012

Ecclesiastical Insurance Office plc (EIO) Reg. No. 24869. This company is registered in England at Beaufort House, Brunswick Road, Gloucester, GL1 1JZ, UK. EIO is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority and is a member of the Financial Ombudsman Service and Association of British Insurers. Oval Insurance Broking Limited, Registered Office: 9 South Parade, Wakefield WF1 1LR. Registered in England No: 01195184 Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. © Ecclesiastical Insurance Office pic 2011

// Janette Kerr RWA

// Richard Hamilton

// Jan Yoors

BackChat // Brian May CBE PhD FRAS

Spring 2012 £1

For more information or a quotation, contact Sam Brazier on 01452 524415 or alternatively, email sam.brazier@theovalgroup.com

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When it comes to protecting the things you value; Sam Brazier and his team at Oval Insurance Broking (Oval) understand the importance of offering professional and confidential advice on your insurance requirements.

They also recognise the value of choosing the right insurance partners who have complete empathy with their clients’ needs.

That is why Oval is working in partnership with Ecclesiastical Insurance to offer a residential insurance policy that sets new standards of personal care, specialist cover and risk management advice for art, antiques and period properties up to Grade 1 listed status.

With Ecclesiastical’s unique knowledge of historic buildings and their contents and Oval’s commitment to deliver service of the highest quality, you can be sure of a partnership that values the things that you value.

WHERE SOLD

The Head of Leda, c.1505-6, Leonardo da Vinci ROYAL COLLECTION © 2012 HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN

Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci A Diamond Jubilee Celebration 31 March – 10 June 2012 Bristol Museum & Art Gallery Queens Road, Bristol BS8 1RL Tel: 0117 922 3571

Free entry bristol.gov.uk/museums

A Royal Collection touring exhibition

Contributors

// Richard Storey took a BA Honours degree in Drama from Bristol University (2006). He worked for the Bristol Evening Post for 12 years and is author of Perfect Persuasion. He is a former Board member of Bristol Arts Centre and Travelling Light Theatre Company.

// Jodie Inkson’s obsession with typography began at school when she painstakingly hand cut every letter of a project. Climbing the design ranks in London, she formed Wire Sky in 2003, winning awards and a position in Who’s Who. She sees her beloved modernist chairs as art, not sure whether she prefers sitting on them or looking at them.

// Mike Whitton taught English, Art and Drama for almost 40 years in secondary schools.

Now, in semi-retirement, teaches Psychology to sixth-formers.

Hobbies include photography, mountain walking. An ardent defender of the Arts in the school curriculum.

// Simon Baker is an RWA Trustee and a solicitor on the cusp of celebrating 40 years in practice. An avid enthusiast of the visual arts since discovering that books with “pictures and conversations” were the best, he is too much of an impulse buyer to qualify as a collector.

// Jilly Cobbe has a degree in Fine Art Drawing and is a practicing artist living near Stroud. She has a life-long fascination with the history of art, especially the artist behind the art.

// Alice Hendy studied Fine Art at Exeter College, learning to use photography to capture ideas and document her work at Kingston University, where she studied Sculpture. Alice has always loved cameras – her current beau is a Canon 5d mark ii; it makes her heart sing.

// Jane Hruska studied Studio Art, Film, Literature, Social Anthropology and Psychology – a testament to her uncontrollable curiosity. She lives in New York City where she is a freelance writer and designs jewellery and accessories via her RedLipsStudio.

// Mike Jenner while a lecturer at Bath University, joined his one-man architectural practice with Ray Moxley’s to found Moxley, Jenner and Partners, ultimately sixty strong.

He has always combined practice with writing on architectural history.

He is a compulsive collector of every form of visual art, from 9th Century Tang pots to 21st Century paintings.

// Max Kolombos treads the digital divide, helping artists in the music industry realise their dream on the web and in the digital sphere.

Co-conspirators include Radiohead and record labels such as Domino and Fat-Cat.

// Hugh Mooney is an art photographer and recently studied Fine Art at the University of the West of England. A physicist by profession, he spent 30 years in the aerospace industry prior to retiring in 1998. A camera is his constant companion.

// Dr. Tracy O’Shire New York born forensic psychologist.

She met her husband, Greg Reitschlin, in a Paris beret shop and subsequently re-invented herself as an Art Critic, winning the coveted Die Kunst Werft Newcomer Award.

// Robert Parker took a BA Fine Art from Durham. Artist, designer, writer, lecturer, he is former head of fashion / textiles at Plymouth University. He lives in Somerset and the South of France, and has exhibited with RWA and as gallery artist in the UK and abroad. Writes for The Artist.

Art is all about communicating great ideas, emotions, messages, concepts. Whatever the method of its making, the spiritual and aesthetic response it receives ultimately rests with the viewer.

Recently, David Hockney seemed to be taking a dig at Damien Hirst for employing others to help realise his creations.

So what’s new? This debate has its roots at least as far back as the Renaissance. Check out Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Bernini, Reynolds, Warhol, Judy Chicago, Koons, Christo et al.

And where does Hockney’s own use of prints, etchings, Polaroids and iPads enter the argument?

Authorship is a prickly topic.

We all know that Ai Weiwei didn’t make his 100 million Sunflower Seeds. The AB Fine Art Foundry and Pangolin Editions in London make many works in bronze and lead for a wide variety of artists.

Master printers continue to work alongside artists in order to create photogravure, etchings and prints.

The use of artisan help is alive and well.

By trotting out this old chestnut, Hockney has cleverly harnessed the oxygen of publicity to coincide with the opening of his A Bigger Picture extravaganza.

And good for him. However, the meaning of the message is not necessarily the message as given: the meaning is the response it gets.

Read Michael Petry’s new book, The Art of Not Making – and be convinced.

Richard Storey Managing Editor

// Greg Reitschlin studied art history in Vienna and took his MA from Freie Universität, Berlin. He is the author of Art Fakes Revealed (for publication next year) and is presently writing A Blast from the Past, a comprehensive history of the Vorticist movement.

// James Russell writes about history, culture and place, often at the same time. His books include the Ravilious in Pictures series and The Naked Guide to Cider, which is based on his experiences as an amateur cider maker. He spends more time than he ought working on his blog, jamesrussellontheweb.blogspot.com.

// Darren Tanner Manager, Foyles at Cabot Circus has worked as a bookseller in various Bristol bookshops since graduating from Art College in 1999.

As a bookseller he has made it his mission to create diverse and interesting art sections wherever he has worked.

RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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Bristol 18 – 20 May 2012 Brunel’s Old Station Temple Meads

Art. Love. Home.

Contemporary art under £4,000 affordableartfair.co.uk

Inside ROYAL WEST OF ENGLAND ACADEMY Patron Her Majesty the Queen Board of Trustees Chairman Dr Norman Biddle Hon RWA Honorary Treasurer Bob Barnett Trustees Simon Baker, Elizabeth Boscawen, Jennifer Bryant-Pearson, Paul Wilson, Paul Gough PhD MA FRSA RWA, Ned Cussen, Janette Kerr PRWA, Rachael Nee RWA, Lucy Willis RWA

features

President Janette Kerr PRWA Academicians’ Council Vice President Peter Ford RE RWA Academician Secretary Rachael Nee RWA Honorary Architectural Advisor Mike Jenner FRIBA FRSA RWA Council Members Anne Desmet RA RE RWA, Vera BoeleKeimer RWA, Stephen Jacobson RWA, John Palmer RWA, Louise Balaam RWA, Rachael Nee RWA Director Trystan Hawkins Assistant Director Vicky Chappell Facilities Manager Nick Dixon Events and Income Manager Angharad Redman Membership and Office Manager Gemma Brace Marketing Manager Lottie Storey Gallery Co-ordinator Tristan Pollard Gallery Assistant Ben Harding Customer Services Manager Steve Fielding Customer Services team members Juliet Burke, Beckie Upton Accountants Hollingdale Pooley ART MAGAZINE Publisher RWA (Art Magazine) Ltd Managing Editor Richard Storey Art Director Jodie Inkson – Wire Sky Deputy Editor Mike Whitton Specialist photography Alice Hendy RWA and Academicians’ news Gemma Brace: gemma.brace@rwa.org.uk

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Eric Ravilious: Travelling Artist James Russell takes us into the world of the much loved landscape painter, war artist, designer, book illustrator and wood engraver.

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The Untamed World of Janette Kerr PRWA Foul-weather painter Kerr impresses Simon Baker with her single-minded vision of the wild and edgy sea.

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Artistic Window Shopping with Richard Hamilton The Founding Father of Pop Art is fondly remembered by his friend and fellow artist, Robert Parker.

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Tapestries: Jan Yoors Family friend Jane Hruska introduces the work of the internationally acclaimed tapestry maker, painter, printer and sculptor.

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Rhapsody in Blue The never before heard true story behind Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks as told to Greg Reitschlin by its key inhabitant, the soda jerk.

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Symbols in The Landscape Why are towers such powerful images, and why have so many cultures felt the need to build them? Mike Jenner explains.

ADVERTISING Angharad Redman t: 0117 906 7608 e: angharad.redman@rwa.org.uk COPY DEADLINE Summer 2012 issue: 13 April Royal West of England Academy, Queens Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX t: 0117 973 5129 General enquiries e: info@rwa.org.uk Magazine e: rwamagazine@gmail.com Registered Charity No 1107149

regulars What’s on at the RWA

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Close-up: Nadège Mériau

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Diary – events, lectures, workshops, tours

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Inside the artist’s studio: Stanley Donwood

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RWA News

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Reviews

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Academicians’ News

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Artful Cuisine: restaurant guide

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Friends News & events

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Listings

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To read an electronic version of ART, or to visit the RWA online: www.rwa.org.uk. Follow us on Facebook and twitter.com/rwabristol

Gallery Review: Innocent Gallery

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BackChat: Brian May

ART is printed by WPG on sustainably sourced FSC certified paper using vegetable inks. www.wpg-group.com

Cover: Jan Yoors Yellow Tantra (detail) tapestry, 7.5 x 8 feet 1977

The opinions in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the Royal West of England Academy. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

CBE PhD FRAS

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Spring 2012

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What’s on at Eric Ravilious: Going Modern / Being British 10 March – 29 April

Going Modern / Being British explores the work of Eric Ravilious (1903 – 1942). He was both artist and designer, reflecting English life and a world at war. Recently described by Paul Laity in The Guardian as “more popular than ever” his current revival can be partly attributed to his complex relationship with modernism. This new exhibition considers Ravilious as part of an on-going, but no less fascinating, debate that explores the complexities of a very British Modernism, placing this marginalised artist firmly back within the canon of great British artists alongside his one-time teacher Paul Nash. Paying particular attention to his work as an artist Going Modern / Being British follows Ravilious’s relationship with the social, cultural and geographical landscape of Britain throughout the 20s and 30s exploring the duality of his Romantic Modernism. Considering both technique and subject matter it focuses on his use of watercolour as a medium through which to depict a sense of place and his native soil, providing the public with an opportunity to uncover this absorbing approach to Being British.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Penguin Parade Celebrating the Penguin Books Archive 10 March – 22 April

Penguin Parade celebrates the extensive Penguin Archive held in the University of Bristol Library, Special Collections. Sir Allen Lane, a Bristolian, founded Penguin Books in 1935. Penguin Parade follows his journey through the history of Penguin publishing and how the design of the books and the range of titles continue to deliver broad public appeal. Penguins, Pelicans and Puffins – there will be books for everyone along with objects, letters, posters and a range of Penguin products. Penguin Parade exhibits highlights from the archive, such as tickets and telegrams associated with the Lady Chatterley trial, external loan items and visual representations of Penguin in its social context over time.

RWA Selling Dreams: One Hundred Years of Fashion Photography

Peter Reddick Beautiful World: 10 March – 22 April

9 March – 29 April In 1984, Irving Penn commented that he saw his role at Vogue as ‘selling dreams, not clothes’.

Selling Dreams is the first touring exhibition from the V&A’s Collection to explore the work of international fashion photographers and to draw together such a broad range of important historic and contemporary fashion images. The photographs reflect key themes in fashion photography throughout the past hundred years and include approximately sixty works by more than twenty major fashion photographers, as well as original magazine spreads from publications such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Exposing the fascinating dialogue between fashion photography and fine art photography, this exhibition is beautiful and scholarly, glamorous and insightful. Exhibition organised by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Exhibition supported by Bristol Fashion Week.

Peter Reddick was one of the leading wood engravers in the UK, and his artistic integrity and wealth of experience made him a most outstanding engraver and illustrator.

His work and output were extraordinary. To achieve complex expressions, free flowing lines and intense detail from a process which can be very unforgiving showed the confidence of an artist totally in control of his technique – trusting his eye and hand. Peter’s love of drawing, landscape, literature and calligraphy enriched each work allowing the image to have depth and vitality which reaches back to Hogarth and Palmer but also sat easily with contemporary work by Emma Stibbon and Thomas Kilpper. Beautiful World encompasses 50 years of artistic practice including colour woodcuts, lithographs and previously unseen watercolours. Peter was the founder of Spike Print Studio (1976) and co-founder of Spike Island. He was chair of Spike Print Studio until 2008 and taught a free class for many years. He remained active in the studio until his death in 2010.

Exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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March // Saturday 10th March, 7th April and TBC May 11am – 1.30pm Scribble and Sketch Suitable for all ages and abilities Scribble and Sketch offers a morning of fun and informal drawing workshops and exercises, led by Bristol Drawing Club founder and artist Anouk Mercier.

Designed to ‘loosen the hand’ this session is ideal for anyone wishing to develop their drawing skills in a lively and relaxed environment, or simply take advantage of the free materials to get creative. Everyone is welcome. Book in advance or just drop in on the day and join in (space permitting). Free with exhibition entry (£5 adults and free to under 16s). Note: all children must be accompanied by an adult.

Space is limited so booking in advance is recommended.

// S aturday 10th 12 – 2pm Book launch and signing for A Travelling Artist: Ravilious in Pictures series by James Russell Published by The Mainstone Press, A Travelling Artist is the fourth in a series of books documenting Ravilious in pictures, and will be launched at the RWA. Find out more about the book by visiting www.themainstonepress.com Free with exhibition entry, books available to purchase in the RWA shop. No booking required. Read our review on page 50.

// Wednesday 14th 6.30 – 8.30pm More with Less – from the Pauper’s Cookbook to the Naked Chef Cook the Books: Hands-on sessions inspired by the culture-changing Penguin cookery books, and led

by Shannon Smith, an experienced food and cooking tutor. Menus are based on local, seasonal produce, and use simple methods and everyday equipment. Austerity is back on the menu. Thanks to Penguin’s culture-changing authors, eaters today need not return to the mock ingredients of the 1940s. Enjoy a demonstration menu of seasonal and sensual food inspired by Penguin authors – from Jocasta Innes to Jamie Oliver. £15 (including daytime entry to exhibition). Booking essential call 0117 973 5129.

// Thursday 15th March and 19th April 4 – 5pm

// Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th 10am – 4pm Drawing From Life – Storyboard Drawing From the Model, Sara Easby A two-day course working with an actor as the model to create storyboard sequences. The course will begin with fast exercises designed to capture the essence of the poses. You will then go on to look at techniques of analytical drawing, exaggeration and the use of imagination to make studies.

With guidance from the tutor you will devise short storytelling sequences with the actor in order to create lively examples of storyboards from life. The workshop is useful for students and professionals in animation, illustration, graphics, and model making; and also for anyone interested in the theatrical approach with previous experience of drawing the figure. £125 book online at www.drawingschool.org.uk or call 0117 906 7601.

Penguin Archive Project Talk and Gallery Tour // S unday 11th 10am – 4pm Wood Engraving Master Class Anne Desmet RA RWA RE

Max McClure

Suitable for beginners and / or those with some experience, the course will cover a range of approaches to fine line and tonal engraving on end-grain boxwood, as well as inking, printing and hand burnishing (on Japanese and European papers). Participants should bring sketches and / or photographs that might be used as the basis for creating smallscale black and white engraved images. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £70 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// T uesdays 13th, 20th, 27th 1 – 1.45pm Lunchtime Curators Tour: Penguin Parade Max McClure

Dr Katherine Hann, Penguin Project Curator, will talk about the creation of the exhibition and the choice of material on display. Free tour (normal exhibition entry prices apply).

Join staff from the University of Bristol to find out more about the Penguin Project and Books Archive Project. Free talk and tour (normal exhibition entry prices apply).

