ART Magazine - Winter 2012

// PJ Crook

‘Dog With Flying Ears’ Limited Edition Print by Michael Ogden

Reigning Cats and Dogs issue

& Gallery

ISSN 2044-2653

Sky Blue Framing

MBE RWA DArthc

MIXED CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION Affordable limited edition prints featuring FIVE NEW IMAGES by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

‘Tennis in the Garden with Gathering Rooks’

‘Summer Night in the Garden’

// Guernica // Jamaica Street Artists // Tony Robinson

NATIONAL FRAMING AWARD WINNER

‘The Gardener’

Alongside other new work by many of our favourite best selling artists such as Quentin Blake, Susie Brooks, John Knapp-Fisher, and many more...

Reigning Cats and Dogs

‘Cliff Walk in Spring’

EASY PARKING NEAR WAITROSE

// PJ Crook MBE RWA DArthc

// Guernica

// Jamaica Street Artists

BackChat // Tony Robinson

Winter 2012

Sky Blue Framing 27 North View Westbury Park Bristol BS6 7PT Tel: 0117 9733995

11 Winter 2012

We can also help you to create framed Christmas gifts for yourself and your family. Call in to see why we have a reputation for designing creative solutions that make stunning presents. We offer FREE advice and friendly prices, and all our work is finished to conservation standard.

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‘Rocks at Old Harry’

PAINTED POM P

Bringing you the best handmade jewellery, accessories & homeware from contemporary designers in the UK and Ireland

Art and Fashion in the Age of Shakespeare DOWER & HALL

GENNAMARIA

26 JANUARY - 6 MAY BERTIE & JACK

Mon - Sat 10am to 5pm Sun and Bank Holidays 11am to 5pm

AMANDA COLEMAN

Admission £6.95 / Concessions

MIMI BERRY

Great Pulteney Street, Bath, BA2 4DB

ANORAK

Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset William Larkin, oil on canvas © English Heritage

ROBIN & MOULD

www.holburne.org

RAWXCLUSIVE

SOPHIE HARLEY CHARLOTTE BEZZANT

32 The Mall, Clifton Village, Bristol, BS8 4DS // 0117 370 6180 // www.madejustso.com Opened October 2012

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 several books. He is a former Trustee 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.

// Gemma Brace is Exhibitions and Membership Manager at the RWA. She took a BA in Film and Literature from University of Warwick, and an MA in History of Art from University of Bristol. She has previously written for art, art, art magazine and Jamaica Street Artists, and enjoys exploring ideas around spaces, sites and memory in her writing.

// Jonathan Camp has a degree in the History of Art from Nottingham University. He has worked as an art tour guide in Florence, Rome and Venice and is currently a lecturer in Philosophy at City of Bristol College and a freelance Art History lecturer.

Often seen struggling around the Downs, training for a marathon.

// 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.

// Cressida Connolly is a prizewinning author who has written short stories, biography and most recently a novel, My Former Heart. As well as reviewing, she has interviewed and written about a number of artists, including Rodrigo Moynihan, Cecily Brown and Michael Craig Martin. She lives on a farm in Worcestershire.

// Alice Hendy is an award winning photographer who 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.

// Ruth Margrove is a graduate in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Bristol. As a live -in artist’s assistant she has been receiving a thorough introduction to stained glass. Blogger and intern writer, she loves to travel and has been known to disappear with Thai artists in the south Islands.

Welcome to the Reigning Cats and Dogs issue of ART magazine.

For some art lovers, kitsch evokes extreme reactions. It’s just too rock ’n’ roll – heavy beat, simple melodies. Yet another passing art fad. Too entertaining, fun, unserious, banal, crass, to be called proper Art. Questions abound. Is it a sham; a Duchampian joke? Above all: will it stand the test of time?

An answer to recurring questions of doubt such as these is not to wrestle with ‘where is it all going?’ but to unpack and decipher where it has come from.

Jeff Koons, the most famous and successful exponent of kitsch, may be a brand which harnesses consumerism and which sells 100% of his output, but what is really important is that Koons was influenced by Ed Paschke, a Chicago Imagist, who in turn took his inspiration from Gauguin, Seurat and Picasso. Like it or not, Koons’ work is another link in a long and illustrious chain.

Much of the pleasure in viewing art is noticing how each movement, each ‘ism’, is connected and informs the next. To anyone who has difficulty with kitsch I say – don’t dismiss it, look again.

Richard Storey Managing Editor // Jessica Phillimore is reading English and Classical Studies at the University of Bristol and is Arts and Exhibitions Editor for the Bristol cultural website Inter:Mission Bristol. She enjoys the variety of works on show around Bristol.

// 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

// Roger Stennett is a dramatist, screenwriter and psychotherapist.

He writes for film, TV, theatre, radio drama and animation and teaches screenwriting to postgraduate students in several Universities. He is also an integrative psychotherapist and clinical hypnotherapist at The Chiron Practice in North Bristol. www.rogerstennett.macmate.me

// Anthony Townsend is a practicing artist, an avid reader of Art books and has an extensive knowledge of the history of art.

He regularly contributes reviews to a variety of journals.

// John Umney has been a parttime student of photography for over twenty years, combining with a career in electronic design.

Now a full-time student he has a particular interest in the depiction of the human being in the environment and how that is evolving in the digital age.

A founder of the Forum Print Group and part-time theatre critic.

// Denys J. Wilcox Ph.D contributes to Apollo and The Burlington Magazine. His books include The London Group 1913 – 1939: The Artists and their Work and Rupert Lee: Painter Sculptor and Printmaker. He is writing a book about Doris Hatt and runs The Court Gallery in Somerset specialising in 19th and 20th century British and French Art. www.courtgallery.com

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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Roger Mayne, Girl jiving 1957

ROGER MAYNE RETROSPECTIVE 26 January – 7 April 2013 Some vintage photographs for sale

Victoria Art Gallery

by Pulteney Bridge Bath BA2 4AT Tel. 01225 477233 www.victoriagal.org.uk Tue-Sat 10.00-5.00 Sun 1.30-5.00 Closed Mondays and Bank Holidays Free Admission

i n par tnershi p wi th

GLOBAL

to local

NO BORDERS contemporary art in a globalised world

14 Artists including Ai Weiwei, Amar Kanwar, Walid Raad, Shilpa Gupta and Imran Qureshi.

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1RL Tel: 0117 922 3571 bristol.gov.uk/museums

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

A Season Outside ©1997 Amar Kanwar, all rights reserved

15 December 2012 – 2 June 2013 Free Entry

Inside ROYAL WEST OF ENGLAND ACADEMY Patron Her Majesty the Queen Board of Trustees Chair Kevin Thompson OBE Honorary Treasurer Russ Carr Trustees Elizabeth Boscawen, Jennifer Bryant-Pearson, Paul Gough PhD MA FRSA RWA, Ned Cussen, Janette Kerr PRWA, Rachael Nee RWA, Lucy Willis RWA, Michael Clarke, Jessica Madge

features

President Janette Kerr PRWA Academicians’ Council Vice President Peter Ford RE RWA Academician Secretary Rachael Nee RWA Council Members Louise Balaam RWA, Vera Boele-Keimer RWA, Stephen Jacobson RWA, Midge Naylor RWA, John Palmer RWA Director Trystan Hawkins Assistant Director Alexis Butt Facilities Manager Nick Dixon Events and Income Manager Angharad Redman Exhibitions and Membership Manager Gemma Brace Marketing Manager Lottie Storey Marketing and Office Co-ordinator Maria Bowers Gallery Co-ordinator Tristan Pollard Customer Services Manager Steve Fielding Customer Services team members Beckie Upton, Rosie Dolton, Rose Mazillius, Rachel Falber 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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Reigning Cats and Dogs Cunning cats and dutiful dogs, contemporary art and historical works, create an interesting dialogue between tradition and post-modernity.

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PJ Crook MBE RWA DArthc Discover PJ’s wondrous world of remembered observation and imagination: an open-hearted and intense love affair, with a highly distinctive style.

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Guernica When a German SS officer entered Picasso’s studio and saw this polemical work he asked: “Did you do this?” “No,” replied Picasso, “you did.”

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Christopher Wood Thanks to a mixture of good fortune and native charm, Wood found his way into the avant-garde circle of Picasso and Jean Cocteau.

Discover this neglected genius.

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Jamaica Street Studios Celebrating their 20th anniversary in 2013, now’s the time to take Gemma Brace’s unique tour of this remarkable collective studio space.

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Doris Hatt Artist, Communist and Clevedon resident took an international style, then softened it, giving it an essential English sensitivity.

ADVERTISING Angharad Redman t: 0117 906 7608 e: angharad.redman@rwa.org.uk COPY DEADLINE Spring 2013 issue: 11 January 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 1070163 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.

What’s on at the RWA

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Diary – events, lectures, workshops, tours

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RWA news

9

ART Emerging Artist Award

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Make my day: The Scream

44

Friends News & Events

46

Academicians’ news

48

Close-up: Chris Friel

50

Artful Cuisine: restaurant guide

52 55 56

Inside the artist’s studio: Rosalind Grimshaw

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Listings

Reviews

42

BackChat: Tony Robinson

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 ART is printed by Park Lane Press by waterless process, on fully sustainable FSC certified paper and with vegetable-oil based inks. www.parklanepress.co.uk

Cover: Simon Quadrat PPRWA Girl at the Piano (detail) oil on board, 53cm x 71cm, image courtesy Panter & Hall RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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What’s on at 160th Autumn Exhibition Until 30 December What does DJ Derek have in common with HRH The Prince of Wales? Where can you see artwork made from Bible pages sprayed black, quarry cement sacks, or plastic bags and papier mache?

All these things and more feature as part of the RWA 160th Autumn Exhibition. With 541 artworks from 351 artists, the show is bigger than ever before, with plenty to suit all tastes.

A portrait of Bristol reggae deejay, Derek Morris, sits alongside an icon, St Marina with Cat and Bird and directly opposite Sir Peter Blake and Mark Lawson in Conversation.

The diversity of the annual Autumn Exhibition is what makes this show such a treasure trove of unexpected delights.

Strong themes emerging from this year’s mix include animals, abstract seascapes, portraiture, geometric patterns, both monochrome and colour pops, walls of miniature works, and architectural cityscapes.

But, equally, much of the work defies categorisation, and unusual works include a tiny set – Balloon for Patrick – by Aardman Animations modelmaker, Matthew Healey; an MDF futuristic sculpture Self Portrait for a Future Cyber Self V.5.2.1 by Ben Rowe; a concertina of paper parsnips

by Coo Geller; and Silent Sirens by Lisa Wright, featuring a bird emerging from the vast painting onto its own separate canvas.