// Friday 16th 10am – 4pm Exploring Woodcut, Martine Baldwin MA A chance to take inspiration from some of the beautiful works in this exhibition and explore the medium of woodcut. Different methods of transferring a drawing or photograph to the woodblock will be looked at and there will be the opportunity to produce a small print in one colour, or a combination of colours using more than one block. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £70 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

6pm University of Bristol Public Lecture in conjunction with The New Poetry and Penguin Modern Poets 50 Years conference, Al Alvarez in conversation Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building, Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ 6pm start, from 7.30pm there will be a set of poetry readings entitled Penguin Modern Poets from Edward Lucie Smith, John Fuller and Tom Raworth. Free but advance booking required, please visit poetry-lecture.eventbrite.co.uk For more information contact Nicola Fry 0117 928 8515 nicola.fry@bristol.ac.uk

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

// Sunday 18th 2 – 5pm Mother’s Day Vintage Afternoon Tea Treat your mum to a glorious afternoon of delicious food, beautiful art and evocative music at the RWA Mother’s Day Vintage Afternoon Tea. Relax in the company of other pampered mums and vintage fans, while Shellac Sound serenade you with their collection of 78s played on original 1930s gramophones. Champagne served in classic Babycham glasses will be available to buy by the glass from our pop-up café / bar. Come dressed in your finest regalia or rummage through our dressing up box before having your picture taken in our photo booth by professional photographer, Alice Hendy (prints and discs available to buy on the day). Have your hair dressed in a classic style or try out a vintage make-up look with Fiona Maynard of Beehive Brides (book your slot in advance and pay on the day). Ticket includes Papadeli tea / coffee, sandwiches, scones and cakes served on authentic Bristol Vintage crockery, entry to all four exhibitions, and a chance to browse our collection of original Penguin paperbacks and vintage fashion magazines. £15 booking required, call 0117 973 5129. Supported by Bristol Vintage and Shellac Sound.

2012

Diary // March to May

Events, Lectures Workshops, Tours

Good Things – Jane Grigson and the British Food Renaissance Cook the Books: Hands-on sessions inspired by the culture-changing Penguin cookery books, led by Shannon Smith, an experienced food and cooking tutor. Menus are based on local, seasonal produce, and use simple methods and everyday equipment. Watch and taste a menu drawing on the life work of this warm and witty champion of regional food and local produce. Grigson’s fresh approach brings out the pleasure of cooking and eating the ingredients of early spring, and celebrates the best of British. £15 (including daytime entry to exhibition). Booking essential call 0117 973 5129.

// T hursday 22nd 1pm Colour: An Inspirational Talk by Farrow and Ball See colour in a whole new light with this illustrated and informal talk, explaining how through the simple use of colour you can achieve striking results. £10 to book call 0117 973 5129.

// S aturday 24th 11am and 2pm Lively performance readings from Dr Anna Farthing

Art History Day School: The Romantic Spirit in British Art: Jan D Cox MA

Join Dr Anna Farthing of Harvest Heritage Arts and Media for some lively performance readings. In the morning, share your favourite Puffin children’s stories with the next generation. In the afternoon, hear extracts from Penguin thrillers, drama, poetry, cookery... and maybe even a snippet of ‘that book’. Free activity (normal exhibition entry prices apply).

In the aftermath of the First World War, Paul Nash, and younger contemporaries, Eric Ravilious, Graham Sutherland and John Piper, captured a vision of Britain that evoked the ‘Albion’ of Blake and Palmer, in tandem with the pastoral music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the mid 20th Century, a further generation heeded this call; Neo-Romantic artists such as John Minton and Keith Vaughan, film-makers Powell and Pressburger, writers and illustrators. We examine the art of ‘this other Eden’ and explore the vibrant and spiritual engagement between artist, man and landscape. £30 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// S aturday 24th 10am – 4pm Get the Point of Dry Point: Ros Ford MA Get inspired by the Peter Reddick exhibition before sketching outdoors directly onto the contemporary medium of plastic drypoint – a fantastic, easy and immediate way to make beautiful prints. No experience of printmaking needed. Using environmentally friendly inks.

Bring a sketchbook. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £70 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// S unday 25th 10am – 4pm // S aturday 24th 11am – 12.30pm Eric Ravilious: A Life in Pictures James Russell is the Bristol-based author of the bestselling series of books Ravilious in Pictures, which celebrate the life and work of English watercolourist Eric Ravilious (1903 – 42). Each of the four books explores different aspects of the artist’s career, from his long and fruitful association with the Sussex Downs to his experience as an official War Artist during WWII. The fourth and final volume, published to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the artist’s death, follows him on his pre-war travels around Britain and northern France.

In this illustrated talk James will focus on a number of the artist’s most compelling watercolours, using letters, diaries, archive photographs and other sources to explore the history of the places Ravilious loved. £10 / £8 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// Saturday 31st 10am – 4pm

Contemporary Cut: Kerry Day MA A chance to look at Lino print in a different way. Explore shape, tone and texture to produce a series of prints or one-off creations. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £70 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// T hursday 29th March, 5th and 12th April 1 – 2pm Behind the Scenes: The project that lies behind the exhibition.

Lunchtime talk and tour with George Donaldson / Hannah Lowery, University of Bristol.

Free tour / talk (normal exhibition entry prices apply).

April // Wednesday 4th 11am, 12pm and 1pm Fresh and Fun Cook the Books: Hands-on sessions inspired by the culture-changing Penguin cookery books, led by Shannon Smith, an experienced food and cooking tutor. Menus are based on local, seasonal produce, and use simple methods and everyday equipment. Hands-on food and cooking taster session for children 6 – 14 years and their parents or carers. Make a simple tasty lunch with fresh ingredients.

Cost £5 per child, adults free (but normal exhibition entry prices apply). Booking advised call 0117 973 5129.

// Wednesday 11th 10am – 2pm Sunday 15th 2 – 4pm Sunday 22nd 2 – 4pm Children’s ‘make and take’ Activities Drop-in session, bring the family to get stuck in to make a range of Penguin and Puffin inspired items. Free but booking advisable (normal exhibition entry prices apply).

Max McClure

// W ednesday 21st 6.30 – 8.30pm

// Wednesday 11th 10am – 1pm Family Screenprint Workshop (5+ years) Simon Tozer MA Try your hand at screen printing, a simple technique that uses stencils to produce vibrantly coloured and crisp images. We will experiment with the process using a combination of hand cut paper stencils, and a monoprint technique using watersoluble pencils. Participants will each make several pictures, which can at the end of the session be put together to make a simple book. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £10 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// Thursday 12th 10am – 12.30pm Easy Linocut Children’s Workshop (12 – 16 years) Christine Howes MA Christine will take you around the Peter Reddick and Ravilious exhibitions for inspiration. You can choose a work to respond to or work with your own image to create colourful prints using softcut lino. Print your own cards and wrapping paper using exciting materials to create colourful images. Great fun. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £10 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

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RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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// Friday 13th 10am – 12pm

// Monday 16th – Saturday 21st

Print with Anything Children’s Workshop (8 – 11 years) Maria Bowers MA

Jo Bannon Artist Residency Live art and performance artist Jo Bannon brings Exposure to the RWA – an investigation into how we look, and are looked at. It comes out of a tentative enquiry the artist is making into how she looks and appears in the world, informed by her relationship to albinism, a condition that affects the artist’s pigmentation and sight, affecting both how she physically sees and experiences the world and how she is seen and perceived within it.

Basic print course. Fun printing with no press and using objects from around the house and waterbased, washable ink to make prints on paper. For example: potatoes, sponges, spoons, pastry cutters, Lego, corks, bottle tops, fabric strips (lace etc), leaves. Use your imagination. Spike Print Studio and RWA collaboration. £10 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

Jo Bannon

// S aturday 14th 10am – 12pm Paper Dolls Family Workshop (4 – 8 years) Alice Hendy

Spike Print Studio

Design a doll-size wardrobe with this creative collage and colouring workshop for children aged 4 – 8 years. We provide everything needed to create a miniature world of fashion in 2 dimensions – you just bring your junior Armani. Join artist and teacher Alice Hendy to make a stylish paper doll. Using a range of materials we’ll be creating a simple, articulated doll along with a variety of outfits. Alice will show us how to use a template and some creative flair to make our paper come to life. Come prepared to colour, stick, design and use collage to create your own pintsized character. Free with exhibition entry (£5 adults and free to under 16s). Note: all children must be accompanied by an adult as per admission regulations. Space is limited, booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

10am – 4pm

Alice Hendy

Art History Day School Graham Sutherland: An English Cosmopolitan Rachel Flynn MA “I would like to feel free, and as much at home in France or Italy as I am in England. To a very large extent I do; yet this mysterious geographical tie […] still binds me.” Graham Sutherland was a British painter, printmaker and designer who brought together the richness of the English Romantic tradition with the innovations of modern European art. This class will explore Sutherland’s practice and identity via his response to Wales and France, arguably the two places he found most inspiring, with a view to thinking about him as an ‘English Cosmopolitan’. £30 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

// Thursday 19th April and 15th March 4 – 5pm Penguin Archive Project Talk and Gallery Tour Join staff from the University of Bristol to find out more about the Penguin Project and Books Archive Project. Free talk and tour (normal exhibition entry prices apply).

// Saturday 21st 10am – 4pm Art History Day School Jan Van Eyck and the Art of the Northern Renaissance Dr Gill White The 15th Century saw a tremendous flowering of painting and the arts in northern Europe, especially in the Low Countries. This day school looks at the work of one of the most innovative and accomplished of these artists, Jan van Eyck, who was notable both for the realism of his painting and the careful use of visual symbolism. The day includes two of his greatest masterpieces, The Arnolfini Double Portrait and The Ghent Altarpiece. Booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// Sunday 22nd 10am – 4pm How to Photograph Artwork, 1 Day Workshop, Stephen Morris For websites, submissions, shows, brochures and as a record of your work, a photograph is an artist’s calling card to the world – don’t let it fail you. This 1 day course involves a small group of students in hands-on activity, photographing 2 and 3 dimensional artworks: oils, watercolours, sketches, ceramics, stitch, jewellery, glass and more.

We’ll use materials and techniques available to everyone and we’ll demystify digital processing: pixels, colour reproduction and emailing.

Students will need a digital camera and ideally a laptop. Further information and pre-course enquiries: Stephen Morris smc@freeuk.com £50 / £40 concessions. Booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// Saturday 28th 10am – 4pm Art History Day School: Infant Sorrow, Infant Joy: 300 Years of Painted Children Dr. Justine Hopkins Children have always been a natural subject for artists, portrayed on commission for their parents or to charm the more general customer. This course explores how British artists from the 18th Century to our own have been inspired to create works which not only celebrate children and childhood, but also shed light on the changing attitudes which have shaped both. £30 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// Sunday 29th 11am – 4pm Life Drawing Untutored: led by model Deb Pearson Life drawing session run by experienced model Deb Pearson.

The bias will be to painters or drawers who need more time so there will be longer poses. These all day sessions are aimed at people who want to draw or paint from the model in a peaceful and professional environment. Suitable for all abilities, although beginners may be better suited to tutored classes. £28 book online at www.drawingschool.org.uk or call 0117 906 7601.

// Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon during the exhibition run (10th March – 22nd April) Pick up a Penguin Come along and swap your Penguin, Puffin or Pelican book and take another one away in our free book exchange. No booking necessary.

// S aturday 12th 10am – 4pm Art History Day School: From Poussin to Picasso – Neoclassical Painting in France Harriet Batten-Foster MA

Jason Lane

Neoclassical Painting in France will look at the role of the classical in French art. From the work of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine in the 17th Century through to the Neoclassical AvantGarde in the 1920s, this day school will examine how the images of the ancient world were utilised by painters in France to convey artistic, individual and political issues. We examine also how traditional classical associations with order, harmony and simplicity proved relevant for painting in eras as diverse as the French Revolution, the Second Empire and the First World War. £30 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// F riday 18th to Sunday 20th Graham Crowley

May // S aturday 5th Slots available between 10am and 4.30pm Artwork Documentation Day Have your artwork professionally photographed by Max McClure – see Max’s photographs above.

Book a 30 minute slot, to document 3 – 7 works, 2D or 3D. Receive a disc of professional images ready to use for portfolios, online submission for exhibitions, websites and marketing. £35.

Additional £5 for disc. Booking essential call 0117 973 5129.

11am – 12.30pm Banksy – The Urban Calligrapher: Paul Gough RWA In the summer of 2009, Bristol saw a remarkable phenomenon that made international news. An estimated 300,000 people queued for hours, often in pouring rain, for admission to the city’s Museum and Art Gallery having been attracted by the media hype surrounding an exhibition ambiguously entitled Banksy vs the Bristol Museum.

This illustrated talk will raise a number of questions: Is Banksy a subversive influence or merely a bit of fun? Why is Banksy so important to Bristol? Paul Gough has compiled a book about the Banksy show; it is the first nonpartisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact. £10 / £8 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

Affordable Art Fair Reader Offer We’re delighted to offer ART readers half price entry to the Affordable Art Fair Bristol which is at Brunel’s Old Station, Bristol Temple Meads from 18 – 20 May. 55 galleries are exhibiting contemporary art priced from £40 – £4,000. There will be free artist-led hands on workshops for budding artists of all ages, and complimentary activity packs for children. Simply show this page on the door to receive half price entry for up to two people.

Children under 16 go free.

// S aturday 19th 10am – 4pm

// Sunday 20th 10am – 4pm How to Photograph Artwork, 1 Day Workshop, Stephen Morris For websites, submissions, shows, brochures and as a record of your work, a photograph is an artist’s calling card to the world – don’t let it fail you. This 1 day course involves a small group of students in hands-on activity, photographing 2 and 3 dimensional artworks: oils, watercolours, sketches, ceramics, stitch, jewellery, glass and more.

We’ll use materials and techniques that are available to everyone at home or in the studio and we’ll demystify digital processing: pixels, colour reproduction and emailing. Students will need a digital camera and ideally a laptop. Further information and pre-course enquiries: Stephen Morris smc@freeuk.com £50 / £40 concessions. Booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

// Saturday 26th 11am – 12.30pm Uncovering Bristol’s Hidden Art Collection Alexandria Smith The Public Catalogue Foundation is an independent charity set up to record every oil, acrylic and tempera painting in Britain.

Bristol alone has over 2000 paintings dotted around the city, some on display, but the majority tucked away in offices, archives and stores, largely inaccessible to the public. Since 2010 Alex has worked as the co-ordinator for Bristol, locating, photographing and cataloguing the city’s hidden art collection. £10 / £8 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

Art History Day School: Russian and Soviet Art – From Icons to Social Realism Theodora Clarke MA This study day is perfect for anyone with an interest in Russian and Soviet art, as we present the major movements and artists of 20th century Russia and examine the various ‘isms’ of the avant-garde. Major artists include Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin, Lissitzky, Goncharova, Chagall, Rodchenko and Popova.

We discuss Tsarist patronage of Russian art and such movements as the World of Art, the Blue Rose Group and the Wanderers. We then consider geometric nonobjective painting, the creation of a new Soviet culture after the 1917 Russian Revolution and Socialist Realism after 1932. £30 booking required, call 0117 973 5129.

Booking To book events, lectures, workshops, Art History Day Schools, and family activities please call 0117 973 5129 unless otherwise stated.

Spike Print Studio and the RWA have collaborated to produce a programme of drawing and print workshops to accompany the exhibition Beautiful World celebrating the work of Peter Reddick, former RWA Academician and founder of Spike Print Studio. The programme is the start of a collaborative project between the two organisations and covers a selection of techniques and practices offering opportunities for all ages to make their mark. To book please call 0117 973 5129.

To book Bristol Drawing School workshops go online at www.drawingschool.org.uk or call 0117 906 7601.

Details of summer term courses starting in April will be available on the website to view shortly.

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// RWA News

Letter to the Editor Sir – Mike Jenner’s article: The Holburne Extension (ART: issue 6, 2011) applauds the Holburne Museum in Bath, yet is based on inaccurate information. Not only that, but his article is insulting to the former Bath City Council whose successor, Bath and North East Somerset Council, was extremely generous in its support of the Holburne redevelopment.

I also contest Jenner’s assertion that the Victoria Art Gallery is “second-rate”.

Visitor numbers have for many years far exceeded those at any other museum in Bath, except the Roman Baths. Pictures have been loaned to The National Gallery, Tate and currently to Yale University. The collection is supremely dominant in local topography and Bath social history, and continues to collect works by esteemed local artists. Through two World Wars, the Great Depression and all manner of other social and financial tumults, resolutely, Bath’s local authority has kept open and generously supported its gallery.

Dr. Michael Rowe Chairman of the Friends of the Victoria Art Gallery

Director’s Column I am delighted to announce that we have just appointed Vicky Chappell as Assistant Director. Previously she was Project Manager for Bristol’s M-Shed.

We are continuing to expand the role of volunteers within the RWA. By volunteering at the Academy you have the opportunity to become involved with the many operational aspects of a prestigious and established arts institution. This allows you to enhance and develop your own skills and knowledge and provides the opportunity to achieve something outside of your everyday sphere of experience.

Volunteering is particularly beneficial if you’re looking for a career in the art world, but also allows you unprecedented access to people and experiences, which may otherwise be out of reach. There are a range of different ways you can get involved and we welcome help and enthusiasm.

For full details please visit our website and look under the ‘Support us’ section.

Finally work is now underway in the lower ground floor, home of our collection. Over the past month we have been carefully moving over 1,300 works of art in order for us to start the building works. By summer 2012 the works will be complete which will provide better access to the lower ground floor, modern storage conditions for our collection and a new gallery / workshop space.

Trystan Hawkins

Recent exhibitions // we meet some visitors

The Abrahams work is not my genre.

Perhaps I’m missing the point and not getting the humour; I just think it’s pretentious.

I’ve been aware of David Shepherd’s work since I was a babe in arms and I think that in his time he was really an extraordinary artist.

Nikki Rainbow: Retired

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

I’m fascinated by the Red Riding Hood piece; it’s such an arresting work. The walls are magical and sinister and I think they work as a pair. Ivor’s work is full of character and, of course, I love the owls.

Everyone loves the owls.

Louisa Mayor: Curator

I enjoyed the Ivor Abrahams ceramics.

The David Shepherd paintings are incredibly detailed and, technically, I think he’s very talented.

I’m just not sure if it’s the art we want or need today.

Pedro Ramalho: Artist

The wildlife paintings are amazing.

I like seeing how different artists capture things and it’s interesting to see the contrast between the Shepherd elephant paintings and the Martyn Colbeck photographs in the café.

Martin Edwards: Photographer

I really like the owls and the scale of the work is impressive.

It’s good to see such a range of materials being used and I like seeing exhibitions where you can see contemporary and more traditional styles of work.

Iris Bolster: Nurse

I like the painting of the Lancaster Bomber because it’s my favourite aeroplane.

I do art at school and I really like it. I’d like to paint like this one day.

Johnny Saunders: Schoolboy

I love what Filthy Luker has done in the RWA back yard. At first I thought it was a big pearl necklace but when I looked more closely, there’s a plug on the end.

It gets you thinking very differently about your environment.

Angela Morris Semi retired Design lecturer

Brian May’s exhibition gave a fascinating glimpse into past technology.

3D TV is supposed to be the latest, greatest technology, but it was all happening 150 years ago in this apparently idyllic, bucolic setting.

Mike Graham Technology Manager

Art in the Theatre

// President’s notes A number of artists have asked how to become an Academician so I thought that I would outline the process. The deadline for this year has now passed, but we are reviewing the procedure and timescale for selecting and electing new Academicians. Meanwhile please visit my new blog: rwapresident.blogspot.com and tell me what you think.

Janette Kerr PRWA

Why become an Academician?

Becoming an Academician gives you the opportunity to become part of an Academy with a 160-year-old history and tradition, to show your work alongside some renowned and respected artists such as Gillian Ayres, Elizabeth Blackadder, Terry Setch, Albert Irvin and Richard Long. It offers professional recognition, opportunities for promotion of personal projects and exhibitions, and networking. The RWA is a charity that supports the arts, and has an educational remit. As such it offers a forum for artists to engage in critical debate and engagement with peers and public as well as proposing, planning and curating exhibitions. Your involvement can help shape the future of this prestigious Academy and art of the South West into the 21st Century.

Other benefits include: free submission of work to the Annual Autumn Exhibition, Opens and additional shows; reduced sales commission; personal gallery page on RWA website; regular mailings of Art Magazine, monthly RWA Bulletins; Private View invitations, Autumn Exhibition catalogue; entry to exhibitions and monthly talks; opportunity to sell artists’ books / prints / cards in the shop.

What is expected of an Academician?

It is expected that all Academicians will play an active role in and contribute to the activities of the Academy, and act as ambassadors of the RWA. They will exhibit in the Annual Autumn show and other members’ exhibitions, be willing to serve on committees (e.g. Academicians’ Council, Selection and Hanging committees and panels), from time to time be involved in

educational events, outreach work such as mentoring, give talks about their work and current practice, assist with exhibitions, attend Private Views and other social functions.

All newly elected Academicians must donate a work, known as a Diploma Work, to the Academy’s Collection, and pay an annual subscription of £200.

Who is eligible?

Preferably, Academicians are professionally active UK artists. I strongly encourage and invite applications from high calibre artists making challenging work, and who can demonstrate a high level of commitment to continued development of their own practice.

Artists should have representation in galleries with strong national reputations, or work with contemporary art organisations and engage in publicly-funded art projects. They may also have an international profile. There are no age limits, but applicants should have graduated at least 3 years prior to applying. Geographical location will be a consideration and a connection with the West Country should be demonstrated.

How do I apply?

Prospective candidates should send in the following: reproduced images showing range of work (preferably as digital images), exhibition catalogues, websites, CV, personal statement explaining why you are seeking to join, any past involvement with, and what you as a member will bring to, the RWA.

What happens next?

Eligible applications go forward to a Candidates Selection Committee. You will be asked to send in 6 works for consideration. A shortlist of potential Academicians is drawn up. Selected artists are asked to submit 4 works to the Autumn Exhibition when the membership votes (currently by postal ballot). The outcome of the vote and newly elected members are announced at the RWA Academicians’ Forum.

Dr. Tracy O’Shire’s favourite quotes: The Habit of Art: Alan Bennett “You are a rent boy. I am a poet. Over the wall lives the Dean of Christ Church. We all have our parts to play.”

Art: Yasmina Reza “If I am who I am because I am who I am and you are who you are because you are who you are then I am who I am and you are who you are, but if I am who I am because you are who you are and you are who you are because I am who I am then I am not who I am and you are not who you are.”

The Pitman Painters: Lee Hall “What do we paint? Moments.

Those tiny little moments of being alive.”

Red: John Logan “These pictures deserve compassion and they live or die in the eye of the sensitive viewer, they quicken only if the empathetic viewer will let them. That is what they cry out for.”

Restoration: Claudia Shear “My favourite thing was polishing silver – soft rags smoothing thick cream polish on to ornate teapots, smooth Revere bowls, delicate bud vases.

I think that’s why I became what I am, the careful rubbing until the magical transformation, the heavy liquid gleam.”

Picasso at the Lapin Agila: Steve Martin “In the twentieth century, no political movement will be as glorious as the movement of the line across the paper, the note across the staff, or the idea across the mind.”

In addition the Academicians’ Council will occasionally elect suitable artists who it feels strongly would be beneficial to the Academy.

Full details of the application process are available from Gemma Brace t: 0117 906 7601 e: gemma.brace@rwa.org.uk

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Academicians’ news 12

RWA magazine Spring 2012

Louise Balaam will be showing with other members of the New English Art Club at the Russell Gallery, Putney from 23 February – 17 March and alongside New England Art Club artists at Hilton Fine Art, Bath, 19 April – 19 May. White Space Gallery, Totnes, will be taking her new work to the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea, from 15 – 18 March, and to the Bristol Affordable Art Fair from 18 – 20 May. New work will also be shown at Josephine Harpur Gallery in Bury St Edmunds during this period and at the Bankside Gallery near Waterloo, from 24 – 29 April. See www. louisebalaam.co.uk PJ Crook MBE, DArthc will be exhibiting at Gloucester Art Gallery and Museum, 12 May – 30 June 2012.

Crook has invited the distinguished Estonian artist Jüri Arrak, who she showed with in Tallinn in 2006 (to celebrate the Queen’s first visit to the Baltic states) to also exhibit. Although both artists are quintessentially of their own nationalities they have in common the human figure and the spirituality that imbues them at the centre of all their work. See www.pjcrook.com Míla Fürstová, along with Emma Maloney and Eileen Cooper RA,

is exhibiting at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton as part of Woman in Art: a celebration.

Míla’s exhibition, a series of etchings that allow us to look into the eclectic mind of a woman, runs 18 May – 10 June. www.brookgallery. co.uk Denny Long will be taking part in the Amnesty International Exhibition at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol.

The exhibition includes 50 Bristol based artists showing work in all mediums to celebrate 50 years of Amnesty International.

Work will be for sale and on show throughout March. Main Bar and Green Room, Tobacco Factory, Bristol, 5 – 31 March 2012.

Peter RandallPage will be exhibiting, along with Helaine Blumenfeld and Kan Yasuda, on the lawns of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge from 5 March. For more information see www.fitzmuseum. cam.ac.uk Lucy Willis’s grandfather, cartoonist H.M. Bateman, painted on Gozo for the last five years of his life. Lucy travelled there last year to find his painting subjects and her next London exhibition, on that theme, coincides with the first ever show of her grandfather’s paintings of

the island; H.M. Bateman: The Malta Years is at Abbott and Holder www. abbottandholder. co.uk. Lucy’s exhibition Lucy Willis RWA: Paintings from Malta and Gozo runs from 10 May to 1 June at the Curwen Gallery, 34 Windmill St, London W1T 2JR www. curwengallery.com / www.lucywillis. com / www. hmbateman.com

Academician Obituary William Cooper MA RWA, 1926 – 2011 I first met Bill Cooper when I joined Council during Leonard Manasseh’s Presidency. Bill had just taken over the demanding responsibility of Academicians’ Chairman from Jean Rees and so, in a way, we were both starting new jobs. However, the Chairman’s role was crucial to the well-being of the Academy, pivotal in providing a link between Council and the wider membership.

Bill carried out his duties with a natural authority and self-confidence born, perhaps, of his background as a former schoolmaster at Sherborne School.

He was firm without being dismissive and had the ability to address difficult decisions with good humour.

And indeed, there were times when diplomacy and tact

were necessary when occasionally dealing with temperamental and forceful characters but Bill, in country tweeds and with solid countenance, handled these situations with ease.

Bill and I got on well from the start and he even had the prescience to tell me, not many months after we first met, that I would be President one day.

However, before such predictions became a reality the eventual question of Bill’s successor had to be considered, and he was most insistent that I should follow him and I did eventually succeed him.

In the years that followed Bill and I kept regularly in touch by telephone and thus continued our friendship even when his increasing lack of mobility kept him away from Bristol. Early in his life and not long after he went up to Cambridge to read architecture, Bill contracted poliomyelitis and although determined and single-minded, he was undoubtedly hindered by such a devastating setback and was forced to adjust and pace his life accordingly.

He returned to Cambridge where he took a degree in Geography in which the physical demands were fewer and which became the subject he taught at Sherborne, where he was also a housemaster.

To this end he was

lovingly supported by his wonderful wife, Dorothy.

Bill Cooper was a self-taught artist and none the worse for that. At one time his preference was for collage, and many examples of his mastery in this field can be seen in the publication by Sansom and Co in 2005 entitled Why Collage? Later, Bill’s small, colourful oil paintings of jaunty fishing boats sailing on choppy seas, or quiet harbours enlivened many a gallery at the RWA’s Autumn Exhibition, and the many greetings and postcards that were published of his work reached a new, wide and appreciative audience. His own taste in art could be seen on every wall of his elegant Sherborne home where his predilection for Mary Fedden and Bryan Pearce, and his fondness for Cornish primitive painters could be seen.

William Cooper, ‘Bill’ to his many friends, was a strong and honest man with a wide range of interests.

He was proud of his membership of the RWA and through his integrity and dedicated service on Council, enhanced the duties entrusted to him, and we who were fortunate to work alongside him and counted him our friend are the better for having known him.

Derek Balmer PPRWA

Join the Friends of the RWA The Friends provide valuable support to the Royal West of England Academy: 1

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Educational activities The Friends organise lectures, workshops, visits to galleries, painting holidays and visits abroad Welcoming visitors Meet and Greet and tours of the RWA building and exhibitions to enrich the visitor experience Helping the RWA Selection days and stewarding exhibitions Financial support The Friends make regular donations to the Academy and sponsor awards Membership benefits include Private View invitations and free entry to all RWA exhibitions ART magazine delivered quarterly to your door Social events and fund-raising activities Opportunities to volunteer Lectures: a varied and stimulating programme Cultural visits and painting trips Discounts on work submitted to Open Exhibitions

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10% discount at Papadeli Café – RWA Shop – Bristol Fine Art – The Bristol Drawing School Regular mailings to keep you informed of news and forthcoming events

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1 Peter Randall-Page 2 Míla Fürstová 3 Lucy Willis 4 PJ Crook 4

5 Louise Balaam

To join this vibrant group of art lovers, please complete the application form overleaf.

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Spring 2012

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Annual Membership Becoming a Friend of the RWA is a great way to enjoy what we have to offer. Friends’ financial support is vital to the development of this wonderful institution.

Friends enjoy: free entry to RWA exhibitions; private view invitations to all exhibitions; a lecture programme with professional speakers; cultural visits and painting trips; preferential rates with discounts on submissions of work to the Autumn Open Exhibition; 10% discount at Papadeli Café, RWA Shop, Bristol Fine Art, The Bristol Drawing School; ART magazine delivered each quarter.

Become a Patron of the RWA For individuals wanting to

make a greater contribution to the RWA, our Patrons scheme offers many exclusive opportunities. Join today and you can enjoy: • G uided tours of major RWA exhibitions • V isits to Academician studios

title (optional) first name

• U nlimited free entry to all RWA exhibitions

surname title (optional)

• I nvitations to all exhibition private views

first name surname

• Artist talks

address

• R educed rates on submission of work

postcode

telephone

e-mail

• A RT magazine sent to your home every quarter • A cknowledgment in the Annual Report and major exhibition catalogue

types of membership single annual £35

individual life £375

joint annual £50

joint life £500

student (NUS card max three years) £15 total

Patron schemes start from £250 and we are We can claim an extra 25p from the Inland Revenue for every £1.00 you give us – if you are a I am eligible as a UK taxpayer and consent to the RWA claiming Gift Aid on UK taxpayer. subscriptions or donations I make. You can cancel this declaration at any time by notifying the RWA in writing. You must pay an amount of income tax and/or capital gains tax equal to the amount recoverable on your total gift aid donations. Should your circumstances change and you no longer pay sufficient tax, you should cancel your declaration.

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In order to save us postage please consider paying by standing order.

Contact Membership Secretary at friends@rwa.org.uk Alternatively please make cheques payable to: RWA and return this section to: The Membership Secretary, Royal West of England Academy, Queens Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX t: 0117 973 5129 www.rwa.org.uk

Registered Charity No 1070163 Data protection: information given will be used solely for maintaining our membership list and administering activities for the RWA.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

happy to draw up a bespoke package for you: Bronze Patron: £250 (£350 joint annual) Silver Patron: £1000 (£1100 joint annual) Gold Patron: £6000 (inc joint membership) latinum Patron: If you would like to donate P £10,000 or more, please contact us to discuss the opportunities available to you.

all Angharad Redman on 0117 906 7608 C or angharad.redman@rwa.org.uk

// Friends News & Events

Chairman’s Column We appreciate the significant contribution made by individuals and teams of volunteers who assist with Friends and RWA activities. Members’ subscriptions continue to provide one of the main revenue sources for the RWA. The Committee have recognised the difficult funding environment faced by the RWA. We understand the importance of recruiting new members and donors, attracting additional income through maximisation of space, and other strategies including raising the profile of the Academy locally and nationally.

A number of Friends expressed their concerns about these changes and about those facilities that are no longer, available to members. In time, we trust that they will be reassured and our patience will be rewarded as we see positive advantages of the new works, the installation of a lift in the former Friends Room and the introduction of climate control in the galleries, which will enable us to view exhibitions featuring the work of outstanding artists.

Many of you are enjoying recently introduced services including the Papadeli café, classes in the Drawing School, the work of the current artist in residence, cards and books linked to exhibitions available in the foyer and longer opening hours.

Our overall aim is to play our part in enabling the Friends and the RWA to survive the artistic and economic challenges now and in the future.

Maureen Fraser

Friends New Initiative

Winner of the Friends You Choose Ballot Helen Simmonds was the viewers’ choice winner of the £200 prize and one year’s membership of the Friends.

Her exhibit, Late Summer Still Life, received the most votes from visitors to the Autumn Exhibition 2011.

She obtained a degree in sculpture at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. While there, one source of inspiration was an antiques market in Bath where she gathered objects that appear in her still life paintings (as above). She still wanders the markets and antique arcades indulging in her search for treasures which find their way into her work.

She is drawn to simplicity of line, colour and shape. Her current work is influenced by the Euston Road approach to painting: giving importance to all elements in each composition.

Helen is a regular contributor to art magazines and has had many single and group exhibitions in London, Wiltshire, Bristol and Bath.

Her next solo show is at the Alexander Gallery, Bristol, from 25 March 2012.

Art Aloud evening discussion groups have been introduced for members and visitors on topics relating to current exhibitions.

The first, Confessional Art, was based on the exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin. A lively discussion ensued with contributions from artists, historians and professionals concerned with mental health issues.