Every work is for sale, with prices starting from just £75 – the Autumn Exhibition is the perfect opportunity for budding enthusiasts to begin a collection. Experienced collectors, too, return year after year to add works from unknown, emerging and established artists to their collections.

The Autumn Exhibition showcases the cream of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture and architecture, selected and curated by an expert panel from thousands of submitted works.

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

RWA Reigning Cats and Dogs 11 January to 15 March As the closest companions to humankind for many centuries it is not surprising that these creatures occur incidentally and centrally throughout the history of art.

From Ancient Egypt to the Chapman Brothers and Jeff Koons, images of cats and dogs appear in the work of van Eyck, Dürer, Titian, Bruegel, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Goya, Courbet, Bonnard, Klee, Gaudier-Brzeska, Balthus, Peter Blake, Hockney and numerous other artists.

Reigning Cats and Dogs features both historical and contemporary images, sometimes imbued with satirical and sentimental intent. Curator Peter Ford RE RWA has brought together an international collection of paintings, printmaking, photography, sculpture, artists’ books, book illustration, postcards and ephemera united under this theme. Reigning Cats and Dogs playfully mixes the humourous with the serious. Participating artists include David Inshaw RWA, Stephen Jacobson RWA, Angela Lizon, Ben Hughes, Martin Leman, Anouk Mercier, Lucy Willis RWA, Bobbie Russon, Rose Sanderson, two Russian artists Alexander Kolokoltsev and Yuri Borovitsky, Japanese artist Emiko Aida, and works on paper by four young Polish artists. The exhibition also presents paintings by PJ Crook RWA, Augusta Talboys and Elisabeth Frink, from the RWA permanent collection.

From inconsequential intrusions to the starring role, cunning cats and dutiful dogs assert their artistic presence throughout the RWA galleries, acting as vehicles for an exploration of historical, functional and imaginative themes, incorporating kitsch kittens, politicised pooches and menacing mongrels.

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December // Sunday 21st October – Sunday 30th December Autumn Exhibition: Artist Tours and Talks RWA Academicians will be in and around the building during the annual Autumn Exhibition leading tours, giving talks and working in the galleries. For more information visit www.rwa.org.uk

// S aturday 8th – Thursday 13th Luke Mitchell, RWA Artist Network Member, Artist Residency Luke Mitchell will be working insitu at the RWA on a project that brings back the idea of the Court Painter in a series of large-format daguerreotype-esque photographs.

The historically referenced portraits, made using a 5x4 view camera will be complemented with hand painted backgrounds.

Taking place during the annual Autumn Exhibition, the project celebrates the history of the Academy and its Academicians, whilst creating a juxtaposition between the historical and the contemporary. The public will be able to view Luke’s work in progress at the start of this on-going project which will include future opportunities for visitors to commission their own photographic portraits.

Academicians have been invited to have their portrait made as part of this project. If you are interested in finding out more about the project please contact: lukemitchell101@hotmail.co.uk

// T hursday 13th 6.30 – 8.30pm // Saturday 1st 2pm 160th Autumn Exhibition Tour – Art on Paper with Peter Ford RE RWA Join Peter Ford RE RWA for a tour of the annual Autumn Exhibition, exploring works on paper.

Free with exhibition entry.

// Saturdays 8th December, 12th January, 9th February 10.30am – 1pm Scribble and Sketch, Anouk Mercier Suitable for all ages and abilities Scribble and Sketch offers a fun morning of informal drawing workshops and exercises for families, 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 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 (children must be accompanied by an adult).

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

RWA Christmas Drinks and Feast For Your Eyes Art Auction Join the RWA for a Christmas event with a difference. Enjoy fine food and wine surrounded by the historic elegance of the RWA galleries, adorned with the mustsee exhibition of the year – the RWA 160th Autumn Exhibition.

Ticket-holders will have the chance to purchase artworks by a range of prolific artists in our Feast for your Eyes art auction, presented by a surprise celebrity auctioneer. Specially selected, donated works will be available for viewing and bidding during the course of the evening, with all proceeds going to the RWA. Come together with art lovers, soak up the atmosphere, enjoy some festive cheer, and snap up a Christmas gift with a difference. FREE

// 1 2th December and then every Wednesday from 9th January onwards 6.30 – 8.30pm Life Drawing Drop-in, Anouk Mercier Come and draw in the beautiful surroundings of the RWA’s main galleries. We provide paper and basic materials, a different model each week with a tutor on hand to offer advice and assistance. An ideal opportunity to practise drawing from a model in a friendly and supportive environment. The drop-in sessions provide a great chance to try out the Drawing School or gain extra practise in addition to scheduled courses, and don’t forget it also

provides the perfect opportunity to see our latest exhibitions. Just turn up on the night and pay at the door, no booking required. £10/£8 concession

site café, use of our stunning galleries to draw in, and a chance to develop your skills at Bristol’s first art gallery. For more detail about individual courses visit www.drawingschool.org.uk

// Sunday 13th 11am – 4pm Introduction to Life Drawing, 1 day Workshop, Angie Kenber If you are new to life drawing, then this workshop will offer the chance to build your skills. We will investigate balance, motion and foreshortening in a variety of media including colour in a professional and supportive environment. £35

// Friday 14th, Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th December Friday and Saturday 10am – 4pm Sunday 11am – 4pm Anatomy Drawing, Alan McGowan Knowledge of the underlying anatomical structures is a fundamental part of confident and expressive figurative art and was until recently a cornerstone of art training. The course is conducted through demonstration and explanation, reference to anatomical examples, and with an emphasis on drawing from the life model. We will examine the individual elements of anatomy, the main skeletal, muscular and structural forms, whilst being conscious of the overall integrity of the body as a coherent system.

While concentrating on anatomy we will also inevitably touch on more general issues involved in drawing the figure. £210

January // Starts week commencing 7th January Bristol Drawing School 10 week courses Choose from a selection of 10 week courses including Beginners Drawing and Intermediate Drawing with Ruth Wallace, Interiors Drawing and Printing with Ros Ford, Life Drawing with Movement with Sara Easby, Introduction to Life Drawing with Angie Kenber and Drawing Paint and Colour and Experimental Drawing with Esme Clutterbuck. Half-day courses at £180 for 10 weeks, or choose from our selection of workshops. As a student at the Bristol Drawing School you will benefit from access to the RWA’s facilities including free entrance to exhibitions during courses and workshops, 10% discount in Papadeli’s on-

// Saturday 26th January, Saturday 9th February and Saturday 23rd February 2.30pm Reigning Cats and Dogs Curator’s Tour, Peter Ford RE RWA Curator and artist Peter Ford RE RWA will be providing a tour of the exhibition Reigning Cats and Dogs discussing some of the exhibitions themes and selected works. Free with exhibition entry.

// Saturday 26th 10am – 4pm Paper Cutting Cats and Dogs, Jessica Palmer MA Inspired by the Reigning Cats and Dogs exhibition, learn the art and craft of precision paper cutting with Jessica Palmer. You will create beautiful hand-cut images based on your favourite artworks in the exhibition. Jessica will take you through the background to paper cutting, showing examples of her own and other artists’ work, introducing you to the skills, techniques and tools required to make cut paper drawings. £40

2013

Diary // December to February

Events, Lectures Workshops, Tours

// S unday 27th 11am – 4pm Untutored Portrait 1 Day Workshop, Deb Pearson This all day session is aimed at people who want to draw or paint from the model in a peaceful and professional environment. The sessions are run by an experienced model who will be providing one seated pose for the whole day.

The model will be clothed with an emphasis on improving your portraiture skills. £28

// T hursday 31st 7pm The Turner Choir conducted by Jonathan James: A Modern Mass Gathering sixteen excellent professional singers from all over the country, the Turner Choir has chosen as its inaugural programme a stunning setting of beautiful movements from 20th century masses. This Modern Mass gives an opportunity to reappraise the familiar liturgy, allowing the music to create its own sacred space for an hour’s reflection. Each movement has been chosen to reflect the romantic yet forward-looking character of the choir’s artistic namesake, with a chance to hear Barber’s powerful Adagio for Strings sung as the Agnus Dei. Programme to include: Introit: A Child’s Prayer – MacMillan, Kyrie – Rubbra, Gloria – Rodney Bennett, Credo – Martin (from Mass for Double Choir), Sanctus – Poulenc (from Mass in G), Benedictus – Bernstein, Agnus Dei – Barber, Missa Brevis: At the conclusion – MacMillan, Nunc Dimittis – Holst. £10 (£8 concessions)

February // S aturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd Saturday 10am – 4pm Sunday 11am – 4pm The Spirit of Drawing, 2 day Workshop, Sara Easby This workshop is designed to explore the nature of creativity and the factors that influence our ability to be creative. Using the process of drawing, the course will look at ways of improving perception, concentration, visualisation and intuition. This is a welcome opportunity for artists and those wishing to discover their creative potential, to spend uninterrupted time developing their skills with individual tuition and guidance.

There will be set exercises and time to work on a personal project derived from the class. £40

// Tuesday 12th 10.30am – 12.30pm Children’s Print Workshop: Print an Animal Snow Scene, Christine Howes MA, in collaboration with Spike Print Studio Join our fun workshop and create your own wintery scenes using Arctic animals such as polar bears or seal pups, or you could even use your own pet including cats and dogs. Press printing is a simple technique. Learn how to draw on polystyrene tiles and print with these using vibrant colours. Tutor Christine Howes has designed many children’s art activities for BBC’s SMart programme and BBC Wildlife Magazine feature ‘Wild at Art’.

Suitable for ages 7-11 yrs. £10

// S aturday 9th 11am Lecture: Unfolding Landscape, Jeremy Gardiner Join Jeremy Gardiner as he discusses his artistic excavation of the geology of landscape and how it is shaped by human activity. Aware of distinct geologies through his painting and printmaking he interprets a variety of landscapes that contain the marks and secrets of their own distant formation. His artistic exploration has taken him from the Jurassic Coast of Dorset to the rugged coast of Cornwall, the oceanic islands of Brazil, the arid beauty of the island of Milos in Greece and more recently the Lake District and its numerous waterfalls. The talk coincides with a publication of his latest book, The Art of Jeremy Gardiner: Unfolding Landscape, published

by Lund Humphries, Jan 2013.

See www.jeremygardiner.co.uk £10/£8 Friends

// Saturday 16th 10am – 4pm An Artist’s Best Friend – Dogs, Cats and Victorian Painters: Art History Day School, Justine Hopkinson The young Pre-Raphaelite painters were fond of deriding the ‘monkeyana’ pictures which had brought their predecessor Landseer such popular acclaim, yet their own pictures are equally full of animals cast in a variety of roles from the sentimental to the symbolic. Queen Victoria doted on her pets and the Prince Consort was no less devoted to his hunting dogs; where they led the nation followed, and the wise artist hurried to keep up. In this day school we will be considering the results of this national enthusiasm in the work of a wide variety of artists, among them David Wilkie, Edwin Landseer, Franz Winterhalter, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and John Singer Sargent. We shall also explore the careers of painters less well-known to us although equally popular in their day, including Frank Paton, Wilson Hepple and Louis Wain. £30

// Sunday 24th 11am – 4pm

// Thursday 14th 10am – 1pm Family Print Workshop: What’s Your Favourite Animal? Simon Tozer MA, in collaboration with Spike Print Studio What’s your favourite animal?

Whether it’s a cat, dog, rabbit, moose, wildebeest or warthog, this fun workshop will make portraits of our favourites using screen printing. We will create colourful images by combining paper-cut and hand-drawn stencil techniques.

This is a family workshop and all children must be accompanied by an adult. £10 per child.

Life Drawing Untutored: 1 Day Workshop, Deb Pearson These all day sessions are aimed at people who want to draw or paint from the model in a peaceful and professional environment. The sessions are run by an experienced model with a bias towards painters or drawers who require longer poses. £28

// Please keep an eye on our website as we will be updating it with more events for Reigning Cats and Dogs and half-term activities for families and children.

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

To book Bristol Drawing School workshops go online at www.drawingschool.org.uk or call 0117 973 5129.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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The future of quality print is

Waterless...

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All carbon produced from site emissions is offset though the DEFRA and DECC recognised charity PURE, and over 95% of waste is recycled.

For more information call or email us and just imagine how brilliant your next job will be printed Waterless...

// RWA News

Wells Art Contemporary Judges: The 45 Park Lane artists (left to right) Martin Fuller, Christian Furr, Bill Packer, Roy Ackerman CBE (Curator), Brendan Neiland and Donald Smith awarded Prizes at the inaugural Wells Art Contemporary Open Competition. Shortlisting from over 770 entries to 60 works for the exhibition was carried out by Dan Hayes, winner of the John Moores Prize, and our own Janette Kerr PRWA.

Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012

Feast for Your Eyes:

Janette Kerr PRWA shortlists Wells Art Contemporary 2012

Fundraising art auction and Christmas drinks Thursday 13 December from 6.30pm, auction will be open for bidding at 7pm On the look-out for an exciting Christmas present this year?

How about a Damien Hirst print or a Jack Vettriano study?

The RWA Feast For Your Eyes art auction takes place on 13 December from 6.30pm, with donated works by a range of prolific artists. This free Christmas drinks and art auction event is a great opportunity for a Christmas catch-up with friends and colleagues, plus a once-in-a-lifetime chance to snap up an unusual gift and an exciting new way to support the RWA’s fundraising efforts. The aim of the auction is to raise funds for future RWA projects, and auction lots are priced from £1,000 – £12,000.

Damien Hirst – Benevolence Silkscreen Diamond Dusted Butterfly Print

The donated artworks will be exhibited for a month prior to the auction, sitting alongside the 160th Autumn Exhibition.

Tickets are free but must be booked in advance – call 0117 973 5129 or email info@rwa.org.uk to reserve a place and to receive an electronic copy of the auction catalogue.

160th Autumn Exhibition // Sam Storey and Amy Fielding

I’m always impressed when I come to the RWA Open, much more preferable to its London counterpart.

Tom Hughes’ two small plein air oils stand out for their photorealism; I think he’s got a future.

What I love about the RWA Open Exhibition is the way the hanging committee has used care, with work hung in families of colour, subject and emotional content. I’m excited to have been hung in the Big Room this year.

Rodney Beecher Roberts Artist

Jonathan Davies Artist

The works in the RWA Open exhibition push the boundaries and are often much more daring than what you’d typically see in London. And that’s exciting.

I love Emma Dibben’s Butterflies although I expected to see more graphic or computer influenced art.

A gorgeous space. The hanging is really good and it’s easy to identify areas that you are drawn to.

My favourite work is my wife’s sculpture: The Ship of Fools.

Also Young Scientist.

I love work that has had a lot of thought put into it.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I’m really impressed with the skill, time and effort that has gone into these works.

My favourite painting is Here We All Are – fantastic colours, the scale and impact of it is very impressive.

And I love the spliff cake.

Kathryn Roberts Cork St Open Exhibitions organiser

Ben FergusonWalker Project manager

Clare FergusonWalker Sculptor

I’m impressed by the hang and the way similar paintings are grouped particularly in the quieter rooms where all the prints and drawings are, you don’t lose anything or get anything shouting out too loudly.

I love the brush marks on Louise Balaam’s painterly works.

Anne Quick Portrait painter

Such a huge variety and a lot of talent; it’s hard to sum up in one go. There are some really lovely prints here. I love the abstract landscape

by Diana BourdenSmith which boldly stands out to me.

Kate Phillimore Independent curator

I’ve been staring at this image, David Cobley’s Here We All Are, for about ten minutes. It’s ‘all-at-once’; the characters don’t seem to be interacting with one another, doing different things but in the same space. I think it’s wonderful.

Naren Wilks Photo lab technician

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

1 untitled pareidolia series 2012

2 filmstill untitled 2012

3 A World Called

Our prize winner is Ejan Hahn, a 27 year old recent graduate from UWE, who this summer took a degree in Fine Art and AVC. Keen to continue her art practice, she would like to work in community based art projects, or even an overseas residency.

Ultimately, her aim is to work in film documentary.

At first sight, Ejan Hahn’s remarkable photograph, A World Called, has shades of JMW Turner’s Snow Storm: an elemental vortex. We see a fire raging, smoke swirling away from a jet-black, ink-black base.

The background sky is ablaze with reflected flame; hot and pulsating. In the foreground, to the right, a stony, possibly wet, terrain – a shoreline on a distant planet?

But, hey, this is a photograph and we all know how they can lie, fooling the viewer with a tweak or two in Photoshop.

And Hahn’s force-of-nature image, too, is smoke and mirrors. To be more accurate: milk, black treacle and black ink, photographed from a low angle in an aquarium. Even knowing the methodology, A World Called is not a manipulated image; it stands out from ploddy representational photographs and evokes a strong visceral reaction which by-passes the intellect and conjures deep inner feelings.

Jessica Phillimore met Hahn at the Autumn Open Exhibition to learn more about this remarkable artist / photographer / film-maker:

I became interested in photography as a way of manufacturing imagery.

I like its potential for ambiguity – how it can be difficult to judge size and scale, the material it’s made from or the subject itself.

My picture, A World Called, suggests to a lot of viewers the Sahara Desert, or a scene from outer space. There’s definitely a sci-fi element to it and it is deliberately ambiguous. There’s a chaotic, dystopian, environmentally degraded and dangerous kind of beauty in there. I think it’s very important to set out to achieve a certain reaction from your audience.

To me, photography is simply a device for capturing stuff so I don’t see myself as a photographer, more as a visual artist, working in film as well. I feel that much photography today has turned towards a bleak, cold, documentary style. At the moment, I’m concentrating more on my painting, although I won’t discount photography altogether. You choose the medium most suited to the subject matter.

For more of Ejan Hahn’s remarkable work see: www.ejanhahn.com

ART Magazine Emerging Artist Award: Ejan Hahn

Jessica Phillimore

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Reigning Cats and Dogs Gemma Brace

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Lurking in shadows, skulking under table-tops or tangled underfoot, cats and dogs have been the silent presence staring back at us from artworks across the centuries. From mummified remains in Ancient Egypt to Jeff Koon’s post-modern puppies, these domestic allies have created their own history of art, littering the work of Bruegel, Bonnard, and Blake with their artistic incarnations.

Yet, despite this omnipresence they are seldom the star of the show.

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Reigning Cats and Dogs elevates these artistic stalwarts, creating a menagerie of historical and contemporary characters ranging from the satirical to the sentimental. It is the third in a series of animal-centric exhibitions from curator and artist Peter Ford RE RWA, following in the footsteps of touring exhibition A Focus on Fish, 1991, and All Creatures Small, 2002, originating at Off-Centre Gallery, Bristol. In this exhibition he brings together an international collection of paintings, printmaking, photography, sculpture, artists’ books, postcards and ephemera. Children’s illustrations from Poland sit happily alongside prints from Japan, mixing cultural icons with cartoon characters in an exhibition that playfully interweaves humour alongside the serious.

Contemporary art sits side-by-side with historical works, creating an interesting dialogue between tradition and postmodernity. Perhaps most fascinating of the questions to be explored is the

relationship between sentimentality and kitsch. Works selected from the RWA’s permanent collection include paintings by Augusta Talboys. They reflect a Victorian sensibility, their acute sentimental pull bearing the hallmarks of sincerity. Yet, they could easily be read as the ultimate kitsch – their artifice and exaggerated sentiment knowingly translated from the serious to the frivolous, and back again. In contrast, contemporary artist Angela Lizon’s colossal cats suggest something more sinister. Characters such as Cowboy Joe from Mexico and Fairy are adorned in whimsical fancy-dress, yet there is a feeling of resistance from the animals, a wry look, at odds with their costumes, creating a forced feeling of festivity. In Pussy Posse, 2008, three sets of feline eyes draw you in. It is both beguiling and unsettling, unlike the innocent eyes staring back from Talboy’s The Three of Us, early 20th century. Lizon’s work demonstrates an understanding of sentimentality and kitsch that can be traced back to Talboy’s saccharine scenes,

1 (page 12) Fairy, Angela Lizon 2 The Three of Us, Augusta Talboys 3 Pussy Posse, Angela Lizon 4 (page 16) Family Viewing, Ben Hughes 5 (page 16) Dog in Winter, Alexander Kolokoltsev 6 (page 16) Guard Dog, Peter Ford RE RWA 7 (page 16) Girl at the Piano, Simon Quadrat PPRWA

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revealing a certain self-consciousness, aware of their own tradition, skirting round sentimentality, and bypassing kitsch.

Cats and dogs in art are frequently met with the charge of sentimentality.

Indeed as domestic creatures sentiment seems ingrained upon them. However, just as Tate Britain’s current BP British Art display Victorian Sentimentality attempts to rehabilitate this traditionally derided aspect of Victorian art, Reigning Cats and Dogs also attempts to provide an opportunity to question our distrust of the sentimental in art. It is just one of a multitude of themes, waiting to be explored beyond the two-dimensional images of cats and dogs that lie scattered throughout art history. Aiming to capture this impressive cast, Ford has created a historical survey for the exhibition from his own extensive postcard collection, featuring images and photographs of iconic canines and famous felines including the loyal and alert lap-dog in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait of 1434; Hogarth’s pugnacious dog Trump; and the statuesque Percy in Hockney’s 1970 Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.