The second, Myths, Beliefs and Symbols, was linked to the Autumn Exhibition. Kevin O’Keefe, one of the exhibiting artists, attended and joined in Rupert Willoughby’s January the discussion. lecture illustrated Jane Austen’s In February Subversive Art focused on the work of life (1775 – 1817) comparing Ivor Abrahams, Patrick Boyle her final home and environment and Filthy Luker. Artist in at Chawton with her previous residence, Filthy Luker, came domicile at Steventon via an along to talk about his work. interlude in Bath, which she We welcome anyone who disliked, and Reading, where she is interested in joining our was educated. We were reminded lively debates and we provide of changing fashions in footwear references for reading before and the evolution of wigs and each session. trousers for men as well as the These events, co-ordinated proximity and dangerous state of the roads. A trip to Basingstoke by Angela Morris and Hilary Betts, are advertised by flyers would have been a great event sent out by mail to Friends. for the Austen’s who were not Posters are displayed at the ‘carriage people’. They were able RWA and in the Art School. to keep servants although this Visit the RWA website for more compromised their privacy. information.

Jane continued with her literary career whilst acting as Friends of RWA Committee 2011 – 2012 housekeeper to the family and Chairman caring for a difficult and ailing Maureen Fraser e: mcf11@tiscali.co.uk mother. She would have been Vice Chairman familiar with the landscape and Simon Holmes e: simonfhholmes@lineone.net recognised the local dialects Vice Chairman and Lectures described so vividly by Rupert.

Wendy Mogford His lively and informative e: wmogford@talktalk.net Friends Exhibitions accounts of English social history, Gillian Hudson based on his extensive research e: gs.hudson@toucansurf.com Cultural & Educational Visits and publications are always Tom Western-Butt entertaining. He continues to be e: thomasbutt@virginmedia.com one of our most popular speakers.

Volunteers Co-ordinator Mary Drown Recommended work by Rupert e: Mary.Drown@blueyonder.co.uk Willoughby includes Sherborne St Membership Secretary Jac Solomons John and the Vyne in the Time of t: 0117 973 5129 Jane Austen (2002) e: friends@rwa.org.uk June Bruton

The life of Jane Austen

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Spring 2012

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BRUCE McLEAN

Relaunch: after extensive renovation to building and gallery.

New artists, a Collectors Gallery and new works by our gallery artists.

24th February

Exhibition by ANDREW HOOD and PAUL LEWIN 7a Boyces Avenue, Clifton, Bristol BS8 4AA Tel 0117 973 2614 www.innocentfineart.co.uk Email enquiries@innocentfineart.co.uk

IMPRESSIONS 25th Feb - 5th Apr

WATERCOLOURS 14th Apr - 19th May

Private collection of French, Spanish and English (mostly 19th & 20th Century) Impressionist paintings. Featuring : C Nadal, A Jacob, Beronneau, Lebourg, Maufra, Montézin, Petitjean, Terruella Matilla, Vollon. Also featuring works by Peter Brown, Cuming, Dunstan and Ken Howard.

Two private collections of Victorian watercolours, a stunning group of Sir W.R. Flints, and some beautiful watercolours from several different countries. See website for more details.

100 page illustrated book published to coincide with exhibition.

Martin’s Gallery Imperial House Montpellier Parade Cheltenham Gloucestershire GL50 1UA t 01242 526044 ian@martinsgallery.co.uk www.martinsgallery.co.uk Open Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or any other time by arrangement.

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Eric Ravilious: Travelling Artist James Russell

Inspiration comes in many forms, and when Eric Ravilious (1903 – 42) set out to paint a watercolour he was looking, above all, for ‘a good place’. He used this simple phrase frequently to describe a location that appealed to him, a port perhaps, or a village, or an old industrial site. True, he often rearranged elements in a scene to create the right composition, and generally completed paintings in his studio with the help of pencilled notes, but his pictures invariably began as a sketch of a real place, at a particular time of day – often dawn, or soon after – and in whatever weather conditions the moment offered.

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“

He did not simply paint what he saw, but created something new out of the raw material he found in the world around him.

During the 1930s the quest for new subjects took Ravilious all around Britain (with one excursion to northern France), on a journey of discovery that continued when he was sent as a war artist to Norway.

Inspired by places as diverse as Dungeness in Kent and the Welsh valley of Capel-yffin, Ravilious also sought out unusual subjects, like the Greenwich Observatory, and strange perspectives, such as Beachy Head viewed from inside the lantern of the disused Belle Tout lighthouse.

He was by no means alone in his fascination for interesting places. In fact he had the good fortune, as a student at the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s, to be taught by one of the century’s outstanding landscape painters. Paul Nash had made his name with large canvases of Great War battlefields but was also a prolific and inventive

watercolourist. Ravilious and Edward Bawden visited his 1924 exhibition at London’s Leicester Galleries and were particularly impressed by the light, spacious watercolours of Romney Marsh and the Kent coast. Watercolour had fallen out of fashion in the mid 19th Century, but a renaissance was now under way, with John Sell Cotman and Francis Towne rediscovered as topographical painting became popular once again.

From the end of the Great War 100,000 new motorcars rolled onto British roads each year and, as bus services also rapidly expanded, the nation was seized by a fascination for countryside and coast, ancient sites and scenic views. In 1926 the journalist H.V. Morton explored the country in his bull-nosed Morris, venturing down lanes and byways to find relics of a colourful past. Published the following year, In Search of England

went through 24 editions in a decade, inspiring a boom in British travel writing and landscape painting.

Before long, painters as diverse as Ben Nicholson and David Jones, Christopher Wood and Frances Hodgkins were drawing inspiration from provincial landscapes and exhibiting successfully in London. The motorcar offered artists a hitherto unimaginable freedom of movement; they could travel anywhere, without the need to follow a timetable and, importantly, with their equipment stowed in the boot.

By the mid 1930s, with so many artists exploring the country, it was becoming increasingly difficult to find new and exciting places to paint. In a light-hearted but revealing letter of November 1937, which was evidently a reply to a request for suggestions, Christine Nash wrote to Ravilious suggesting Braunton Barrows in north

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Devon as a possibility.

“We believe,” she added, “this is practically Virgin Soil as regards the Painter’s Activities”.

Christine was the wife of John Nash, who was Paul’s brother and an artist of great skill and accomplishment.

He joined Ravilious on the staff of the RCA in 1934, and the pair became close friends, painting together in Essex and around Nash’s Buckinghamshire home.

It was Nash who suggested a trip to Bristol, a city he had first visited in 1920. John had himself been introduced to Bristol by Edward Wadsworth, an idiosyncratic painter of ports and marine subjects who had supervised the painting of warships in dazzle camouflage during World War I. In an interview with Bristol publisher John Sansom, John Nash later recalled his first trip to Bristol: “We used to stay in a little villa kept by two old

retired gentleman’s servants in the middle of Cornwallis Crescent,” he explained. “From there, I could hear the sirens of ships coming up the Gorge and rush down to the Hotwells just below.”

By good fortune the very same rooms were available in November 1938, and the two artists had only a short walk down the hill from Clifton to the docks. The port’s 18th Century glory may have faded but armies of dockers and stevedores still went about their business, unloading cargoes of American tobacco, Swedish timber and Spanish sherry into wagons that were shunted day and night around a maze of railway lines. What had really sold Ravilious on Bristol, however, was the promise of paddle steamers, and it was on these lovely old craft that he and Nash focused their attention.

This choice of subject matter suggests that Ravilious

was rather old-fashioned in outlook, and in a way this is true. During his boyhood his father had run an antiques shop in Eastbourne, and for the rest of his life Ravilious retained a love of old or unusual objects – from oil lamps to lighthouses.

Vehicles and machines were a particular passion, but it was only as a war artist that he focused on modern aeroplanes and ships; his true interest was in derelict buses, abandoned old cars, bakers’ carts and the like.

However, it would be a mistake to cast him as reactionary. As Alexandra Harris persuasively argues in her marvellous book Romantic Moderns, a fascination for the past was integral to a certain type of modern sensibility in 1930s Britain. Look at John Piper – a lover of old buildings who spent the decade seeking new forms of expression.

When he portrayed antique

Welsh churches in collage, gouache and ink wasn’t he simultaneously looking forwards and back, bringing together ancient subject and contemporary technique?

The same is true of Paul Nash, who was equally interested in Iron Age sites and the latest European art movements.

And it is also true, I think, of Ravilious.

But how, you might argue, can you describe a 20th Century artist who painted Downland cottages in watercolour as modern? Here was a painter whose greatest influences were not Matisse and Picasso but Towne and Cotman. An artist who refused to join the Surrealists or take part in the constant struggle between abstract and figurative art. A man who rarely wrote or talked about his work.

To Paul Nash, who would have adored the age of social media, this reticence was almost irresponsible, yet Ravilious

1 (page 17) Lifeboat 2 Interior at Furlongs 3 Dangerous Work 4 (page 20) Westbury Horse

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did not shirk responsibility.

He supported the Artists’ International Association in its humanitarian work during the Spanish Civil War, before going into combat as a war artist.

Not only was Ravilious fully engaged in the events of his time, he was also modern in artistic outlook.

While his subject matter was often old-fashioned or – in the case of the South Downs – timeless, his approach was not. He did not simply paint what he saw, but created something new out of the raw material he found in the world around him. This may not be immediately obvious; on first sight his paintings may seem rather small, humble, a little cool. A Ravilious does not jump off the wall to greet you. But pause a moment to reflect – resist the impulse to rush from one picture to the next – and you may find the way you see the world, in all its everyday glory, subtly and irrevocably changed.

James Russell’s book: Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist is reviewed on page 50 For more information about James Russell and his work, please visit: jamesrussellontheweb. blogspot.com

Going Modern / Being British is on at the RWA 10 March to 29 April.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

...you may find the way you see the world ...subtly and irrevocably changed.

‘Flying Dog’ – Limited Edition Print by Michael Ogden

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Tinto Gallery, Tinto House, 13 Broad St, Hay-on-Wye, HR3 5DB. www.tinto-house.co.uk 01497 821556 tintohouse@tiscali.co.uk rogluxton@btinternet.com RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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Battling with the Villains of Ure 47 x 75 inches

The

Untamed World of

Janette Kerr Simon Baker

PRWA

I am in Worcester to see On the Edge, an exhibition by Janette Kerr, President of the RWA, standing on a suspended walkway in the King’s School Terry Frost Gallery. Here Kerr immerses the visitor in the fierce, unforgiving world of the extreme waves of Shetland which she describes in over 30 compelling works. She depicts too the injured swollen hands of fishermen and the ghostly craft rowed by seven boatman in former times: We the Undersigned, bound together to search for their livelihoods in this dark sea.

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1 En plein air painting Culswick oil on board 11½ x 11½ inches 2 Brimfooster I oil on canvas 48 x 60 inches 3 (page 26) We the Undersigned II mixed media 12 x 12 inches

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

The same sea comes at me from two large oils: Brimfooster I and II, a Shetland term for the sound of sea breaking on sunken rock. THUMP! The water crashes down and light darts out from a grey sky, breaking like lightning into the rising spray. Days later Kerr tells me that

“…the sea can feel the approaching land mass. Everything is concertinaed.

The moment of maximum danger is when a rough sea comes ashore.”

Next I am in a boat clutching the gunnel as the horizon leans and dips in Kerr’s drawing, Southerly, veering southwesterly. My eye goes up to Battling with the Villains of Ure, charcoal, chalk, graphite and gesso dramatising wind and light on wild water.

Now I have driven into the Mendips to see Kerr in her West Horrington studio. She welcomes me to this scene of energy, commanding my attention with her searching pale blue eyes. We will talk later about looking and seeing. “Seeing isn’t just visual,” she says, “seeing is understanding with all your senses.”

First I want to know how and when it all began. Kerr’s commitments to drawing and art education immediately become clear. “Drawing is totally important,” she says, “all my work is based on drawing.

I do tend to go back to the drawings most of the time. Drawings are slow photographs capturing a series of moments.” That relationship with photography intrigues me. “Painting in the studio, you have to let the image emerge,” she explains. “Paintings are amalgams. Photographs are difficult to work from; too static.”

Kerr always knew that she had a facility for drawing. Her mother, who had faced disadvantage to become a teacher and head teacher, was determined that her daughter should follow her. Art school was forbidden and Kerr went to teacher training college. “I spent all my time in the art room. All my painting was from the figure.” On her graduation, the college acquired a large orange nude from its gifted student who wanted to practice, not teach.

Next, in Liverpool, she dedicated her time to learning: life drawing, printmaking and photography.

“I was determined that I must do art.”

She moved back to Bath where John Eaves RWA found a place for her to work at Sydney Place. She supported herself doing supply teaching, got a job as a community print worker and, later, teaching at Bath College. She determinedly persevered with life drawing in the face of these commitments. She decided that she couldn’t paint or handle colour. But this crisis was dispelled by her involvement in publishing a magazine which required screen-printing.

“I suddenly discovered that by pushing ink through a screen I was painting.”

Attending still-life classes run by David Cobb and John Eaves reinforced this.

She now quotes such influences as Turner, Constable, Ivon Hitchens and Auerbach, “a big influence – his drawings are fantastic...You start slowly to develop

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your own ideas,” she says, “but you take on board all these artists and slowly distil their influences to make them your own.”

Joan Eardley, the Scottish painter who died tragically young, is a hero, “…one of my real seminal influences, a painter of the sea.”

In 1986 Kerr moved to Coleford in the Mendips. With a friend, who had been at the Royal College of Art, she would

education. She enrolled as a part time post graduate student in fine art at UWE, initially combining teaching with academic study which led back into her artistic practice in her studio. Her subject was landscape. Kerr knew that she had to be represented by a gallery. She plucked up courage and approached Anthony Hepworth in Bath. He agreed to take her on and started selling her work.

would soon sell. “In the night you cannot judge distances and perspectives,” Kerr explains. She found herself exploring auditory and periphery vision. “This had a big impact and resulted in my making big abstract paintings recording the sensation and physical experience of being enveloped in the night.”

In 2003 she became an RWA Academician and in 2005 she was

When she completed the postgraduate diploma it was suggested at UWE that she should register as a PhD student and that her research subject should be the representation of night in painting.

The idea grew out of the night drawings and paintings which she had begun to make and which Anthony Hepworth

awarded her PhD. She was invited to curate the 2008 RWA blockbuster exhibition Night.

Walking continued to be integral to her practice and her perception: “You are moving through the landscape and the landscape is moving too.” But the sense of being overwhelmed by landscape still persisted. Kerr felt more confident at capturing the outdoors in her sketchbook.

The turning point came on the Craster

“I don’t allow the sunshine into my pictures.” visit and paint in a disused quarry. She found painting outside was hard: “there was so much information to assimilate.”

Determined to go on, she knew she had to leave teaching if she was to develop creatively and become a serious full time artist. It was a big jump; she needed a structure. It was to be further art

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coastal path in Northumbria. Here in a small bay she felt at once that she could paint what she was seeing almost level with the sea. Release came in two days of furious painting.

Scotland had always figured heavily in her travels and led to fascination with the remoteness of Shetland. “I thought that I must go there. The sea must be so wild, so exposed, and wind with the highest energy in the world.” Her exploration of extreme waves and weather began.

A diagram of an extreme sea seemed like an abstract drawing. Visits to Bergen in Norway and to Shetland followed.

In response to my question to what extent she allows the sun to shine in her pictures, as a confessed foul weather painter Kerr tells me that: “I don’t allow the sunshine into my pictures.” Her motifs are clouds travelling across the sky, light changing, the energy of the sea. “On a sunny day with no wind and waves, I cannot work. I am exploring untamedness, the wildness of nature.

I seek to show light when waves break and the sun casts dark shadows.”

I ask to what extent the spiritual enters her work. She replies: “I don’t really recognise terms such as spiritual.

It’s more an emotional response. My work is always of this world, certainly of my world. The conjunction of sea and land needs to feel right. It must hold elements of wildness and remoteness, edginess and energy. It takes time spent walking and looking and finding the right place in which to work. It’s about developing a relationship between the landscape and myself. For me it is the sublime which is important – the Romantic sublime. I am a Romantic painter.”

I ask her what directions she plans to take. She is compiling her own archive of photos, images and historical material, intent on bringing more of the history of Shetland fisherman and their present day experience into her work. She is planning on spending a month in Norway at the Oceanographic Institute. “It is a real challenge to incorporate their science into my work but I don’t want to keep doing the same thing. Painting is not just about what you see but also about what you think and know and about your experience. It’s about your whole history.

These impact on your perception – all those experiences come into the making of your work. There’s a lot to do and so little time in which to do it.”

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Passionate about Art

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RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Artistic Window Shopping Robert Parker

with Richard Hamilton RWA magazine

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Richard Hamilton (1922 – 2011) is widely regarded as the Founding Father of Pop Art. However, it is impossible to corral his vision entirely within the confines of Pop. Although he engaged with myriad subjects from landscape to space exploration, architecture to eroticism, his early response to the growth of American-style consumerism anticipated much that was to come both in art and in society in general.