Ford’s installation of reproduction images offers numerous frameworks through which to view the exhibition.

In particular they remind us of the symbolic use of these domestic creatures throughout art history. The iconographic status of cats and dogs has been conditioned through years of historical reference. First deified by the Egyptians, cats have simultaneously represented lust, danger, fertility and freedom. Meanwhile, dogs – ‘man’s best friend’ – have cemented their docility as an emblem of fidelity.

Take for example Manet’s Olympia, 1863, based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1538.

Manet replaces Titian’s loyal white lapdog with an ominous black cat. The exchange of one for the other has dramatic implications. The cat embodies sexuality, independence and sorcery, allusions which are then overlaid upon Manet’s confident nude.

This rich history of symbolism is alluded to by contemporary artists throughout the exhibition. Bath based artist Bobbi Russon creates a dark and awkward world, depicting the transitional years between childhood and adolescence. Her unsettling scenes communicate a solitary world in which domestic pets take the place of playmates. Among her previous paintings cats are coddled in smothering arms, clasped tight to the chest, thwarting escape, whilst dogs sit obediently waiting on chairs or in doorways.

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...three sets of feline eyes draw you in.

It is both beguiling and unsettling.

The theme of companionship is later explored in UWE graduate Eleanor Heaford’s photographic portraits, which examine the working relationship between dogs and humans. Heaford’s formal portrayals of sniffer dogs, display a regal quality. Digby and Homer face the camera, shoulders angled, nose in the air, displaying a sense of dutiful pride.

Among other photographic offerings Sarah Francis weaves an element of performance into her work, creating impulsive images that blur the boundary between fact and fiction. Fascinated by “the uncanny duality of photography” the work How I Was made, Self Portrait with Legs, 2007, has the quality of a film still, steeped in narrative possibility.

Both dog and owner are poised, one mid-air, one teetering on the edge of a chest of drawers, looking on in trepidation.

Another work in which narrative features strongly is PJ Crook’s La Prunelle de Mes Yeux, 1997. A childhood pet is RWA magazine

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“

Duality is perhaps the unifying principle of this exhibition, domesticity versus the wild, sentimentality versus kitsch, cat versus dog. And who reigns supreme?

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employed to invoke a sense of suburban safety. Crook is often described as a painter who captures the ordinariness of British life before imbuing it with strangeness. La Prunelle… depicts the artist’s children locked between two worlds. Anchored to their childhood by the domestic, yet pulled into their future by the exotic, the familial pet providing the foil to the surrealist interruption of a zebra at the window. Painter Ben Hughes evokes a similar sense of the familial in Family Viewing, 2008. He describes this series of work as portraits lending an air of commemoration to these scenes in which cats and dogs are firmly ensconced in family life.

Yet, despite their popular rendition as childhood friend, or life-long companion, both cat and dog have also long been associated with an element of danger or violence. They are ‘domesticated’ animals, tethered to their wilder counterparts through nurture over nature. In 1939 Picasso painted Cat With Bird, the same year that the Second World War began and Madrid fell to Franco’s forces. The cat savages the bird, leaving a gaping and bloody wound. Its flashing jaw and sharp claws transform the domesticated animal into an image of savagery and contempt, an allegorical protest by Picasso the Republican. Gone is the playful kitten. Similarly, curator Ford’s relief printed etching Guard Dog, 1984, and Alexander Kolokoltsev’s etching of Dog in Winter, 1991, display a proprietorial and predatory side to our domesticated friends.

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Duality is perhaps the unifying principle of this exhibition, domesticity versus the wild, sentimentality versus kitsch, cat versus dog. And who reigns supreme?

In a playful stroke the curator has asked each contemporary artist to declare their loyalty, revealing their own history of pet ownership, an act in which the public are also encouraged to participate. Reigning Cats and Dogs is an open invitation freely to indulge in our sentimental side, offering up slices of nostalgia alongside critical appropriation. Cats and dogs are coaxed out of the shadows, transforming them into the star of the show. Dogs stand to attention and cats bathe in the limelight. Staring back at us through fixed eyes, and years of history, they are finally given due contemplation.

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RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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Christmas Cracker!

The Searchers contemporar y

1st - 21st December

This popular show returns with a mix of Sculpture, Prints & Drawings

GALLERY PANGOLIN

CHALFORD - GLOS - GL6 8NT 01453 889765 gallery@pangolin-editions.com www.gallery-pangolin.com Uakari Anita Mandl RWA, Small Standing Dog Terence Coventry, Earlybird Jon Buck RWA

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MATTI BRAUN GOST LOG

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Greyhound Sabina 18" x 24" ÂŁ1350

MIXED EXHIBITION CHRISTMAS 2012 20th Nov - 23rd Dec 7a Boyces Avenue, Clifton, Bristol BS8 4AA Tel 0117 973 2614 www.innocentfineart.co.uk Email enquiries@innocentfineart.co.uk

PJ Crook Cressida Connolly

Perhaps because many of her paintings are very big, or perhaps because their subjects include such traditionally male dominions as the card-game, the casino, the snooker hall and the race-track, admirers of her work are often very taken aback when they come face to face with PJ Crook.

“People tend to assume I’ll be a pretty large man”, laughs PJ. She’s laughing because the misapprehension is a major one: in person, she is very tiny indeed, with wrists barely wider than a Crunchie bar. That’s the first thing you notice, on meeting her. Then there’s the waistlength blonde hair and bright, cornflower blue eyes. Within a few moments in her company, something else becomes apparent: PJ Crook hasn’t got a single cynical bone in her body. There’s an openeyed, open-heartedness about her; as well as a sense of sincerity, consideration and warmth. Put simply, she shines.

It is no surprise that her work is in great demand from collectors the world over. The paintings combine a highly

MBE RWA DArthc

distinctive style with extraordinary technical mastery. No contemporary artist is more accomplished at depicting perspective or depth of field, whether the scene is a crowded street, an open-air swimming pool or the jostling spectators at the races. “I feel the viewer is as important as the artist”, says PJ, with characteristic generosity. Certainly the viewer has a sense of being invited into each painting. In part this is achieved by PJ’s signature trompe l’oeil framing, in which she continues the picture-plane to the outer edges of each piece, creating a three dimensionality. “People say it draws them in”, she agrees. “It started early on, I found I didn’t like the grandeur of gold frames and the way they cut a picture off.

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I had a frame from a junk shop and I took the painting over the frame and it just looked right.” As a young artist, she was as drawn to sculpture as to painting, so this framing is a way of realising both forms.

In her work PJ Crook has responded to events as diverse as the first Gulf War and the Asian tsunami, creating a sense of menace which troubles the apparent calm of the pictures’ surfaces. Often she paints crowds: people reading newspapers, as if on a busy commuter train; people feasting or gambling or mingling on a station concourse; the bustle of the circus, the bar, the cabaret. “I’ve always been fascinated by groups of people”, she says. “I find a crowd exhilarating but also quite terrifying. Or it can be a refuge, the way in which an individual loses his identity in a crowd; or it can be very powerful, like the peaceful revolution they achieved in Estonia, by holding hands all across the land...all those wills together, willing things to happen.” The movement and colour, the sheer vitality of crowds inspire her, whether it’s a dawn visit to the old fish-market in Tokyo, or a visit to Cheltenham Racecourse, only a stone’s throw from her home. “Maybe in my studio I can keep a crowd under control”, she smiles.

Sometimes the paintings offer a more enclosed and private world: a pair of children playing in a room, figures in a dimly lit-corridor, a series of self-portraits.

These pictures present what Anton Chekhov called “the art of the glimpse”: a place where the imagination of the viewer interacts with that of the artist.

“I can remember, as a child, peeking into smoky rooms where my father was playing cards all night. My dad was a fantastic storyteller and he loved to gamble. So I think some of my paintings come from the stories he used to tell me.”

PJ does not work from photographs or drawings, preferring to paint directly, from a combination of remembered observation and imagination. “I paint intuitively, so it’s as much about feeling as thinking. Compositionally they’re fairly resolved when I begin, but I don’t really know in advance what each picture is going to look like. I think, if I knew, I wouldn’t have the same compulsion to make the painting. It all happens on the canvas and that’s very important to me.

I like the adventure, the risk. It’s always a journey of discovery. Whenever I’m working on a painting it becomes like an intense love affair. I often think it’s a bit

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like method acting, you have to feel like each person or thing in the picture. It’s an emotional journey.”

PJ’s practice is exceptional in that she has always incorporated the demands of family life into the work. Unlike many women artists, she perceives no conflict between motherhood and self-expression: “Often it seemed to me that motherhood and creativity were so closely entwined that they were actually part of each other.

Both my children [a daughter, Henrietta and a son, Nathan] have always been a huge source of inspiration.” Indeed, she first began to make paintings on the kitchen table, when her baby daughter was asleep.

Her parents, too, play their part in the work; either obliquely, as when she incorporates stories her father told her into the pictures; or directly, as in the case of the recent painting, the luminous Hare of Tiree. “My father was stationed in Tiree in the RAF, and I was conceived there”, PJ explains. “We recently took my mother back, for her 90th birthday. It is a bit like a paradise, really: the flora in the painting are all plants which grow on the island. The sea really was turquoise and you’d see seals...It was quite magical. It was only after I’d finished the picture that I discovered that the hare is a symbol of fertility. I’m sure more paintings will come out that will be inspired by Tiree.”

PJ Crook lives and works in Gloucestershire with her partner, the artist Richard Parker. Much of her childhood was spent nearby. “I love being part of a community”, she says. Without fanfare, she quietly and generously supports a number of local causes. She has contributed greatly to the National Star Centre, of which she is a patron; and to her local church, St Michael and All Angels at Bishops Cleeve, she donated a very moving depiction of Christ’s crucifixion.

Yet travel also informs the work.

PJ shows regularly in Paris and Estonia, as well as in New York and Florida, and collections of her paintings hang in Japan and Saudi Arabia. In 2001, she was invited to lecture at the Morohashi Museum in Japan, where some of her own work is displayed among a major collection of Surrealist and Modern art. “It was wonderful”, she says. “Twice having the opportunity to go to Japan and observe such a different culture was marvellous.

We saw a traditional wedding, and the White Heron Festival at Asakusa; and we travelled through the country to Nara,

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“

I paint intuitively, so it’s as much about feeling as thinking.

the old Capital”. Visitors to her forthcoming London show at The Alpha Gallery, Cork Street will be able to feast their eyes on the remarkable new painting, A Bigger Wave, inspired by her travels in Japan. The woman in the elaborate kimono may be a Geisha, two hundred years ago; or she may be contemporary. Perhaps she is sad, a lonely figure watching the cranes and the sea from her window. Or has she come to the window, blissfully, straight from a lover’s bed?

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There is mystery at the heart of these paintings, as if something momentous might be about to take place; or as if a seismic event has already happened, perhaps still unbeknown to the people in the picture. The viewer may be lost within this world of the artist’s devising, or impose a narrative of their own. Like the silent white owls which swoop through some of the night-time paintings, PJ Crook always invites the imagination to take flight.

PJ Crook’s exhibition Night & Day is at the Alpha Gallery, 23 Cork Street, London W1 until December 7. She will then be showing new works with Panter & Hall at the London Art Fair 2013, 16 – 20 January.

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1 (page 19) The Eighth, tinted gesso on canvas on corrugated wood support

2 (page 20) A Bigger Wave, tinted gesso on canvas with painted wooden frame

3 PJ Crook in her studio

4 Hare of Tiree, tinted gesso on canvas with painted wooden frame

5 Bar, tinted gesso on canvas with painted wooden frame

CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION PICT uRES ANd S CulPT u RE 1st – 22nd December

Ian WeatherheaD

autumn LanDscape

mIxeD meDIa

the complete exhibition can be viewed online

www.jerramgallery.com

the Jerram GaLLerY

half moon street, sherborne, Dorset Dt9 3Ln

info@jerramgallery.com

01935 815261

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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Guernica: 24

RWA magazine Winter 2012

timeless monument to the human spirit Jonathan Camp

Why did the USA once hide the most famous painting of the 20th century behind a curtain?

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On February 5 2003 US Secretary of State Colin Powell stood up to speak at the United Nations in New York. He waded laboriously through the Bush administration’s policy: immediate invasion of Iraq and heavy bombing of Baghdad were essential to stop Saddam Hussein’s imminent deployment of WMDs. Quite apart from Powell’s uneasy expression something else looked wrong; why was he talking in front of a huge blue curtain? Where was the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica, the usual backdrop for internationally critical speeches, which hangs by the entrance to the Security Council room?

The response from US intelligence turned out to be as flimsy as the replacement curtain: “Guernica would have been too visually confusing for television viewers,” a state department official claimed. The irony of the premeditated removal of Picasso’s lamentation on unjustified bombing is irresistible.

The story which inspired Guernica is well known: hired by Spain’s Republican General Franco during the Spanish Civil War, mercenary German planes bombed the Basque town of Gernika, for three hours in the afternoon of 26 April 1937.

The Luftwaffe were delighted with their practice run. 1,654 defenceless civilians died as pointlessly as it is possible to imagine: the victims were mostly peasants going to market. Gernika is remote, a strategically unimportant town; a large Nationalist arms depot nearby was completely ignored. The sheer nihilism of it all redoubles our horror. When an SS

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

officer stumbled into Picasso’s studio in Paris he gasped at the vast canvas before him. “Did you do this?” he asked of the diminutive painter. “No,” said Picasso, “you did.”

Guernica can be a hard painting to approach. An anti-war position is an easy line for an artist, but a tough act to pull off without resorting to cliché and clumsy moralising. Picasso’s vast output of around 50,000 works of art can leave him open to criticism: is he essentially egotistical, and merely profligate with his immense talent? We can be more readily drawn to the preciousness of, say, Giorgione or Vermeer, great artists with scarcely fifty authenticated paintings between them. Finally Guernica is simply too famous: like the Sistine Ceiling or the Mona Lisa it’s difficult to view afresh; we’re meant to join in the unanimous approval of the anti-war painting by the most famous 20th century artist; it’s tough to find a personal angle.

The solution? Guernica doesn’t reproduce easily. You have to immerse yourself in the painting itself. Imagine yourself now at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, alone in front of the huge canvas; peer close in at giant, gruesome details; step back to take in the desperate whole.

The scale itself is awe-inspiring: 3.5 metres high, over 7.8 metres wide. Twice as tall as Picasso, the painter had to stand on a platform or work with brushes strapped on sticks. This is tragedy on a monumental scale; it urges you to react.

At first all seems chaos, but a deceptively simple structure emerges.

Eerily reminiscent of a religious altarpiece, the composition is essentially a triptych. No reassuring balance of saints here, just a pell-mell rush of figures lurching unnaturally from right to left.

But all is tightly controlled: we look from the dead hand in the left corner across to a gnarled foot at the far right, then left up an urgent diagonal to the hopelessly screaming horse. All this in front of an inescapably dark, flat backdrop: death is a remorseless presence.

Picasso heightens the terror by using only a handful of figures: six represent the entire town. As the bombs drop, women respond helplessly: on the far right one leaps from a window, only to land in a furnace of flames; another staggering forward in a state of undress, her breasts impaled with rough nails, is hopelessly weighed down by a gruesome injury to her left leg; above a weirdly distorted face floats across, seemingly detached already from her scrawny body; to the left a bereaved mother shrieks to the skies in utter terror, her baby lies dead in her helplessly clumsy arms – echoes of Michelangelo’s

Pieta are inescapable. A bewildered horse takes centre stage, screaming in pain, a spear through its stomach; it tramples unknowingly on a dying man, his useless staff broken in two, his huge outstretched palm lamentably powerless. All the while an unharmed bull surveys the carnage through widely-spaced human eyes, his tail wafting aloft, alert but somehow distanced. Does he represent Franco’s coldhearted amorality or perhaps Picasso himself, watching events from the guilty safety of Paris?

“

When an SS officer stumbled into Picasso’s studio in Paris he gasped at the vast canvas before him.

“Did you do this?” he asked of the diminutive painter.

“No,” said Picasso, “you did.”

Monochrome dominates. Redolent of the timeless struggle of the oppressed, it juxtaposes the victims’ desperate pleas with the heaviness of history: we’ve seen this before, we see it now, we’ll see it again. Picasso acknowledged specific sources: relief sculpture from the Parthenon frieze in the Louvre, just across the Seine from his studio in Rue des Grand Augustins; Goya’s stark Disasters of War series dominated by innocent victims of the Napoleonic regime.

The grey marks covering the horse recall newsprint, a personal reference perhaps: an appalled Picasso first read of the bombings in Le Figaro; as in Alfred Hitchcock’s decision to film Psycho in

“

In black and white, our imaginations see blood better than our eyes. chaos of bombing. You notice on closer inspection several subliminal Cubist motifs of death: a skull forms out of the horse’s nostrils and upper teeth; a second bull’s head seems to emerge by his right front leg, perhaps goring the horse’s stomach from below.

Picasso, a lifelong member of the Communist party, is not an overtly political painter. The Second World War, the Holocaust and the Cold War inspired a mere handful of works. ‘Picasso was largely unconcerned by war,’ argues John Berger. The greatness of Guernica is that

black and white, our imaginations see blood better than our eyes. Yet most figures are lit with unnatural brilliance, from fire or the latest blast. Picasso incorporates a cruel visual pun: at the top a vast light bulb hangs in the sky: the Spanish for ‘light’ is bombia.

Cubism as a style can appear clinically reductive. Developed by Picasso and the French painter Georges Braque in the decade before World War I, it was intended for a different purpose: to free painting from the confines of mere representation.

But in Guernica the dysfunctional style of Cubism is perfect for an emotive representation of an atrocity of war.

We observe animals simultaneously from different angles: the bull walks in yet looks away; his two human eyes are widely spaced as it is, but a third eye (possibly an under drawing) emerges between the others; perhaps Picasso who painted Guernica in a rapid five weeks, allowed it to remain, symbolic of the

it rises above the merely political; it works as an anti-war painting, but above all it is a paean to the human spirit, to our refusal to be subjugated, to our determination to stand up against oppression. Guernica argues that our humanity is predicated on free will and liberty.

And what about the tapestry at the United Nations? “Art is not interior decoration,” Picasso insisted. “It is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.” While George Bush, Colin Powell and Saddam Hussein are relegated to the ranks of historical footnotes, the Guernica tapestry is back on guard at the Security Council, a timeless monument to the human spirit.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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TRUE IDENTITY?

VIEW ART GALLERY 159-161 Hotwell Road, Bristol BS8 4RY 05603 116753

viewartgallery.co.uk 28

RWA magazine Winter 2012

“

...paintings that deserve to be looked at, often and at length, with eyes wide open and mind fully engaged.

Looking at

Christopher Wood

If we should learn one thing from Tom Lubbock, the art critic who died last year, it is that visual art is about looking. This may sound a bit obvious until you read one or two of the pieces he wrote for The Independent.

Lubbock didn’t just glance at a picture, he really studied it, eyes wide open and mind engaged.

Forget what you’ve been taught about the artist’s biography or about contemporary trends in painting, his approach suggests. Don’t try to place the work.

Just look at it, carefully.

James Russell

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Winter 2012

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This isn’t easy. I know I’ve been guilty on many occasions of rushing up to a picture, giving it a quick once over and then glancing sideways at the label on the wall.

I know other people do this too because I’ve watched them, but there is one gallery where you can’t rely on a printed label to guide you. It isn’t really a gallery, in fact, but a house, the former home of collector Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.

The house rambles up, down and around, and every room is packed full of paintings and sculpture, mostly by 20th century British artists. None of the work is labelled, so you end up playing nervous

guessing games with yourself. This ship looks as though Alfred Wallis painted it, but is it really a Wallis? I like this landscape, but is it by an artist I know? Is this any good, or is my taste flawed? Some years ago I was at Kettle’s Yard with some time to spare and forced myself to look properly, and certain pictures kept calling me back. One was a full-length portrait of a handsome young man sitting with a cat on his knee; the picture held my gaze but it took three goes to notice that the cat’s claws were wickedly extended.

Another picture depicted a quayside on which a large wooden boat was being built, the exposed timbers like the rib cage

of some giant creature. The style was altogether looser than the portrait, but something told me the same intelligence was at work; the forms in both pictures were solid enough, the style slightly naïve, but both the half-built boat and the man with the cat had about them a sense of something unsaid, something suggested by the cat’s claws and the sorrowful old woman standing beside the unfinished boat.

At the far end of the house was a little shop where you could – finally – buy a guide book, and in it I discovered that the pictures (Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat and Building the Boat, Tréboul) were the work

“

Dearest Mother, you ask me what I am going to be: I have decided to be the greatest painter that has ever lived.