Here, Robert Parker recalls the artist he knew:

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Not for nothing was Richard Hamilton nicknamed ‘Little Richard’ by students at the Newcastle Department of Fine Art. Clad in pale blue denim and looking like a lugubrious rock star, he worked in a studio of frenetic image making, the Dansette throbbing out Eddie Cochrane and Jerry Lee Lewis loud enough to split your eardrums. This was part of the deal if you worked in the print making room. Though infatuated with the work of Marcel Duchamp enough to make painstaking reconstructions of his work, Hamilton was most clearly focused on current imagery and what it revealed about contemporary life. He was also hooked into US culture: its movies, its Cadillacs, drive-ins, motels, fast food, Coke bottles, gadgetry, blondes, pulp fiction and comic books. This was a bold deviation when the US and everything it stood for was an anathema to a left-wing obsessed student body, where Black chic, Camus, Audrey Hepburn, Jacques Brel, La Nouvelle Vague and Ingmar Bergman’s gloom weren’t an option (though he did climb on board by getting behind CND).

His roving eye for imagery landed on what was around him, causing academic eyebrows to be raised when he stated that product design could create the great artefacts of the future and that supermarkets could be the new art galleries.

The influence of Duchamp seemed to energise a restless search for both found and fresh subject matter and for a way of harnessing technology to serve art.

Though technology has proved itself to be a tool rather than an alternative, it was a quest that he followed for most of his life and which led him to design computers to suit his needs. That he contributed to the Marilyn Monroe conspiracy that transformed her from film star into goddess was in the way of making a comment rather than an instance of worshipping at the shrine. Images on a contact sheet are deleted or disfigured in the quest to sustain an image of perfection; wistfulness found in shots taken at the end of the day and at the end of her career – Marilyn now commodity rather than person.

Unlike Warhol, addicted to the intoxication that celebrity worship brings,

Hamilton was more likely to go off at a tangent. This is highlighted by his inclusion of Patricia Knight in the collage Interior I. Knight was a small-time actress at Colombia pictures. The story goes the image was lying on the floor of the print making room, Hamilton retrieved it and everyone thought it was of Rita Hayworth. In fact it was Knight in the film Shockproof directed by Douglas Sirk, who provided highly Technicolored diversions for American women in the 50s.

Hamilton had given Knight a fame she never achieved in movies, becoming a pop immortal as Hamilton created his own icon. Interior II, again featuring Knight, shows the Kennedys in Dallas on the TV. The meaning if there is one, is that small personal dramas run concurrent with big ones.

Celebrated as the Founding Father of Pop Art, Richard Hamilton had a tendency to skim the surface of a big idea rather than dig into it. Does this mean that he was infected by the superficiality of his subject matter, or was it that he had the true measure of it? Though he was hugely influential it certainly lessened his visual impact. Nor was he a Hockney or Warhol, RWA magazine

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intent on making himself part of the package. Unlike them, Hamilton remained a comparatively private person.

The collage that brought him prominence is Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?

Though not a particularly pleasing image, displaying little of his refinement, it was spot on as a socio-artistic sibylline text that foretells the coming obsessions with body image, porn, furnishing, fast food, home technology, tape recorders, and television.

The work of Lichtenstein is anticipated, yet there are ambiguities that are uniquely Hamilton. Also featured are Al Jolson in the first talkie (technological progress), and the portrait of Victorian art critic, John Ruskin (fine art versus consumer culture).

Hamilton had pinpointed the pivotal moment when chaotic consumerism and the allurements of American affluence, with its aggressive and long term effects, were about to be swallowed whole. The word ‘Pop’ on the over-sized American Tootsie lollipop coined the word that came to mean both popular culture and the art that drew its imagery from celebrities and commodities, a disposable and soon forgotten part of the process. His most concise images show a love affair with American streamlining, as seen in the Cadillac car, and with American architecture. He played homage to Frank Lloyd Wright in a series of Guggenheim reliefs and prints showing the building’s basic symmetry with suggestions of 3D Op Art, a possibility which he chose not to pursue further.

As a constructor of cool, precise compositions he outclasses his contemporaries with an ability to denote the strength, tension and beauty of the

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undulating line, matching this to a meticulously honed spatial awareness which remains mysteriously underappreciated. To a large degree Hamilton was an artistic window shopper, and when compared to another idea hopper, Gerhard Richter, his work lacks soul.

Though he wasn’t overwhelmed by celebrity, his choice of subject matter when he chose to make commentary, shows a lack of discrimination. Was Mick Jagger a worthy subject for attention in ’68, when France was in turmoil and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia had just taken place? To be fair, he did pause to touch on the Kent State University shootings.

Conversely his image of Hugh Gaitskell demonises this relatively harmless and ultimately tragic man, only because he failed to denounce nuclear weapons; a hard take on someone who never attained power.

When Hamilton gets serious his conclusions are often naïve. On Palestine he is inevitably anti-Zionist, and on Northern Ireland his conclusions seem simplistic: Bobby Sands a Christ-like figure; an Orange marcher a bloated bigot. Hamilton never asked the deeper question about why these two tribal groups are so polarised. His take on Iraq, the image of Tony Blair showing him as a cowboy with six shooters, is a missed opportunity. Had there been a glass in one hand it would have been a more appropriate whack at abuse of power and champagne socialism. But he is certainly more political than his contemporaries; no big political concerns disturb the work of Hockney.

Hamilton’s reflections on the modern art scene are succinct. On Tracey Emin: “What would I have to talk to her about?’’

And, “Damien Hirst can’t draw though the

shark in formaldehyde is interesting.”

He saw the current generation of artists as both ignorant and with no understanding of art history. “What they are doing is a waste of time; much of it has been done before by Marcel Duchamp.” Despite this dislike of the current art scene and its shallowness, as a teacher he was a sympathetic and encouraging figure at a time when hauteur amongst lecturers was the norm. Nor was he above getting involved with student life.

He painted a Bacchus on a night club wall in Newcastle for the student owner.

I painted the grapes alongside him. Alas, the Bacchus was whitewashed out when the establishment closed soon after – it’s still under there somewhere.

Richard Hamilton was ambiguous in a way that sometimes suggested it was all a joke, that the art establishment took itself too seriously. His humour is revealed in changing a Ricard bottle to ‘Richard’; it was the sort of word play he loved. Paradoxically this frivolity could then be tossed aside as he devoted all his skill and energy to reproducing one of Duchamp’s lost works or embraced new technology with a young man’s fervour. Why did he do any of it?

Simply because he wanted to. Hamilton understood that change and expendability doesn’t underpin modern culture alone, it lies in the nature of the universe itself.

There is no terminus for the enquiring mind. The momentum he devoted himself to perhaps robbed him of some depth and quality. Minds calmer than his, once they’d caught up, could dig in and provide the depth and concentration he chose to sidestep. Amused by lack of self awareness in other artists, he was blind to it in himself. That one of his visual word games should produce from nowhere the word Pop, and that this should provide him with lasting immortality when he regarded the very term as synonymous with transience and worthlessness is ironic. Be sure he appreciated the joke.

1 (page 29) Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland 1964 2 (page 30) Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956 3 (page 30) The citizen 1982–3 4 (page 31) Interior I 1964 5 Swingeing London 67 (f) 1968–9

ARTISTS Fine Art Giclée prints from original artwork

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PHOTOGRAPHERS Fine Art Digital Graphics from film or digital file

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Pilgrims

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French Avenue

by Moish Sokal ©

by Una Woodruff ©

by Pauline Rook ©

by Steve Payter ©

Visit the on-line gallery at www.imageart.co.uk to browse and buy Fine Art prints from Wessex-based artists and photographers We exhibit work from artists and photographers using our Fine Art printing service, and the gallery is regularly updated with new and exciting contemporary and traditional images.

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RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Tapestries: Jan Yoors Jane Hruska

one of the many lives of

The work of internationally acclaimed tapestry maker, photographer, painter, printer and sculptor Jan Yoors (1922 – 1977) is enjoying a renaissance: Yoor’s extensive artwork will be exhibited in numerous galleries worldwide this year. As artist and weaver, Yoors revolutionised the medium of tapestry, and his work will be seen at the FeliXart Museum in Brussels, Gallery Fifty One in Antwerp, and in Crafting Modernism at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. Friend of the family, Jane Hruska, introduces this remarkable man: RWA magazine

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Jumping aboard a Romany Gypsy wagon in 1934 at the age of 12 marked the beginning of Jan Yoors’ second life – a life spent mostly away from his Antwerp family. This impulse eventually led him to a third life: thwarting Nazis for the O.S.S. and the British Secret Service during World War II. This enterprise landed him in a German prison from which he escaped. Later, in 1944, he found himself in Miranda del Ebro, a Spanish concentration camp from which he was released a few months later due to the intervention of Anthony Eden. Yoors eventually returned to Antwerp where he reconnected with Annebert, a childhood friend, whom he later married in London.

For a while, his fourth, more domestic life found him studying International Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, painting and drawing at home, and becoming a father. Annebert’s close friend, Marianne, was encouraged to join them as an au pair and artist’s model.

His fifth life then took him to New York City in 1950 where he was later joined

by Annebert and Marianne.

Yoors’ father, Eugene, was a famous Belgian artist who specialised in stained glass. Preferring not to confine his talent within that medium’s rigid frame, Jan honed his considerable drawing, painting, photography, and sculpting skills. However, it wasn’t long before he would change course again. Following their 1947 visit to the V&A’s Masterpieces of French Tapestry, which featured 200 tapestries from medieval times through to 1940, Jan, Annebert, and Marianne were inspired to take on the challenge of teaching themselves to weave the remarkable tapestries that make up his current collection of over 200.

The three built their own loom in a warehouse studio located at 96 Fifth Avenue (the same space where you would find William Zorach and Jack Levine) before moving down the block from Andy Warhol’s Factory on 47th and 1st Avenue. The 18 feet long by 18 feet high loom was built with large, heavy wooden beams with no treadles, and one set of string heddles that stretched the width of the loom. Yoors preferred to use linen for the warp because of its strength, and wool for the weft for the same reason.

Like medieval weavers, he only used Persian wool and linen. He persuaded two Armenian wool dyers to match the exact brilliance of colours found in his world travels and among the Romany Gypsies, and save these extraordinary dyes for him alone. His early palette boasted only 15 to 20 colours similar to the range found in medieval tapestries, although Yoors’ colours were more intense, but toward the end he used many more direct, less complex colour relationships.

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His cartoons were drawn in full scale and fully rendered, even those as large as 24 by 7.5 feet. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Yoors’ drawings and figurative tapestries imitated stained glass by separating the forms from both the background and other forms with a thick, black line, strengthening the bold power of those colours, and adding an unexpected three-dimensional depth. Former Textile Conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nobuko Kajitani once commented that: “[Jan] is the only person who can use two contrasting colours to make an area three-dimensional. That’s his magic.”

Yoors found enormous comfort working with others, noting that he credits this preference to memories of

“

He persuaded two Armenian wool dyers to match the exact brilliance of colours found in his world travels and among the Romany Gypsies, and save these extraordinary dyes for him alone.

living among the Gypsies contrasted with his experience as a secret agent and solitary confinement in prison. The tapestry trio often discussed the original designs, agreeing to adjust the size or alter the colour. Marianne reports that mistakes were made in some of the first, small practise attempts, but the viewer might find these originals difficult to fault. As the three wove life into their inspirations, they listened to and were inspired by classical, Gypsy, and Spanish music. Yoors noted: “We make a single tapestry from each design, as opposed to the current trend of producing editions or a series of reproductions. In an age marked by either anonymous mass production or, in its very opposite, what I consider, excessive egocentrism and interpersonal distrust, the team work demanded by the making of tapestries as we practice it, is one of the purest forms of romance and personal fulfilment.”

A compelling series of 60 to 70 gouache designs based on the Old Testament were Yoors’ first undertaking.

Of these, 20 to 25 were actually woven, the rest exhibited as paintings. After the war, when construction was rampant in the United States, Yoors found that in addition to private homes, the blank walls of new office buildings offered the perfect site for his large, bold tapestries. He once remarked: “I see contemporary tapestries as a way to give human, that is lyrical, scale to massive corporate architectural environments, perchance, and against all odds, to widen horizons and heighten the awareness of human vitality, dignity and the inherent joy of life.”

In the late 1950s, he turned to abstracts, as well as figurative work that included animals and nudes. Most of his abstracts reflect soft, easy lines and round curves, perhaps mirroring the curves and forms of his nudes, and the free flowing direction of Romany Gypsy life. Yoors’ personal history is partially reflected in one of his 1958 works, The Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an image of two skeletons riding two skeleton horses alongside two skeleton dogs with a Greek caption at the bottom stating: “The conquerors will be conquered.” This masterpiece now hangs in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Also in Washington, D.C., Jan was commissioned by architect Marcel Breuer to design a two-storey tapestry for his Hubert H. Humphrey building. Among their permanent collections, you will find Jan Yoors’ tapestries in the Chicago Art Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.

Following a tragic bout with diabetes and the amputation of both legs, Yoor’s Romany Gypsy ‘cousins’ learned of his hospital stay in New York. Many Gypsies came from all over the world including Spain, Canada, and the United States, eight to twelve of whom took Jan out of that gaje hospital, believing he would be much happier and safer at home. Yoors died shortly after in 1977, survived

by Marianne, Annebert, and his three children – Kore, Vanya and Lyuba.

Marianne and Annebert remained close friends for 79 years before Annebert died in 2010.

In 2011, Yoor’s tapestries were shown at the Regeneration Gallery and the Armory Show in New York City, the American International Fine Arts Fair in Palm Beach, the Pavillon des Arts & Design, the Galerie Chevalier in Paris, and the Design Miami in Basel. His vast collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, photography, and tapestries is managed by his wife, Marianne and their son, Kore.

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In an age marked by either anonymous mass production or, in its very opposite, what I consider, excessive egocentrism and interpersonal distrust, the team work, demanded by the making of tapestries as we practice it, is one of the purest forms of romance and personal fulfilment.

1 (page 34) Mexican Pink Tantra 7.5 x 10 feet 1976 2 Vermillion Tantra 8 x 10 feet 1976 3 In The Past 7 x 8 feet 1975

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Our annual exhibition of

Sculptors’ Prints and Drawings 5th March - 5th April 2012

Next exhibition: Best in Show: The Dog

Including work by Anthony Abrahams Kenneth Armitage Jon Buck Reg Butler Lynn Chadwick Ann Christopher Geoffrey Clarke Terence Coventry Lorraine Robbins

14th April - 12th May

Hounds Terence Coventry

GALLERY PANGOLIN

CHALFORD - GLOS - GL6 8NT 01453 889765 gallery@pangolin-editions.com www.gallery-pangolin.com

Untitled-3.indd 1

01/02/2012 11:26:14

104 Arts

Club

Submissions of original works of art are invited from members and non-members.

Contact the Submissions Secretary on 01275 392141 www.cliftonartsclub.co.uk

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Bristol School of Art

Open

Clifton

Exhibition

JANE CARTNEY

Queens Road Clifton Bristol

July 14-28

2012

ART�STUDIO & Gallery

By Appointment Tel: 01934 418198 www.janecartneyfineart.co.uk

You know when someone starts off: “It’s a long story …” don’t your heart just sink a little?

Don’t worry. This’ll grip you by the throat like an American pit bull. Ok… ok. It’ll grip you like … like …like a tight polo sweater. What the hell. It’s just a story, my story. Frank Levine – ex store clerk, ex bellhop and now soda jerk in some all night diner. Except of course, this ain’t just any old diner.

Rhapsody in Blue Greg Reitschlin

Every evening, six on the dot, I take over the shift. First off, I wipe the surfaces, wash a few glasses, check the ashtrays.

Look busy. I like polishing; just enough to keep a glint on the chrome, a refracted reflection on the window glass. We were the first to get hold of a coupla these new fangled fluorescent lights. Only came out a year or two back. That’s what Hopper liked, the light. He only ever wanted to paint light on walls; to him, we humans are an intrusion. When I’m all polished out, I hope that tonight, just for once, we’ll have a full house. But we never do.

It’s only ever the four of us.

I guess you’d call Nighthawks iconic.

“Epitomising the stuck state of American society after Pearl Harbor.” But to me, we’re more than a painting; we are the essential existentialists. Maybes we are iconic. Dunno. Who gives a damn, anyway?

We live in the Art Institute of Chicago, first floor, Room 29, on the right – two paintings up from a Bacon triptych. Can’t miss us. There’s always a crowd jostling to get right up close, studying Nighthawks intently to look for the door that ain’t there, trying to read something into the look on the broad’s face, and so forth.

Visitors always need a narrative and Nighthawks begs for a story. Who are we?

What are we doing there in that diner, so late at night?

There is a gloom about our painting.

You’re right if you think that. A rhapsody in blue. Hopper painted us right after

Pearl Harbor was attacked. You think I’m concentrating on washing glasses; what I’m really thinking about is the draft, fighting hand to hand with a bunch of Japs in some God-forsaken jungle.

The draft. It’ll catch up with me faster than a roadrunner. Jesus.

Of course I’m just doing this stuff for the dough. My day job? Well, my day job is student. Don’t look surprised. I may be twenty-six but everyone’s entitled to make start sometime, I’m just a little later than the rest of ’em. I’m studying Art and Literature at the City College along Convent Avenue. You’ve seen it. Big brick campus all the way up to Harlem from 131st.

But it ain’t me you’re interested in, it’s Nighthawks. I know you want answers: back-stories, a bit of dirt on the lone guy with the hat. Don’t he look shifty all on his own? Perhaps he’s a private dick tailing the couple opposite? And who are they?

Married? Having an affair? Fighting?

Hopper knew the answers long before he painted us. Oh yes. Both the guys are Hopper himself. And the broad? She’s Mrs Hopper. Featured in all his stuff.

Those stiff secretaries, weepy dames in Laundromats, sullen hat check girls – they’re all Hopper’s old lady. Every goddamn one of ’em. Mrs. Josephine Hopper.

The couple used to come in every second Tuesday. Sit in the same seats, order the same drinks. Ten minutes would pass before either one of them would speak. Usually it would be the dame. She had some kinda foreign accent and spoke

real quiet, so often I couldn’t figure out what she said. But it always seemed to be: “ What are we going to do?” or, “I’ll never forget tonight.” “We’ll always have the Bronx.” It was like something outta Casablanca. You seen that movie? Came out round the time we were painted.

The guy, he was more cryptic. Short little statements: “Really?” or, “I guess …” or, “Maybes”. Not a lot to go on there, I’m afraid, folks. Sorry to disappoint.

I mean I could make it up but that would be illegal or something, so I’m just telling it like it is.

The other guy, the one on his own, he was different. For a start he’d usually had one too many, if you know what I mean.

So he’d bounce in, all good humored like, order up a double-shot coffee and sit and chat to me for a while. Not about anything special.

Maybe a ball game – he was a Yankees fan – or Joe DiMaggio’s latest hitting streak. But I guess you could say he was lonely. You only see the guy from the back but he’s hunched over his drink which gives a sense of human hopelessness. Big cities are lonely and boring, with plenty of places to lose yourself in. Maybe he’d been caught up in the Great Depression. But he seemed a decent enough guy. Never caught his name.

I guess that’s pretty much it. That’s all you’ll get outta me. Now it’s over to you.

Check us out; take another look at us. Suggestion: next time you study Nighthawks stick some Gershwin on the phonograph. Rhapsody in Blue. That’ll tell you more about my world than ever I can.

RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

t: 0117 9090 225

01/02/2012 12:21:58

// Gallery review

Innocent Fine Art Innocent Fine Art was established in 1996 and is situated in the heart of Clifton Village, Bristol, close to Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The gallery specialises in contemporary artists living in the South West, internationally known artists and the School of Paris – Picasso, Miró, Dali, Chagall and Matisse.

Following an extensive refurbishment, Innocent Fine Art now has new lighting and extended gallery space which allows them to carry a permanent exhibition of work from leading British artists including Sir Terry Frost RA, Sandra Blow RA, Sir Peter Blake RA, John Hoyland RA, Bruce McLean, Barbara Rae RA, Dan Baldwin and Barry Reigate.

The main gallery shows work from contemporary artists including Abigail Reed, Andrew Hood, Anthony Garrett, Paul Lewin, Victoria Coombes, Rose Sanderson, Lynn Golden, Chris Hankey, Elaine Jones and Heidi Koenig.

Innocent Fine Art also offers a comprehensive Art Consultancy Service, framing and restoration.

Innocent Fine Art is open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 5.30pm Sunday 11.30am – 4.00pm 7a Boyce’s Avenue Clifton Village Bristol BS8 4AA t: 0117 973 2614 e: enquiries@innocentfineart.co.uk www.innocentfineart.co.uk

RWA magazine

Spring 2012

41

ARTISTS Fine Art Giclée prints from original artwork

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Shilpa Gupta Someone Else 3 March –22 April Also showing Sophy Rickett, To the River

WWW.ARNOLFINI.ORG.UK Part of A Parallel Universe, a year-long series exploring alternative realities and co-existing worlds.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, Photograph, 2006.

T: 0117 917 2300 / 01 E: BOXOFFICE@ARNOLFINI.ORG.UK 16 NARROW QUAY, BRISTOL BS1 4QA

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Zed.Freejack@flickr

in the

BT Telecommunications tower, Purdown, Bristol

Symbols Landscape

Why is a tower such a powerful image, and why have so many cultures felt the need to build them?

We all know what Freud thought about them. Other peoples and other times had other beliefs. The medieval Schoolmen thought that church towers and spires, and the soaring columns of the cathedrals, were emblematic of the prayers of the faithful rising to heaven.

18th Century landowners were more mundane, their compulsion to build towers was a desire to improve their parks by raising statues of their relations and political allies on high columns, or inscribing their names on obelisks. We no longer put the great on pedestals, but we still build towers. Ours cater for the needs of Everyman – industrial chimneys, radio masts, telecommunication towers, and so on. A few years ago a BBC poll revealed that the BT tower looming over the M32 at Purdown is one of the most popular structures in the west of England. It clearly appeals to something well below the level of our consciousness.

Whatever it is, it’s a very powerful force.

Mike Jenner

JHB@flickr

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2

The 66m Purdown tower was built in 1970 on an old anti-aircraft gun site as a relay station to be used mainly for radio broadcasting to the Bristol area. Later it was used for mobile phone networks.

As the M32 had been opened only four years earlier, the two have remained linked in the public mind ever since.

It is fascinating that it is this stark modern structure which people love and remember, not the more prominent Georgian mansion facing it a mile away.

The tower consists of a concrete column supporting eight circular galleries holding the transmitters, which, when the BBC poll was conducted, were a visual chaos of aerials, microwave dishes and antennae, all jostled up tightly together, and all facing in different directions without any apparent reason or logic.

But it was an ordered chaos, controlled by the discipline of the circular galleries.

A couple of years ago the dishes were removed, so now the concrete structure stands alone with only little wiry aerials visible. It has lost some of its fascination, but standing high on its hill, and sometimes catching the last rays of the setting sun when the rest of the landscape is in darkness, it still dominates the motorway and wide views over a large part of north Bristol. If one day evolving technology makes it redundant, as it probably will, its loss would be a minor tragedy. Eventually it will probably be Listed (as the BT Tower in London, which was built five years earlier, already has been).

At the opposite extreme are the monuments erected by Georgian landowners to glorify their families

or political heroes. In order to do that most effectively they had to be widely visible. Those we see most often today are, like the Purdown tower, landmarks on our motorway journeys. The Wellington Monument on the Blackdown Hills near Taunton and the Somerset Monument at Hawkesbury Upton in Gloucestershire are highly enjoyable examples. Both of them enliven great stretches of the M5 running a mile away below them. They are a reminder that one could write a diverting

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

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One tower on a hill is a magnificent thing; a group of them... can be dramatic, but... history of England by concentrating on the achievements of younger sons. The firstborn got the land and the grander titles, the Garters, the ribbons and the seats in the Lords, but their brothers had to carve their own careers if they wanted one. Most of them subsided into rectories and the hunting field, but a considerable number achieved distinction. Everybody has heard of Wellington, fourth son of the Earl of Mornington, but few know of General Lord Robert Somerset. He was the notably brave third son of the 5th Duke of Beaufort, leading victorious cavalry

3

charges in Spain and commanding the Household Cavalry at Waterloo. When he died in 1842 the 6th Duke built the Somerset Monument in his memory. It was designed

by Lewis Vulliamy (who also designed, amongst much else, nearby Westonbirt House). Architecturally the Monument is one of the best of its type and well worth a visit, high on its hillcrest overlooking the Severn plain. The Wellington obelisk is splendid when seen from below, but a bit of a disappointment if you climb up to it.

One tower on a hill is a magnificent thing; a group of them, such as the towers of San Gimignano or the clustered skyscrapers of Manhattan Island, can be dramatic, but a dribble of them along a hilltop is depressing. Dundry Hill forms the view looking south from Bristol.

Up to the 1960s it was crowned by a single feature, the tower of Dundry Church. For five centuries it was a view loved by Bristolians and celebrated by its writers. Over the last five decades it has been joined along the hilltop by a straggle of characterless radio and television masts. The church tower is diminished, the hilltop demeaned, and Bristol impoverished.

One of the dominating features of Victorian cities was the plethora of high factory chimneys billowing smoke: the visible symbols of the industry which made Britain the richest country on earth. Over the last century most of the industries have gone and their chimneys with them. In southern England, which was never as industrialised as the north, they are now scarce and fiercely protected. In the north, where they are more common, I met people who see

manufactured by Francis Yerbury at his mill in Bradford-on-Avon.)

The famous church towers of Somerset are unequalled anywhere. From that superabundance of riches it is hard to pick out one, but St. Mary’s in Taunton is an example, though not entirely typical because it is capped by a superb version of Gloucester cathedral’s lacy crown.

50m tall and big in proportion, large even

by Somerset standards, it was built in the second decade of the 16th Century.

It is breathtakingly beautiful, but given greater glory by its setting. In 1788 the local M.P., Sir Benjamin Hammet, built the street named after him which leads axially up to the church: a minor masterpiece of 18th Century town planning. That wasn’t the end of the story: a century later something wonderful happened. Having become increasingly shabby and decrepit, in 1862 the tower was demolished, and rebuilt with absolute fidelity so that we can enjoy it as it was in its golden youth.

Despite damagingly intrusive development, Hammet Street still delivers a powerful aesthetic punch. It is curious that in Bath, where one would expect to

find something similar, there is nothing comparable. Unlike Edinburgh, which is Bath’s only competitor as Britain’s most beautiful city, it contains no formally positioned high focal points in its streets.

There are of course several church towers, but none of them terminate a street in this formal way. Bath’s Great Pulteney Street is the most beautiful classical way in Britain.

It is notable that all the photographs of it, and no doubt all the visitors’ memories, are of the view looking eastwards, where the vista is closed by the Holburne Museum and the trees behind it. It is that which makes this fine street great. The view looking west is much less memorable because there is no terminal feature on which the eye could focus. At that end of the street it would not be desirable to shut out the view back into the city, but a tall slim feature, perhaps a great column of some sort, positioned centrally in Laura Place, would terminate the street without hiding the view beyond. As with the Eiffel Tower for Paris or the Opera House for Sydney, if it was designed with that irrational touch of genius which is beyond explanation, it could become the symbol of Bath.

Shaun D Taylor@flickr

them as reminders of their grandparents’ inhumane and degrading employment, and want them to go. Today, when we build high chimneys, they are of white concrete, the antithesis of blackened Victorian brick. An example, about which I feel some ambivalence, is Bristol Royal Infirmary’s boiler-house chimney. Widely visible on the top of Cotham Hill, it was built there to allow its (smokeless) fumes to blow away high over the city’s roofs.

It is a slightly menacing, nightmarish, feature in the townscape, surreally out of scale with the little houses below it, looking like a gigantic model of a filter-tip cigarette: an ironic symbol for a hospital.

In the west of England, when we think of towers, I suppose we think first of our unrivalled heritage of church towers. No part of the country is more richly endowed with them. The reason, as everybody knows, is that in the 15th and 16th Centuries, before the rise in the north of King Cotton, this region was hugely rich from the woollen cloth which it exported all over the known world. (As late as the 1730s the ladies of the Sultan’s Seraglio in Istanbul insisted on fabrics

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1 Wellington Obelisk, Somerset

3 The Somerset Monument, Hawkesbury Upton, Gloucestershire

2 Boiler House chimney, Bristol Royal Infirmary

4 St Mary Magdalene, Taunton RWA magazine

Spring 2012

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“

The photograph has a special power to manipulate, even to deceive, because of our almost instinctive belief in its ‘truthfulness’.

Au centre de la Terre 1

// Close-up

Nadège Mériau A recent graduate from the RCA, photographer Nadège Mériau is becoming an increasingly noteworthy figure on the fine art scene with her images of ‘fictional spaces’.

Hugh Mooney met her recently in her London studio.

Photography as a mirror of ‘reality’ is often central to its understanding as a medium. As evident from previous articles in Close-up, however, the photograph is rarely a reliable and impartial record of the world. In fact, it is doubtful whether such a thing is possible since a large part of what we experience is a function of the photographer’s personal agenda and our own unique responses as viewers. These may be complex, with much contemporary art photography and film, for example, operating on our perceptions in ways which access parts of our minds normally associated with dreams or fantasy.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Although this is often true of the visual arts in general, the photograph has a special power to manipulate, even to deceive, because of our almost instinctive belief in its ‘truthfulness’. This is the art of photographer Nadège Mériau, whose work presents us with images of fictional worlds and with settings which plunge us into strange and unexpected spaces.

Drawn to the arts through her family background, Mériau, a Frenchwoman, developed a fascination with photography at an early age and with its ability to create fiction and to stage narratives.

After reading English Literature at the University of Nantes she came to the UK in the 1990s to take a BA in photography at the Bournemouth Art Institute, her ambition a career in this country as an artist photographer. Exhibiting widely in the UK and abroad, she has subsequently attracted critical attention and gained numerous nominations and awards for her work. Her practice was further developed by her recently taking an MA in Photography at the RCA. “An enriching and nurturing experience,” she told me.

She lives and works in London.

Mériau’s art is dense and provocative.

Often, it entangles us in ambiguity and enigma and challenges us to explain, and in some cases to become part of, the situations and places she creates.

In her ensemble of images, Mis en Scène, Mériau’s carefully staged settings distil hints of narrative into single images, often placing human and animal ‘actors’ in predicaments in which things are somehow not quite right. There is an oddness about the stories they suggest and even everyday objects in her images seem removed from the ordinary, endowing the whole with the unsettling qualities of scenes from a David Lynch film.

Cat-mania is a good example. The strange self-absorption of the girl and the cats and the unnatural stillness of the image impart a dream-like quality to the entire setting.

Unsure of what terms on which to take it, we may ponder whether it is a scene from a children’s story or a nightmare.

Images such as these evoke the narrative qualities of film and play with our imaginations. They create an

Cat-mania

atmosphere of expectation, demanding we wait for something to happen. It never does. Although we might make attempts at explanation, their ambiguity, while fascinating, remains unresolved.

In more recent work, Mériau takes us into other kinds of fictional worlds by “creating large images whose impact is immediate and immersive (with) sculptural forms that are three dimensional landscapes one can plunge into”. She first achieved this in Au centre de la Terre 1, a set of images created for her final degree show at the RCA. At first sight, it seems that we are in a hot, subterranean place deep in the bowels of the Earth. Are we witness to one of John Martin’s apocalyptic visions or have we descended into Snaefell with Jules Verne? It is only later that we realise that we are looking at the inside of a loaf of bread, our first perceptions having transformed illuminated dough into tongues of incandescent rock, and tiny interstices into sculptured volumes which we might enter. Superficially, the impact of such images may be amusement at our self-deception. More significantly, however,

we ‘buy in’ to them much as we would a convincing theatre set. Particularly when seen full size, such images envelop and enchant us and induce a sense of physical presence in what are wholly imagined worlds.

The making of images which engender such feelings has become central to Mériau’s practice. At its heart is her wish to engage our innate drive to seek places of habitation within landscape, reflecting, perhaps, a primordial instinct for security and belonging. The landscapes in her case are the fictional territories which she cleverly constructs and photographs in her studio and for which she uses edible matter, with its almost inexhaustible range of plasticity, colour and texture, as architectural material. She particularly relishes its associations with biological processes and some of her images suggest the warm, internal spaces of living organisms, their sense of dark enclosure tapping, perhaps, an innate memory of the womb. In one sense, Mériau’s images have no clear subject in themselves but show, with the persuasive clarity that only

the photograph can deliver, environments which we might enter and possibly inhabit. As we continue our gaze, her images inexorably draw us in and we, as their inhabitants, become their subjects.

Nadège Mériau is a talented and creative artist-photographer with distinctive ambitions and a visual language to match. Her future practice, she informed me, will be one of continuing investigation of the visionary potential of constructed landscapes, and of new architectural materials and photographic techniques. She also intends to explore the creation of fictional territories which are increasingly abstract and ever more removed from appearances reminiscent of the physical world, taking us, perhaps, into places entirely of the mind. She would also like to broaden her practice to include video and possibly the use of a variety of platforms for expressing her work, including the Internet, public events and books. I will follow her career with interest.

Summer issue Close-up: Laura Letinsky RWA magazine

Spring 2012

47

Inside the artist’s studio Stanley Donwood is the artist who for 15 years has created for Radiohead every one of their iconic album sleeves, helping capture the alienation and intensity of one of the most celebrated bands of all time.