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

of the same painter, namely Christopher Wood (1901-1930). The name was familiar, and when I read the brief biography I realised why: he had died in tragic and rather mysterious circumstances, falling under a train at Salisbury station after having lunch with his mother. Wood, I recalled, had been precocious, gifted and troubled. An addiction to opium had fuelled a tremendous output of work but also made him prey to paranoid delusions that may have driven him to suicide. Nobody knows.

Born in Liverpool, Wood enjoyed a privileged upbringing and solid public school education, but his teenage years were marred by a debilitating illness that left this otherwise attractive and confident young man, who was likened to the Prince of Wales, with a limp. While growing up he showed no particular inclination towards art, but in 1920 he went to Paris and there, thanks to a mixture of good fortune and native charm, found his way into the avant-garde circle of Picasso and Jean Cocteau. Two years later he wrote to his mother, with whom he maintained a lifelong correspondence: ‘Dearest Mother, you ask me what I am going to be: I have decided to be the greatest painter that has ever lived.’

With that Wood set about becoming an artist, absorbing everything he could from the extraordinary talents around him and gradually developing his own peculiar vision. That he had ability was clear early on; his 1923 painting La Foire de Neuilly is vivacious and strange, with all manner of odd characters (including a horse) gazing

towards the viewer. While the merry-go-round is cheerfully painted, the trees behind are both dark and unsettlingly animated; already one senses that his is a troubled vision.

His life over the next few years was frenetic, as he whizzed around Europe with wealthy friends and lovers. Cocteau and his circle adopted Wood as a beautiful, flawed creature, at once naïve and worldly, and the young artist considered himself extremely fortunate.

‘He will see only very few people,’ he wrote about Cocteau, ‘so I have been lucky to have his time… I don’t suppose you, dear Mother, have read any of his things and,

Courtesy of Towner, Eastbourne

which besets these islands. They have left a clean colour and a gay humour which is essentially English.’

The following year Wood spent more time with the Nicholsons, staying at their home in Cumbria and travelling with them to St Ives, where he and Ben met Alfred Wallis. The importance of this meeting is probably exaggerated, since Wood’s naïve style and liking for dark colours were already well established, but the fishing ports of St Ives and, later, Tréboul in Brittany, were to provide him with the subject matter for his best work.

In the spring of 1930 he travelled

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with his friend Max Jacob to Tréboul, where he worked feverishly for several months. He painted scenes of public joy, as in Dancing Sailors, Brittany, and he painted moments of quiet meditation. In Mending the Nets, Tréboul a woman sits with her back to us, working at the net that hangs like a diaphanous veil over the solid Breton harbour building beyond. What is she thinking about as she works, the sea visible through the doorway in front of her? She seems as lost in contemplation as the kneeling figure in Breton Woman at Prayer, who is watched over by a strangely lifelike figure – Jesus, perhaps, or a saint, at whose feet stands a vase of flowers.

Here is a composition at once simple and profound: the standing figure gazes down at the woman, who kneels facing the window, which in turn frames a rectangle of pale yellow. The bars of the window form a cross, and it is towards the centre of this cross that our gaze is drawn.

If any other artist’s spirit hovers over this painting it is not Alfred Wallis but Winifred Nicholson, Wood’s close friend and another artist whose work was collected avidly by Jim Ede. In 1979, Nicholson addressed visitors to an exhibition of Wood’s work: “What are you of this generation saying about these pictures – are you measuring them by their place in the history of Art? They are not in the main current, there is no sequence after them. Kit Wood created no movement.”

What did he create, then? I think paintings that deserve to be looked at, often and at length, with eyes wide open and mind fully engaged.

like everybody else in England, you have never seen any of Picasso’s pictures. I can only say that the English, as a race, are terribly slow…’

Whatever the truth in this remark, English artists and critics were quick to notice Wood’s talent. With the help of Ben and Winifred Nicholson he exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, in 1927, where a critic noted that ‘he has been influenced greatly by modern French work but as yet has not been conquered. The dry winds of the continent have blown away from his canvases some traces of the fog

Courtesy of Towner, Eastbourne

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1 (page 29) Jean Bourgoint with Siamese Cat

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2 Building the Boat, Tréboul

3 Mending the Nets, Tréboul

4 Tréboul, French Crab Boat, 1929, oil on card

5 Breton Woman at Prayer

6 La Foire de Neuilly, 1922, gouache on card RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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two decades of success

Jamaica Street Studios

Gemma Brace

Photography Alice Hendy

The studio as an ‘imagined place’ has long been the subject of art and literature, showcased in Courbet’s study The Painter’s Studio, 1854-5, or Christina Georgina Rossetti’s poem In an Artist’s Studio, 1890.

We have seen the studio deified as a site of creation and then simultaneously ousted from this position with the poststudio era signifying freedom from the idealisation of the past. However, artists have yet to systematically abandon the studio as a physical site.

Occupying a prime position in Bristol’s self-proclaimed ‘cultural quarter’ sits Jamaica Street Studios, with its imposing industrial façade of iron and glass. This Grade II listed former carriage works is currently occupied by Jamaica Street Artists (JSA), with community group the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft occupying the ground floor adjoining building, and yard. Originally built in the 1880s the building has also provided a home to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves, Bristol Film Co-operative and Venue magazine, to name just a few.

It is a building steeped in history, full of memories.

However, these memories don’t just belong to its inhabitants, they are also shared by the public. As artists’ studios it has traditionally opened its doors on an annual basis, putting the space, as well as the artwork created within it, on display.

When we talk of open studios we talk of unveiling, revealing and discovery, but what has been concealed? Much of the art here can also be seen in galleries, yet year-on-year the public floods through its

doors as we go in search of tangible traces of inspiration, tiny fragments that linger like cryptic clues among the paint pots.

The artist’s studio represents a seductive, secret world, one that perpetuates its own myth, feeding our imagination, waiting to be revealed.

Key to this romanticism is the architectural structure of the studio.

In its archetypal form we imagine it simultaneously as a cold, windowless, garret and a light-filled oasis. Jamaica Street in some way conforms to both these stereotypes. The first floor is largely open, bathed in sunlight. Privacy is limited and absent walls feed a feeling of communalism. A steep narrow stairwell winds up the building encircling the now defunct lift shaft, leading to two further floors that splinter off central spinal corridors into individual rooms. These closed doors lend privacy in contrast to the openness below, but both spaces are victims to the weather. It is a building of thermal extremes retaining a suffocating heat in summer and harbouring pockets of frozen air in winter, yet this does not RWA magazine

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prevent the waiting list for available spaces growing longer and longer year-on-year.

The building itself has undergone various physical improvements since the current landlords took over in 1997.

However, it has always proven popular with artists. First occupied by Minto Studios in 1993, it has experienced various reincarnations and housed numerous groups including Cornershop, Fat Stoogie, Jam and BICA (Bristol Institute of Contemporary Art). Past tenants remember the atmosphere at the start as “chaotic, frenetic and slightly anarchic” but it was also a time of intense experimentation; conceptual art and cross-collaboration lending itself to an inter-disciplinary approach to

City Museum and Art Gallery, as a turning -point for JSA “opening doors which had previously been firmly shut”. Since then the group has gone on to stage a number of successful exhibitions around the city including group show Inside-Out, 2011, RWA; illustration showcase Red, Yellow, Blue, 2010-11, St George’s; a curatorial turn and recipient residency as part of Stroud Valley Arts Festival 2011, and the creation of The Art Box, now a regular highlight on Bristol’s pop-up shop calendar.

Today the studio is home to a remarkably entrepreneurial spirit with artists making their way in the world as various hybrids; designers, illustrators and teachers. Artists use the space in a variety of ways. Night owl Patrick

Brandon would exploit the studio’s evening lull, painting throughout the night. His abstract creations produce narratives that lie somewhere between literature and art, word and image.

Part-time teachers Vera Boele-Keimer RWA and Dan Parry-Jones utilise the space in short bursts of creativity, fitting their practice around teaching hours.

Since joining the studio in 2010 ParryJones has seen his career and his art develop. Now exhibiting with Edgar Modern, Bath, and The Cube Gallery, Bristol, his textured urban landscapes are haunted by outcrops of lonely buildings providing the back-drop for his stencilled figures, locked in the subterranean world of childhood, deep in concentration.

Within the building there is always movement with artists vying for coveted spaces. Parry-Jones has recently swapped the privacy of the third-floor for the open-plan of the first, and with this, its desirable light. He joins, Hood among others, and painters Abigail McDougall, well-known locally for her luminescent watercolours, illustrator turned painter Serena Curmi and landscape artist Anthony Garratt. Garratt is one of many artists who have slowly made a name for themselves during their time in the studio. His energetic landscapes sweep across the canvas, taking in expansive vistas, creating a sense of atmosphere and depth. Other upstairs painters working in seclusion include Elaine Jones and her abstracted seascapes, Abigail Reed’s behemoth animals, looming tall and proud, and rising star Rose Sanderson’s intricate renderings of wildlife floating upon heavily textured backgrounds.

the studio is a space of transf making. Art, music and film collided, with a programme of talks, screenings and exhibitions. The origins of JSA can be traced back to the late 90s, when its first Chairman Graeme Mortimer Evelyn played a pivotal role in the gradual formalisation of the studio’s structure and identity. But it was 2003’s Retox Festival of Contemporary Art that confirmed the group’s status as a fullyfledged fixture within Bristol’s cultural tapestry. As a city-wide event it reached beyond the physical boundaries of the studio, utilising alternative spaces such as Avery’s wine vaults and culminating in a symposium reflecting on art, culture and regeneration, a topic still relevant today.

Over the years the studio has evolved with the area, known for its struggle between regeneration and gentrification.

Artist Andrew Hood cites the studio’s fundraising auction in 2009 at Bristol

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

With more of an emphasis on commercialism than perhaps existed in its early years the studio is also home to a number of illustrators and designers.

Bristol-born Hannah McVicar creates horticulturally inspired screen-prints and designs, and is now a regular fixture at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Emma Dibben’s recognisable food illustrations feature on Waitrose’ ‘bag for life’ and newcomer Anna Higgie’s fashion illustrations have graced the pages of Nylon and Dazed and Confused. Fine artist Anouk Mercier, Higgie’s studio-mate, has also added a new dimension to the studio, with her painstakingly detailed studies, elevating the art of drawing in its own right.

There are a number of artists operating internationally. Contemporary artist Evelyn has achieved international recognition for his provocative and subversive work, tackling universal themes of memory, myth and historical narrative. His projects span the local and the international, including a residency at St Stephen’s Church, Bristol, culminating in the piece Reconciliation Reredos unveiled in 2011; and the Caribbean Curatorship and National Identity Conference in Barbados in 2009, where he was the only invited British artist on the panel. Similarly, painter Karin Krommes has received international attention for her highly-stylised paintings depicting mutations between insects and

“

It is space to create and take apart.