Max Kolombos and photographer Alice Hendy visited Donwood in his Bath studio for this exclusive interview:

Max Kolombos 48

RWA magazine Spring 2012

Stanley Donwood My studio, at the moment, is a freezing cold box. At this time of year it’s not really very much fun. Nor is it in the summer, as there’s no insulation. It was once part of a dance hall and tea rooms in the 1930s; before that, it was part of a tannery and stables.

I’ve been here longer than any other studio. All my screen printing gear is in a factory in Westbury and I’ve moved a lot of my work which you see here from my other studio, an unconverted barn in rural Oxfordshire. That studio has a really good wood burning stove, so I tend to paint towards the stove area. There are lots of spiders and rodents.

My favourite story about that studio is that I hadn’t been there for a while and when I did return there was a suspiciously large pile of earth in the corner – it was a huge rats’ nest. The rats had made themselves pretty comfortable in there and had eaten in to my tubes of acrylic paint. They’d obviously tried all the colours but the one they really liked was Prussian blue; they’d eaten it all and left little piles of Prussian blue rat shit all over the place. I’ve since blocked up the entry holes so only smaller rodents – voles and shrews – can get in. And the spiders are

massive. Like a lot of people I’m a little bit scared of spiders.

The last time I cleared up I used a long stick and twirled it around the dusty webs and one jumped off onto a piece of paper and I could hear its little feet. Ugh! That’s enough of wildlife.

At the moment I’m working on a piece based on a five and a half metre long linocut illustrating Los Angeles being destroyed by acts of nature: fire and flood and meteor storm. It’s cut up into eighteen blocks that all fit together so I print an edition of each block. I plan to expand the height of the artwork from its original 300mm to two and a half metres high and transfer it with computer routing to birch ply. At the moment I’m not sure how it will look. Birch is quite a beautiful wood so we may just oil or varnish it. So the finished piece will be eleven metres long. Oh my God – I’ve just realised I’ll have to reverse the writing.

LA has some really interesting architecture, like the Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry.

And Downtown is great. Up until the post war period it produced all these BeauxArts, faintly Gothic, faintly Classical, faintly Palladian

styles. Then suddenly in burst this Modernism and you get all these blocks. More recently architecture from the 1980s, which is not to my taste but does epitomise the large amounts of money being spent or gambled on it; and so this new centre rises up. They did have a building code, allowing only a certain number of storeys because of the San Andreas Fault but now I think that if you build an expensive enough building, it doesn’t really matter. And in the early evening, when the fog and smog take over, these newer, taller buildings float above the city like islands.

In my linocut, I have the waves coming in from the West, and fire blown by winds from the East, with Los Angeles caught in the middle. I’ve done all these extravagantly abstracted curlicues of flame, basing the imagery on illustrations from the 1493 Liber Chronicarum, or the Nuremburg Chronicle.

This depicted, among many other things, a woodcut of all the towns in the known world, each of which ended up looking a bit like Nuremburg. They could only rely on eye-witness reports and obviously didn’t have a budget to go and check,

or do on the spot sketches.

They had this post-Medieval way of representing things; a building on fire and falling would be a building, tilted a bit with some flames coming out of it. Which is great because when everything’s on fire it all looks the same. And my Pacific waves look like early Bridget Riley Op Art paintings. They have an Op Art effect on the eye because of the parallel lines which swoop and move in and out of each other.

RWA magazine

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TOP

art b ooks

10

David Hockney was recently reported to be taking a sideswipe at Damien Hirst by suggesting that using assistants to complete his works was “…a little insulting to craftsmen”. So – can an artist claim that an object

is a work of art if it has been made for him or her by someone else? If so, who is the ‘author’ of such a work. And what is the difference between a work of art and a work of craft?

The Art of Not Making is the first book to tackle these questions head on, exploring the concepts of authorship, artistic originality, skill, craftsmanship and the creative act. When I first received it I did think – This will be a bore; all artefacts and no proper art. How wrong can you get. This book is a gem.

It examines the extraordinary levels of skill and ingenuity it takes to produce works of art that are beautifully designed objects. With the growing level of creative and technical ambition, it is little wonder that so many artists are turning to others to help

them realise their art. Petry’s wonderful book illustrates hundreds of artists – Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Mark Wallinger, Tony Cragg, Grayson Perry for example – and most of the images are gloriously revealing.

But it is the way in which the arguments for creative alliance are presented that really grab the attention.

Petry gives insights into the history of these partnerships, citing works from Duchamp and before, giving a context to the growing global collaborations of artists and artisans. At last, art is on the move. A highly recommended, thoroughly enjoyable, informative read.

Richard Storey

// BOOK

// BOOK

// BOOK

Ravilious in Pictures: A Travelling Artist James Russell

Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs Alison Castle (Ed)

Until Further Notice, I Am Alive Tom Lubbock

Foyles at Cabot Circus

1

A Yorkshire Sketchbook David Hockney

da Vinci 2 Leonardo Frank Zollner da Vinci: 3 Leonardo Painter at the Court of Milan (National Gallery London)

Luke Syson, Larry Keith Antonio Mazzotta Minna Moore Ede

One Hundred 4 Hiroshige: Famous Views of Edo

// BOOK The Art of Not Making: The New Artist / Artisan Relationship Michael Petry 208pp: Thames & Hudson, 2012 ISBN 978 0 500 290 262

Melanie Trede Lorenz Bichler

5 Japan: Season by Season Sandrine Bailly

Blackadder 6 Elizabeth Phil Long Perry 7 Grayson Jacky Klein

8 Courtney Watson

M.C. Escher Pop-Ups

48pp: The Mainstone Press, 2012 ISBN 978 0 955 277 788

135pp: Taschen, 2011 ISBN 978 3 836 527 286

138pp: Granta Books, 2012 ISBN 978 1 847 085 313

McCarthy

9

Gustav Klimt: Art Nouveau Visionary Eva di Stefano

and the Ballet: 10 Degas Picturing Movement Richard Kendall Jill DeVonyar

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

Beautiful reproductions of Ravilious’s watercolour landscapes of the South Downs and beyond, insightful, informative and readable essays all help make a vivid portrait of this much loved artist.

The twenty-two watercolours in this volume provide a uniquely compelling and idiosyncratic portrait of Britain in the years before World War II. The book will be launched at the RWA on March 10 and James Russell will be giving an illustrated talk on Ravilious and his work, also at the RWA. (See Diary pages for full details.) RS

This coffee-table behemoth is one for the aficionado.

As leading photographer of the 60s music scene, McCartney captured on film many of rock’s most important musicians. This loving retrospective, edited in close collaboration with the McCartney family and Annie Liebowitz, covers a life in photographs. Her work, especially within the family group, shows a warmth, love and empathy which shines through every image. This will become a collectors’ item; snap one up while you can afford it. RS

Tom Lubbock, chief art critic of The Independent who died last year, wrote reviews that were often more entertaining than the shows themselves.

Iconoclastic, thoughtful and provocative, he made the most difficult art accessible to the layman. Diagnosed with a brain tumour, he wrote this remarkable record of his final months, examining the question: how to live with Death in sight. Highly recommended. RS

// Reviews surely unrepeatable – National Gallery exhibition did much to redress the balance. This is that exhibition’s catalogue, though the term seems hardly adequate for such a sumptuous, weighty volume. Leonardo’s eighteen years in Milan were the making of him. It was during this period, starting in the early 1480s, when he produced paintings that set a new standard for his contemporaries. As a salaried court artist to Duke Ludovico Sforza he found himself free to explore new techniques and subject matter. This book sets such works as The Last Supper, the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks and The Lady with an Ermine in this context.

For all those who attended the exhibition, and even more so for those who failed to get tickets, it is an essential purchase. MW

This very attractively presented book offers a fascinating insight into a world lost for 150 years. Brian May has had a life-long passion for stereoscopy and with conservator and photo historian Elena Vidal he has produced a meticulously researched and beautifully

illustrated tour of T.R. Williams’ series of pioneering stereo photographs entitled Scenes in our Village. The village in question is Hinton Waldrist, Oxfordshire. Included are modern stereo photographs of the village which can be viewed alongside Williams’ originals.

Hinton Waldrist in 1850 had been virtually untouched by the Industrial Revolution; though contemporary with London’s Great Exhibition, it was ‘far from the sound of the train’s whistle’. Williams was also commissioned to photograph Princess Victoria’s wedding and Queen Victoria was so keen for him to take a few extra images that the Royal Procession to the chapel was delayed – an unprecedented occurrence.

May and Vidal plan to follow this project with a second book on the whole spectrum of Williams’ life. Mike Whitton

// BOOK

// BOOK

// BOOK

// BOOK

Elizabeth Blackadder Phil Long

Degas and the Nude Shackelford and Rey

Michaël Borremans: Eating the Beard Wurttembergischer Kunstverein (Ed)

A Yorkshire Sketchbook David Hockney

// BOOK A Village Lost and Found Brian May and Elena Vidal 239pp: 250+ images including over 80 Victorian stereo photographs.

Frances Lincoln Limited, 2009 ISBN 978 0 711 230 392

112pp: Yale University Press, 2011 ISBN: 978 0 300 179 002

Elizabeth Blackadder is probably best known for her watercolour flower paintings but her work in other media is equally beautiful. She seems to address Modernism’s preoccupation with flatness but is influenced more

by Chinese painting or Calligraphy. Forms float across the surface with a sense of light and air and the reproductions in this book capture the paintings’ refined delicacy. Darren Tanner

264pp: Thames & Hudson, 2011 ISBN: 978 0 500 093 627

A highlight of this book is the wonderful interview with Lucian Freud which is followed by some fascinating essays. In his later work, Degas used slashes of pure colour to redefine artistic conventions for depicting a body, and his daring use of composition explores the relationship between the viewer and the nude, virtually inventing a new grammar of pictorial arrangement. DT

// BOOK Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan Luke Syson, Larry Keith Antonio Mazzotta, Minna Moore Ede 320pp: 190 colour images Yale University Press, 2011 ISBN 978 1 857 094 916

Revered as the archetypal Renaissance man, Leonardo’s reputation as an inventor and scientist has perhaps come close to overshadowing his importance as a painter. The recent hugely popular – and

240pp: Hatje Cantz, 2011 ISBN: 978 3 775 728 355

This publisher has introduced me to the work of several interesting contemporary artists from mainland Europe.

Michaël Borremans is a Belgian artist with a masterful painterly technique which he deploys in paintings which on first glance seem like traditional depictions; but on closer reading present something intriguingly darker and unsettling, like a world view twisted by some kind of psychological disturbance. DT

92pp: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011 ISBN: 978 1 907 533 235

Hockney’s studies have a wonderful freshness.

He captures the specifics of place without resorting to topographical realism.

His is a relational realism – his feeling of connection to the Yorkshire landscape as much a reality to be represented alongside the specific visual impressions.

This takes his work beyond the realm of the mere mimetic into something far more profound. DT

RWA magazine

Spring 2012

51

Artful Cuisine

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An exclusive Directory of places to enjoy brunch, lunch or dinner – all within a 15 minute walk of the RWA. 8 5

Fifty

50 Princess Victoria Street Clifton, Bristol BS8 4BZ t: 0117 973 3711 www.restaurantfifty.co.uk ‘Break away from the chain gang.’ Fifty is an independent restaurant serving locally sourced foods cooked to order.

We pride ourselves on our excellent service and range of fresh eating options.

Brunch: 11.00am – 3.00pm Set lunch: 12 – 3.00pm only £12.50 for two courses.

Dinner: Early bird menu £12.50 for two courses 6.00 – 7.30pm A la Carte menu: 6.00pm – 10.00pm. Closed Sunday evenings and all day Monday.

3 5 7 4 1

6 9

2

10 2

ourmet G Burger Kitchen

74 Park Street, Bristol BS1 5JX t: 0117 316 9162

British

Fish

Gastro Pub

Italian

Japanese

Mediterranean

Korean

To advertise please call Angharad Redman on 0117 906 7608 or email angharad.redman@rwa.org.uk

52

RWA magazine Spring 2012

Gourmet Burger Kitchen is all about the burger. We use the freshest ingredients and have created classic and innovative taste combinations to make the ‘best burgers in town’. Everything we serve is fresh and made to order, so if you want to make the burger your own just choose your favourites from the menu and we’ll do the rest. Our burgers are at the heart of everything we do, made and served by our fun loving staff.

3

The Lido

5

Papadeli

7

he T Richmond

Oakfield Place, Clifton Bristol BS8 2BJ t: 0117 933 9530 www.lidobristol.com Every day 12 – 3pm and 6.30 – 10pm (closed Sunday evenings)

84 Alma Road, Clifton Bristol BS8 2DJ and Café @ RWA info@papadeli.co.uk t: 0117 973 6569 9.30am – 5pm Mon to Sat and 11am – 5pm on Sundays

33 Gordon Road, Clifton Bristol BS8 1AW t: 0117 923 7542 e: richmondpubandkitchen @gmail.com

The Lido is a veritable oasis tucked within a courtyard of Georgian terraces in the backstreets of Clifton. The Lido restaurant is located on the first floor with sliding glass doors affording fantastic views of the 24m outdoor heated pool and period changing cubicles. The food style is Mediterranean with the focus being on the provenance of the ingredients.

The most delicious cakes in Bristol, Hobbs House bread for our sandwiches, organic and fairtrade coffee. Meet at Café @ RWA for mouthwatering food in gorgeous surroundings.

“Great atmosphere, nice staff and wi-fi. It really is good!”

Also try our café, delicatessen and treat shop on Alma Road; seats 40. Take home delicious meals from our traiteur counter.

The Richmond offers a wide range of classic British cuisine with a distinctly modern twist.

Food and drinks served in the warm and comfortable surroundings of a traditional British pub, with two open fires and a relaxed, friendly ambience. Offering free room hire for small or large bookings, the Richmond has the facilities to completely cater for all your needs.

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Noa

2 Waterloo Street, Clifton BS8 4BT t: 0117 973 2881 e: bookings@noajapanese.co.uk www.noajapanese.co.uk Lunch Mon to Sat 12 – 3pm Dinner Mon to Sun 6 – 11pm Contemporary and traditional washoku cuisine where fresh ingredients are seared to seal natural flavours. Starters include a traditional miso made from the finest nutritious soya beans to a wakame (seaweed) salad. Light and crispy tempura, tonkatsu, harumaki; sashimi, cut and served in different ways; all garnished with our range of vegetables and seaweed. Our skilled chef can create mouth-watering sushi delicacies complemented by a choice of side dishes.

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rimrose P Café

1 – 2 Boyces Ave, Clifton Bristol Bs8 4AA t: 0117 946 6577 www.primrosecafe.co.uk Daily from 9am – 5pm (9.30am – 3pm Sun) Tues to Sat evenings from 7pm The ideal place to watch the world go by. Al fresco eating, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner all using sustainable, locally-sourced ingredients. Twenty years under the same ownership and a Bristol institution.

8

ockFish R Grill

128 Whiteladies Rd, Clifton Bristol BS8 2RS t: 0117 973 7384 e: enquiries@rockfishgrill.co.uk www.therockfishgrill.com Open Tues to Sat Enjoy the freshest and best seafood simply prepared and served in stylish surroundings.

A speciality is cooking fish over a charcoal fire which gives a unique and delicious Mediterranean flavour. Our Seafood Market sells the freshest seafood in town. RockFish work tirelessly with fishermen and merchants to ensure only the best in responsibly caught fish is on the menu. An amazing seafood experience.

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Rosemarino

1 York Place, Clifton BS8 1AH t:0117 973 6677 www.rosemarino.co.uk Open seven days a week from 9am Dinner Wed to Sat from 6pm Rosemarino is a place to enjoy fresh, unfussy, sensibly priced food in a light and relaxed atmosphere.

Alongside our extensive all-day breakfast menu, the lunch and dinner menus are based on satisfying regional Italian specialities using the freshest ingredients around.

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Surakhan

52 Park Row, Clifton Bristol BS1 5LH t: 0117 929 0806 e: touedu@yahoo.co.uk Korean food is very different to Japanese, Chinese and Thai cuisine; made with a variety of fresh vegetables and natural seasonings, a minimum amount of oil and no dairy products it is a very low fat / low calorie option bursting with delicious flavours.

In Korea the king’s table is known as the ‘Sura’ and ‘Khan’ is the Mongolian word for King; and so ‘Surakhan’ represents ‘a king’s meal’.

At Surakhan we endeavour to provide every guest with a meal fit for a king.

// Listings The Affordable Art Fair, Bristol Clock Tower Yard Temple Meads BS1 6QH www.affordableartfair.co.uk t: 020 8246 4848 e: enquiries@ affordableartfair.com Fri 18 May 11am – 8pm Sat 19 May 11am – 6pm Sun 20 May 11am – 5pm Contemporary art from £40 – £4,000. 55 galleries exhibiting original paintings, prints, sculpture and photography. Free workshops and kids’ activity packs .

Arnolfini 16 Narrow Quay Bristol BS1 4QA t: 0117 917 2300/1 e: boxoffice@arnolfini.co.uk Tues – Sun 11am – 6pm 3 March – 22 April Shilpa Gupta: Someone Else Also – Sophy Rickett: To the River Part of A Parallel Universe, a year-long series exploring alternative realities and co-existing worlds.

The Art Room 8a The Strand Topsham EX3 OJB e: theartroom@eclipse.co.uk theartroomtopsham.co.uk Sat, Sun and Weds 11am – 5pm 18 March – 9 April Robin Rae: Recent Paintings Figurative and abstract

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

artist and teacher New paintings 21st April – 20th May Francis Hewlett RWA: Sculpture, drawing and paintings Painter, ceramic sculptor, teacher.

Bath Contemporary 35 Gay Street, Bath BA1 2NT t: 01225 461 230 e: gallery@ bathcontemporary.com Mon – Fri 10am – 5.30pm Sat 10am – 5pm and by appointment 10 – 31 March Mike Bernard Recent paintings of Cornwall, Italy and local scenes, in collage with mixed media and pen, ink and wash.

22 May Bob Dearnley: Avenue of Champions 18 life-size sculptures of celebrated Olympians and Paralympians, to coincide with the Olympic Torch coming to Bath, going on to Salisbury Cathedral during the Games.

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery Queen’s Road Bristol BS8 1RL t: 0117 922 3571 e: General.museum@ bristol.gov.uk Mon – Fri 10am – 5pm

Sat, Sun and Bank Holiday Mondays 10am – 6pm Free admission 31 March – 10 June Ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci: a Diamond Jubilee celebration From the Royal Collection the exhibition forms part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Selected from the unparalleled holdings of the Royal Library to reflect the whole range of Leonardo’s activities.

R E Bucheli Fine Art Albion House 12A Broad Street Bristol BS1 2HL t: 0117 929 7747 e: gallery@rebucheli.co.uk www.rebucheli.co.uk Tues – Fri 10am –6pm Sat 11am – 4pm Other times by appointment 1 – 27 March Picasso Prints 30 March – 5 May Mosaics and Outdoor Art Open Exhibition submissions 8 – 10 March Artists Collective also mosaic courses.

Centrespace Gallery 6 Leonard Lane Bristol BS1 1EA Mon – Sat 11am – 5pm and Sun 11am – 4pm 12 – 23 May Hybrid 2012

Clevedon Arts Club Toll House Gallery Clevedon Pier April Work-in-Glass www.work-in-glass.co.uk e: info@work-in-glass.co.uk www.clevedonpier.com/ gallery

Clifton Arts Club Bristol School of Art Queen’s Road, Bristol 14 – 28 July Open Exhibition of original works of art.

Handing-in day: 8 July 10am – 3pm Non-members may enter up to 4 works; all media accepted. Prizes include £100 Sidoli Prize.

For details and entry form send SAE to Submissions Secretary, Clifton Arts Club, 12 Ridgeway Road, Long Ashton, Bristol, BS41 9EU or from: www.cliftonartsclub.co.uk t: 01275 392141

The Crypt Gallery & Café / Bar St George’s Bristol Great George Street Bristol BS1 5RR t: 0845 4024001 e: administration@ stgeorgesbristol.co.uk Open 90 minutes before all concerts, see www. stgeorgesbristol.co.uk 15 May – 2 September Bristol Through the Lens Sheona Beaumont’s series of Bristol landscapes are digital collages.

Diana Porter Contemporary Jewellery 33 Park Street Bristol BS1 5NH t: 0117 909 0225 e: web@dianaporter.co.uk Mon – Sat 10.30am – 6pm Sun – 11.30am – 4.30pm 3 Feb – 27 April.

The Wedding Show 2012: Natural Beauty Intricate and Textural Jewellery inspired by the natural world – Lindsay Taylor, Kate Holdsworth, Judith Brown, Liz Willis and Jade Dutton.

Frome Art Society Rook Lane Arts Rook Lane Chapel, Bath Street, Frome www.rooklanearts.org.uk Tues – Sat 10am – 4pm Sat 24 March – Thurs 5 April. Closing 1pm on last day. Entry free of charge.

Spring Exhibition Inspirational exhibition presented by the Frome Art Society. An eclectic mix of drawings, prints, pastels, watercolour, acrylic and oil paintings demonstrating the variety of art work by Society members.

Geneva Stop 68 Colston Street Bristol BS1 5AZ t: 0117 929 4782

m: 07740 796814 e: info@genevastop.co.uk w: www.genevastop.co.uk Thurs – Sat, 2 – 6pm 23 March – 14 April Dermot O’Brien: Recent Work. Drawing, sculpture and moving image.

The Glass Room Colston Hall Colston Street Bristol BS1 5AR t: 0117 922 3686 e: glassroomart@gmail.com Mon – Fri 8am – 11pm, Sat 9am – 10pm 4 May – 2 June The Colour of Landscape Sheona Beaumont and Walter Dirks photographic works explore the rich, colourful and diverse landscapes of our planet.

Gloucester City Museum & Art Gallery Brunswick Road Gloucester GL1 1HP t: 01452 396 131 e: museums@gloucester. gov.uk Tues – Sat 10am – 5pm 12 May – 30 June PJ Crook & Jüri Arrak Reunites PJ Crook RWA with Estonian painter Jüri Arrak 5 years after first showing together in Tallinn for the Queen’s visit.

The Holburne Museum Great Pulteney Street Bath BA2 4DB t: 01225 388 569 e: Holburne@bath.ac.uk Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm Sunday 11am – 5pm www.holburne.org 11 February – 7 May Art of Arrangement: Photography and the Still Life Tradition Admission £6.50 / concs Still life’s rich visual tradition has always captured the imagination of photographers.

Photographs by Ansel Adams, Harold Edgerton, Roger Fenton, Fox Talbot, Madame Yevonde, Chris Killip and Don McCullin.

Image Art Fine Art Printers Jubilee House Queen St. Gillingham Dorset SP8 4DZ t: 01747 82 66 33 e: info@imageart.co.uk w: www.imageart.co.uk Sat – Sun 10am – 5pm 17 & 18 March Benefits of Digital Fine Art printing for Photographers and Artists Informal ‘Open Studio’ w/end. Discover how digital Fine Art printing can benefit you; see examples of alternative ways to present your work.

Innocent Fine Art 7a Boyce’s Ave Clifton BS8 4AA t: 0117 973 2614 e: enquiries@ innocentfineart.co.uk www.innocentfineart.co.uk Tues – Sat 10am – 5.30pm Sun 11.30am – 4pm Relaunch of the Gallery after extensive refurbishment.

24 Feb –18 March Andrew Hood & Paul Lewin New artists

include Dan Baldwin, Abigail Reed, Anthony Garratt, Rose Sanderson, Victoria Coombes.

Collectors Gallery includes work from School Of Paris and several RAs including Sir Peter Blake, Sir Terry Frost, Sandra Blow, Barbara Rae.

Jane Cartney Art Studio & Gallery rear 80 Regent St. Weston-super-Mare BS23 1SR t: 01934 418198 m: 07779 178736 e: artist@ janecartneyfineart.co.uk Viewings welcome by appointment Jane Cartney: Paintings Recent framed work from the studio of ScottishWest Country colouristexpressionist. Inspired by architecture, cows, sheep.

Limited edition prints.

Portrait Commissions.

Jessica’s Jewellery: Enamelling Workshops 13 –19, The Motorcycle Showroom, Stokes Croft, Bristol BS1 3PY t: 07531 739 338 e: jess.brown56@gmail.com Tuesdays 6 – 9pm March – July Enamelling Workshop Discover the ancient craft of fusing glass, metal & fire. Extensive jewellery & tiling projects held throughout the term.

All levels welcome

Martins Gallery Imperial House, Montpellier Parade Cheltenham Glos GL50 1UA t: 01242 526 044 e: ian@martinsgallery.co.uk Wed – Sat 11am – 6pm, and by arrangement 25 Feb – 5 Apr Impressions Private collection of French and Spanish Impressionist paintings See website for details.

Watercolours A core of two private collections of Victorian watercolours; a stunning group of Sir W.R. Flints.

Gallery Pangolin 9 Chalford Ind. Estate Chalford Glos. t: 01453 889 765 e: gallery@pangolineditions.com Mon – Fri 10am – 6pm Sat 10am – 1pm 5 March – 5 April Show 1: Sculptors’ Prints and Drawings Annual exhibition of sculptors’ prints and drawings, includes work by gallery artists Anthony Abrahams, Jon Buck RWA, Lynn Chadwick, Ann Christopher RWA, Terence Coventry, Sue Freeborough and Lorraine Robbins.

16 April – 12 May Show 2: Best in Show: The Dog Sculpture, prints and drawings celebrating ‘man’s best friend’ in all his guises.

21 May – 29 June Show 3: Sue Freeborough: Solo Show Sculpture, prints and drawings centred around the human body.

The Somerset Guild of Craftsmen @ The Courthouse Gallery Market Place, West Street Somerton TA11 7LZ t: 01458 274 653 www.somersetguild.co.uk Open six days a week Free Admission 10 March – 2 April Flow Interpretations of water within a diverse range of craft disciplines include shimmering textile threads, reflective steel surfaces and forms, fluid silks and glassworks.

5 May – 9 June The Life of Trees Designs in wood including natural sculptures and our annual display of furniture from Bridgwater College.

We are proud to nurture and champion local craftsmanship for the future.

Spike Island 133 Cumberland Road Bristol BS1 6UX t: 0117 929 2266 e: admin@spikeisland.org.uk Tues – Sun 11am – 5pm 5 April – 17 June The Artists’ Postcard Show Featuring works by Ruth Claxton, Tacita Dean, Richard Hamilton and Sara MacKillop.

Dewar & Gicquel Clay sculpture and film works from Paris-based duo.

5 – 7 May, Bank Hol w/end Spike Island Open Take a peek into the studios of the artists, designers and creative practitioners based here or produce something yourself in a hands-on activity.

Artful quotations

Eight women artists/ art psychotherapists.

Includes a range of two and three-dimensional media. Hybrid reflects the duality inherent in their work.

“To the historian accustomed to studying the growth of scientific and philosophical knowledge, the history of art presents a painful and disquieting spectacle, for it seems normally to proceed not forwards but backwards.”

R.G. Collingwood “…But beauty would keep breaking in, and the most resolute disregard for conventions of art often resulted in unconscious harmonies.”

Herbert Read on Surrealism

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”

Vincent van Gogh St Stephen’s Church / Café 21 St Stephen’s Street Bristol BS1 1EQ t: 0117 927 7977 e: info@saint-stephens.com Church: Mon – Fri, Sun 8.45am – 4pm Café: Mon – Fri 10am – 3.30pm 24 April – 27 May Elemental: Earth, Fire, Wind and Water Sheona Beaumont and Dennis Anthony.

Original photography and installations exploring the power and mystery of the elements.

Tinto Gallery Tinto House, 13 Broad St, Hay-on-Wye HR3 5DB t: 01497 821 556 e: tintohouse@tiscali.co.uk e: rogluxton@btinternet.com www.tinto-house.co.uk Open all week 11am – 5pm 2 – 29 April Arcadia and Beyond Paintings by John Clare and Roger Luxton.

White Space Art 72 Fore Street Totnes TQ9 5RU t: 01803 864088 e: info@whitespaceart.com www.whitespaceart.com Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm 1 – 18 March Sarah Bowman – The Rite of Spring Stunning new work from this popular West Country artist.

Catalogue available.

31 March – 30 April Easter exhibition Mixed exhibition of gallery artists’ work.

See website for more details.

“You can teach the craft; you can’t teach the poetry.”

David Hockney “The loneliness you get from the sea is personal and alive. It does not subdue you and make you feel abject. It’s stimulating loneliness.”

Ann Morrow Lindbergh “Drawing is an alchemic language – images and emotions that connect through the act of drawing.”

Tracey Emin “To transform height, width and depth into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.”

Max Beckmann “I suppose I am interested, above all, in investigating the golden ability of the artist to achieve a metamorphosis of quite ordinary things into something wonderful and extraordinary.”

Eduardo Paolozzi Chosen by Jilly Cobbe RWA magazine

Spring 2012

55

Back Chat Mike Whitton

Brian May

CBE PhD FRAS

Founding member of Queen and one of the world’s great rock guitarists, Brian May is also an astrophysicist, co-authoring Bang!

The Complete History of The Universe with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott.

Another passion is stereoscopy, and with photo-historian Elena Vidal he has written A Village Lost and Found, an annotated tour of the 1850s series of stereo photographs by T.R. Williams, as seen in the recent RWA exhibition.

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RWA magazine Spring 2012

What is your most treasured possession?

It would probably be the Red Special, the guitar my father and I made together when I was eighteen. I’ve been playing it for a considerable number of years. I designed it originally because I couldn’t afford a guitar, but also because I wanted a guitar that could sing.

All guitars in those days were designed not to have feedback, but I wanted to make one that would have feedback and, either by luck or by design, it worked. It sings; it has a certain voice to it. I like to build up layers of sound, using the guitar as part of an orchestra.

Which guitarist initially influenced you the most?

I think we all loved Hank Marvin, but at that point in my life I looked around for everything I could find: from Segovia and Julian Bream to Charlie Byrd, Django Reinhardt and Chet Atkins.

Ricky Nelson’s Hello, Mary Lou has this wonderful solo with a bending of the notes that really got me. The guitarist was James Burton; he created this amazing effect where the guitar seemed to talk to you, and that’s what really fired me up. His playing had the same

born 1947 emotional qualities as a singer would have.

Rock guitarist, astro-physicist and wildlife campaigner.

Which is most important to you?

I’m still trying to figure that out. More and more I’m feeling that my destiny is to try to make a difference for animals.

We are animals, and part of it is recognising that fact; I’d like to see us try to treat each other better. But surely it’s not too much to ask that we treat all species on this planet decently. That’s my starting point. It’s something I feel very strongly about, especially as we have a government at the moment which is completely unfriendly to animals – wrong about badgers and wrong about fox-hunting. They seem to want to hurl us back into previous centuries as far as treatment of animals is concerned. We need to rise up and say that we are not going to put up with it.

If you could own just one piece of art, what would it be?

You know, the funny thing is I don’t feel the need to own art. I’ve been through that.

I like the fact that art can be experienced by everybody, as part of a conversation. There was a time when I was trying

to possess everything, and then I realised that wasn’t necessary. The great thing is to be some kind of appreciator, which means you are getting the message, and then a communicator, which means you are passing the message on, becoming part of the conversation.

If you could spend one day with any figure from the past, who would that be?

It would probably be T.R. Williams, the man who took the stereo photographs in Scenes in Our Village. I feel that he was such a pivotal artist.

He was massively influential during the period that he worked and then became largely forgotten. I am very proud of the fact that I’ve managed to channel him back into the 21st Century, because I think his contribution is terribly important. To me, he spans art, science and humanity. That’s crucial to me.

I think he’s a great example of the way that an artist should be, or indeed the way that a human being should be.

The Head of Leda, c.1505-6, Leonardo da Vinci ROYAL COLLECTION © 2012 HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN

Ten Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci A Diamond Jubilee Celebration 31 March – 10 June 2012 Bristol Museum & Art Gallery Queens Road, Bristol BS8 1RL Tel: 0117 922 3571

Free entry bristol.gov.uk/museums

A Royal Collection touring exhibition

ISSN 2044-2653

Eric Ravilious issue // Janette Kerr RWA

// Richard Hamilton // Jan Yoors // Brian May CBE PhD FRAS

Together, we value the things that you value

Eric Ravilious: travelling artist 08 Spring 2012

Ecclesiastical Insurance Office plc (EIO) Reg. No. 24869. This company is registered in England at Beaufort House, Brunswick Road, Gloucester, GL1 1JZ, UK. EIO is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority and is a member of the Financial Ombudsman Service and Association of British Insurers. Oval Insurance Broking Limited, Registered Office: 9 South Parade, Wakefield WF1 1LR. Registered in England No: 01195184 Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. © Ecclesiastical Insurance Office pic 2011

// Janette Kerr RWA

// Richard Hamilton

// Jan Yoors

BackChat // Brian May CBE PhD FRAS

Spring 2012 £1

For more information or a quotation, contact Sam Brazier on 01452 524415 or alternatively, email sam.brazier@theovalgroup.com

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When it comes to protecting the things you value; Sam Brazier and his team at Oval Insurance Broking (Oval) understand the importance of offering professional and confidential advice on your insurance requirements.

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That is why Oval is working in partnership with Ecclesiastical Insurance to offer a residential insurance policy that sets new standards of personal care, specialist cover and risk management advice for art, antiques and period properties up to Grade 1 listed status.

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