A space to learn and un-learn. A space of loss and retrieval: memories, ideas and inspiration.

ormation, a place for memory machinery, and illustrator Bjorn Rune Lie, originally hailing from Norway, has a global client base including Texan based Yee-haw Industries and the New York Times. The list of past studio tenants also presents an impressive roll-call including RWA Danny Markey, Peruvian installation artist Lizi Sanchez, Chris Sage, Blast Theory founder Nicholas Tandovanicz, John Hayward, Annabel Other and Elin Thomas.

As a space for artists, its future looks relatively secure. The current landlords are keen that a proportion of the property always remains as studio space, and the artists themselves are committed to retaining the studio’s identity as a space run by, and for, artists. The building itself has harboured many dreams over the years adding to the myth and magic of the studio construct. At a forum in 2009 at The Courtauld Institute of Art a pertinent question was posed; ‘What is the function, and significance, of the studio

for artists working today?’. Artist and panel member Antony Gormley responded with the suggestion that “the studio is a space of transformation, a place for memory.” But whose memories does a studio contain; the artist’s? The artworks’? The privacy of the artist’s studio facilitates transformation, but perhaps most importantly experimentation.

It is space to create and take apart. A space to learn and un-learn. A space of loss and retrieval: memories, ideas and inspiration.

Here, work is made, painted, sculpted, drawn, dragged out of the canvas into being. Space in which to trial and cast aside, littering the floor with prototypes, almostworks, leaving traces of genius in the most romantic sense.

Jamaica Street Artists will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the studio in 2013 and can currently be seen at The Art Box at The Showroom, College Green, Bristol.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

35

Exhibition from 7th December 2012

35 Gay Street, Bath BA1 2NT t 01225 461230 www.bathcontemporary.com

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

Doris Hatt was one of the most distinctive and advanced artists working in the West Country during the first half of the 20th century.

Born in 1890 and from a wellknown and affluent Bath family, she received a privileged education in London, Vienna and Paris, studying in London at the Royal College of Art and at Goldsmith’s College, but it was her visits to Paris in the early 1920s that were to inspire her artistic direction. Denys J. Wilcox continues the story:

Doris Hatt Denys J. Wilcox

Passionate Modernist

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

Having initially been influenced by Paul and John Nash and the Romantic English landscape tradition, Hatt was soon captivated by the modern Paris School – Braque, Léger and Picasso. She began exhibiting with the Clifton Arts Club in 1921 where fellow exhibitors included Wyndham Lewis, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Even in this company the strength and quality of her paintings were quickly noticed, prompting Albert Rutherston to write of her ‘distinction’ and her ‘curiosity and conscience’. However it was the intoxicating atmosphere of Paris during the 1920s with its euphoric optimism for the speed and dynamism of the new machine age that was to have the most profound impact on her life and work.

Hatt first visited Paris in 1922 and was drawn to Léger’s free school where she was able to develop her own personal take on Cubism bringing a uniquely English quality to an international movement.

She became steeped in the writings of Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (more commonly known as the architect Le Corbusier) and their modernist doctrine of Purism. This was the new gospel for the thrilling age of science and mechanisation which rejected early Cubism’s fragmentation of reality in favour of a monumental style that celebrated the production line and the standardisation of objects for modern life. In painting, the most dominant and successful exponent of the new Utopian creed was Fernand Léger who had experienced the horrors of the trenches first hand but held a determined belief in the possibility of a better world and thus embraced the representation of reality in heroic terms. Hatt was also certainly influenced by Léger’s commitment to Communism – a political ideal that was to become the cornerstone of her life.

Returning to Clevedon in the late 1920s she opened her studio once a week offering free art classes to locals in her desire to educate and open minds to the new developments in art. She delivered regular public talks on art in a brave attempt to communicate her ideas to a wider public as she did not want to ‘live in a vacuum’ and feel isolated from her community. During the 1930s a family inheritance enabled her to commission the building of a starkly modern house and studio according to Bauhaus principles where she lived and worked with her life-long partner, the weaver Marjory Mack Smith. Her home became a centre for radical activity both in art and politics and was a meeting place for like-minded people throughout the region causing a stir amongst Clevedon’s ‘polite’ and predominantly conservative society.

Hatt developed a painting style that was meticulous in its planning and execution.

Her great mantra being ‘simplify and at the same time intensify’, her guiding aim was to present only essential elements in her compositions. ‘This will give you a sense of power and well being as you study the picture.’ Yet as her friend and supporter Professor Peter Millard observed – ‘There was nothing brutal about Doris’s paintings, nothing raw...

It is typical of English artists to take an international style, and then to soften and lyricise it, giving it an essentially English sensitivity.’ Indeed there is a strong Romanticism in Doris Hatt’s work which pays homage to the ancient traditions of painting.

A highly political feminist, Hatt became a member of the Independent Labour Party soon after the First World War, but in response to the rise of Fascism during the early 1930s she joined the Communist Party and was a tireless activist even standing for election as a Communist candidate in Clevedon during the 1946 local elections. She began her election leaflet with the following statements: ‘I believe that Clevedon Council cannot be representative of the majority of the Clevedon people unless there is an increase of Councillors with workingclass sympathies. I think also that Women should be represented on the Council. At present there are no Women Councillors.’

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According to Professor Millard, ‘Doris Hatt’s Communism was gentle and kind, and suffused with solid middle-class virtues.’ Her political passions were guided by an empathy for others and a belief in fairness and equality. She was also widely and affectionately known in Clevedon for her regular visits round the local pubs selling the Daily Worker and she remained staunchly loyal to the Communist cause right up to her death in 1969. In the light of Picasso’s membership of the Communist Party, she was formally invited by the Soviet Embassy as the Communist representative to the opening preview of the great Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London in 1960. Much honoured by the invitation, she attended the private view dressed in traditional Spanish costume, borrowing a long black

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...she attended the private view dressed in traditional Spanish costume, borrowing a long black dress and an old mantilla.

dress and wearing an old mantilla leading the press to believe that she was a relative of the great artist.

During the last twenty years of her life Hatt divided her time between Clevedon and her partner’s cottage in Watchet and these two places provided many of the subjects for her paintings and coloured linocuts. Her paintings gained acceptance in Paris and she exhibited regularly at Galerie Zack and her work was favourably reviewed in La Revue Moderne. Although she was a prolific exhibitor in the South West, particularly at the RWA and the Clifton Arts Club, she was never inclined to secure a regular London dealer and perhaps as a result of this she is not as widely known today as she deserves to be.

She lived a courageous and inspirational life, full of passion, commitment and individuality which is richly evident in her powerful, life-affirming, paintings.

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A major book about Doris Hatt will be published by Sansom & Co in 2014 and a retrospective is planned for the RWA.

1 (page 37) On The Telephone c. 1960s 2 (page 37) Hatt in her Clevedon studio c. 1950s 3 Still Life with Guitar, 1957 – RWA collection

4 Cottage & Boats c. 1940s 5 The Fish Stall, Antibes, 1951 6 Porth Gwarra c. 1930s 7 The Orchard c. 1920 – showing the influence of Paul and John Nash RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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Inside the artist’s studio There is something unexpected hiding behind the traditional Georgian front of a townhouse in Bristol, where the tranquil status quo of neighbouring Clifton residences is shattered by a resurgence of bohemian burlesque.

A grand entrance hall flaunts 1920s period wallpaper, peacocks with draping plumage wind their way up four floors; decidedly faded and wonderfully shabby. Ruth Margrove and photographer Alice Hendy welcome us to the home and studio of Rosalind Grimshaw, one of Europe’s best-known glass artists.

Ruth Margrove 40

RWA magazine Winter 2012

Rosalind Grimshaw FMGP

Opened in 1996, the walls of Grimshaw’s studio on the ground floor of the house are lined with pigeon holes stuffed with glass in every colour, shade and thickness. Long work benches are scattered with soldering irons and other tools, and pieces of glass terrazzi waiting to be fitted into a work of art. A spiral staircase leads to a mezzanine floor, where 40 years of design work is stored. At every point the visitor is greeted with reminders of great works from the glory days of stained glass, from Chartres Cathedral to York Minster.

Rosalind Grimshaw was elected as a fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters in 1997, after a lifetime of contribution to the Arts and Craft movement in stained glass. She studied fine art at Brighton, Ravensbourne and Hornsey before settling in Bristol, training in stained glass with Joseph Bell & Son in 1975. She has worked in the theatre and in education, in the UK and Africa. However, her main passion has always been for glass. Living and working in the same house for over 40 years, she has completed over 300 commissions for public and private collections in Bristol, across the UK and in Paris.

The Creation Window at Chester Cathedral, completed in 2001 with Patrick Costeloe, is perhaps Grimshaw’s greatest accomplishment. The design of the six-light window, charting the six days of creation from Genesis, incorporates aspects of the past, present and future, in line with the Benedictine tradition. For Grimshaw, the natural world is an ongoing and evolving creation, therefore she chose to include imagery of flowing river deltas, thunder storms and African grass planes as the cradle of human civilisation.

Six panels across the lower aspect of the window add a modern twist to the story, with some contemporary wonders of science such as a foetal ultrasound, a view from the Hubble space telescope and Grimshaw’s own brain scan.

All aspects of the Creation Window are uniquely captured in the vivid Technicolor of the glass, evolving by the hour as the light changes with the passing sun. When I visited Chester, a woman working in the cathedral café, on hearing that I knew the artist, demanded that I call her to express her delight at viewing the window every day. I think Ros was greatly touched by this gesture.

The studio itself leads out to a conservatory, which maximises the light through which to showcase some of Grimshaw’s extraordinary talent. An assortment of window panels glow in the low evening light, capturing the movement of dancers, or the peace of her slumbering children, now grown.

Iridescent mirrored windows and mirrors crowned with glass mosaic hang in every corner. On an easel rests a painting of Jimmy Hendrix with a spray painted gold halo, above which hangs a life size puppet on stilts. Nothing is ordered or straightforward here, reflecting the artist’s mind and style of work – experimental and daring.

Grimshaw’s recent commissions have been for private collections and therefore on a smaller scale.

She has been experimenting with fused glass, where compatible glass is layered, before it is fired in the kiln at up to 900°c. Sometimes, she has been known to layer glass with copper which when fired turns the most exquisite turquoise. The latest window to have emerged from the studio is called Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils depicting an abstract couple dancing.

Different shades of oranges and pink copper-rimmed glass are layered to make up the picture, a personal project. The next window planned draws on the theme ‘Games from early childhood’, it will depict her young grandchild climbing a tree, exploring the possibilities of life through games.

What is unique about this studio is that it is run by one woman with vision, character and personal determination at an age past retirement.

Grimshaw has lived with Parkinson’s for the last 30 years and takes medication every two hours to ease the slowing of her motor faculties.

The side effect of this however, is a reduction in her ability to control her movement, among other things. Despite this, it remains a marvel to watch her hand steady, totally in control as she cuts the glass with a knife or holds glass to the light to examine it. “You must not treat glass as though it is a solid,” she reminds me, “it is more of a liquid, it isn’t brittle.”

Although still wishing to teach again at some point within the Arts and Craft movement, Grimshaw last exhibited her fused glass in the On The Edge travelling exhibition in 2010; since then she has continued to experiment with glass methods, rather than teaching or exhibiting.

Rosalind Grimshaw’s work and studio is a testament to the human condition, illustrating perfectly how passion can help overcome predicaments, however rough the road or fraught the journey.

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... evolving by the hour as the light changes with the passing sun.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

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The title of this ravishing book, Sanctuary, suggests a secure place, hidden from

public gaze and this is the first publication in half a century to look behind the scenes at artists’ working lives and workplaces, encouraging them to speak, delving into their minds and methodology. Many art lovers harbour romantic notions about artists’ studios.

Beyond the sheer celebrity of

a famous, or successful artist lies the possibility that a peep into their studio will somehow confer upon the viewer some of the artist’s Bohemian magic.

Sanctuary dishes up this experience in spades, opening doors normally closed to the public, inviting delight, intrigue and a sprinkle of controversy.

First up, Tom Morton offers the reader Field Notes On British Art In The Third Millennium, an erudite but jaunty sashay through ten years of British art, embracing among others, Anish Kapoor, George Shaw, Michael Landy, Mark Wallinger and Roger Hiorns.

Then comes Iwona Blazwick’s The Studio – An A To Z. Her alphabetic entries include Boredom, Factory, Hermeticism, Night-Time and Politics – each entry opening up a short but provocative dialectic into the mystery behind the mystery of the studio.

By now, when we reach Richard Cork’s Studio Visits we are a mere 26 pages into this extraordinary tome.

This section is the meat of

the book, its purpose: 120 artists living and working in Britain today surveyed, from the most noteworthy to up and coming talent.

In today’s world, the studio has become an observation platform for assessing surrounding life, a creative centre for experimentation often extending beyond a big room. With this in mind, Cork takes his interviewees out of the studio, challenging them on Art, politics and life in general.

The accompanying images chosen are photographed in exquisite detail by Robin Friend who devotes up to six photographs to each ‘sanctuary’. You may quibble with the artists chosen for inclusion, but my guess is that the authors simply dropped any whose studio space wasn’t worth analysis. As by its nature art is transitory, the book may have a relatively short shelf life and at £48 a pop, may seem way too expensive. But if you want a truly absorbing read, with images to drool over, Sanctuary is a must for lovers of contemporary British art.

Richard Storey

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In My View: personal reflections on art by today’s leading artists Simon Grant (ed.)

Christopher Wood: an English painter Richard Ingleby

Hassel Smith: Tip Toe Down to Art – Paintings 1937 – 1997 Paul J. Karlstrom, Susan Landauer, Petra Gilroy-Hirtz (ed.)

212pp: Prestel, 2012 ISBN 978 3 791 35107 0

Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages 1941 – 1991: A Catalogue Raisonne Jack Flam, Tim Clifford, Katy Rogers

Hassel Smith is well known to Bristol via his time as Principle Lecturer at Bower Ashton art college from 197879. At times, his own abstract works suggest a looming and intimidating presence encroaching across the heavily pigmented surface. This has parallels in the work of Robert Motherwell, for example his wonderful cycle – Elegies to the Spanish Republic. In other pieces we find a pure painterly outburst comparable in handling to Howard Hodgkin.

Anthony Townsend

Robert Motherwell is one of the towering figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement, as painter, renowned thinker and critic.

Although Motherwell’s work often shared the epic scale and matched the ambition and range of his contemporaries, his work is perhaps less portentous than some of the works produced by other Abstract Expressionists. This is a huge tome befitting the legacy of this 20th century artistic giant. AT

// BOOK Sanctuary: Britain’s Artists and their Studios Hossein Amirsadeghi (ed.)

600pp: Transglobe Publishing, 2012 ISBN 978 0 954 508 395

208pp: Thames & Hudson, 2012 ISBN 978 0 500 238 967

In My View is a selection by more than 75 contemporary artists of their favoured works from the past: artworks that have inspired, or triggered a memory.

Works they find beautiful or that resonate with their own artistic practices. Or simply art they find hard to get out of their minds. The result is a wonderful mix of artworks from around the world that provide an alternative history of art, from the 15th century through to the 1960s. RS

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

295pp: Allison & Busby, 1995 ISBN 0 85031 849 1

Christopher Wood is the story of the 1920s traced through the success and failure of one short life. Wood, the only English painter to design for Diaghilev, sketch with Picasso and smoke opium with Jean Cocteau. His paintings of Cornwall and Brittany are among the most sensitive English landscapes of the inter-war years. Ingleby draws extensively on previously unpublished letters and his perceptive and moving work is the first biography of Wood and it fills a gap in the history of modern British painting. RS

1712pp (3 volumes): Yale University Press, 2012 ISBN 978 0 300 149 159

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Once upon a time, around 988 AD, in the frozen wastelands of Russia, the pagan Prince Vladimir was bombarded by missionaries urging him to join their faiths. He chose the Greek Orthodox of Byzantium, in particular, Constantinople.

The splendour and beauty

of the churches, the incense, music and singing, convinced Vladimir that heaven could be found on earth and so he was baptised and decreed that wooden churches be built.

Once upon another time, 2002 AD, the architectural photographer, Richard Davies, came across some postcards of wooden churches in Northern Russia. His nine-year quest, in some of the harshest inhabited terrains on earth, to track down and record in photographs and stories, what might remain of these fragile and desecrated structures, is travel writing and journeying beautifully and tragically told. Visually breathtaking, this book offers a fascinating social, political and cultural history of Russia and a privileged insight into the daily lives of the people who still inhabit the wild places of the North. Jilly Cobbe

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Jenny Saville: Continuum Jenny Saville

Matisse: In Search of True Painting Rebecca A. Rabinow, Dorthe Aagesen

Turner’s Secret Sketches Ian Warrell

Derek Balmer’s lavishly illustrated monograph includes a fascinating memoir in which he witnesses the Bristol art scene of the 1950s and early 60s. He describes the adventure and ease of travelling around the country in his Romantic’s pursuit of high culture and the common

person, before the whiff of the Mediterranean was to exert its pull.

Later Balmer reveals a sense of responsibility toward family and the mortgage, choosing the security of professional photography over approaches from the Leicester Gallery. However, this whatmight-have-been eventually drove him to walk away from his successful business, to attend full-time to the painting that he so passionately cares about.

In Andrew Lambirth’s interview you sense the critic trying to nudge Balmer to more seriously regard his ‘white’ paintings. But as the excellent reproductions reveal, his curiosity persists and his most recent work holds a significantly new liquid character not present before.

Stewart Geddes

// BOOK Rembrandt and the Passion Peter Black, Erma Hermens

// BOOK A Singular Vision Derek Balmer, Andrew Lambirth, ACH Smith

240pp: Sansom & Company Ltd., 2012 ISBN 978 1 908 326 225

160pp: Prestel, 2012 ISBN 978 3 791 34736 3

This is a gem of a book – concentrating on a single work – the Entombment Sketch from the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.

The book traces the artistic influences upon Rembrandt’s representation of Christ’s Passion in various paintings. But where this book really excels is in the close examination of Rembrandt’s technique, focusing on the Entombment Sketch to provide in-depth analysis both through beautiful reproductions and descriptions of Rembrandt’s sublime handling of materials. AT

132pp: Rizzoli International Publications, 2012 ISBN 978 0 847 839 100

Jenny Saville’s work is indebted to the example of Lucian Freud, but where his slow deliberate style forced the viewer into a protracted manner of viewing, Saville utilises a far more fluid and speedy pictorial gesture.

What she shares most closely with Freud is a brutality of expression. Saville has taken that brutality further, at times painting flesh as if flayed – a more exact historical equivalent can be found in Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. AT

// BOOK Wooden Churches: travelling in the Russian North Richard Davies and Matilda Moreton 256pp: White Sea Publishing, 2011 ISBN 978 0 957 045 606

256pp: Yale University Press, 2012 ISBN 978 0 300 188 578

This book approaches Matisse’s oeuvre from an interesting perspective, looking at how Matisse furthered his artistic development via a dialogue with other artists and perhaps equally importantly, with his own work. Through these dialogues Matisse pursued a singular vision paring down to what was essential to express his artistic vision – peeling off any aspect which he considered superfluous in the search for what he considered ‘true painting’. AT

144pp: Tate Publishing, 2012 ISBN 978 1 849 760 850

This work investigates the erotic sketches of JMW Turner, a number of which were supposedly destroyed by his admirer John Ruskin.

The salacious details surrounding these works overshadow the true value in the best of the watercolour nudes. These, through the freedom of colour and form, anticipate the later developments in figure painting in Modernist art, for example Bonnard’s nudes and Matisse’s odalisques. AT

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

43

Make my day

Roger Stennett

People keep stealing me. I think that’s pretty messed up – as if I don’t have enough to deal with, what with being facially challenged. But things are changing. I’m wising up, as they say in The Big Apple. And that’s where I am, at the time of writing unless, at the time of reading, I’m stashed under a tarpaulin in the back of a white van.

I’m at MOMA – The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Not that it’s all beer and skittles. Hurricanes tearing up Broadway and rats drowning in the subways. Apocalyptic I’d call it, and I know a thing or three about Cosmic Angst. Incidentally, do I look 118? It’s a fair question, because 118 years of pastel on board isn’t always a good look. What’s that? I look a million dollars. Higher, Honey … $119.9 million to be precise.

Perhaps that’s why people keep stealing me.

Do you know I’ve been called ‘The Mona Lisa of Modern Art’? We’ve never met, Mona and me, but she seems a nice girl. How come no one steals her? Down in the gift shop you can buy an inflatable version of me. Bet you’ve never seen a blow-up Mona.

Edvard Munch calls his paintings his ‘children’. Bit of a nut job, or what the NYPD call an EDP: emotionally disturbed person. How come I know all this police jargon ? I have an iPad now, and when the MOMA is closed I watch movies. Bobby De Niro is my favourite. Taxi Driver is still his best work. I’ve bought myself a .44 Magnum. Not the ice-cream sort; it’s a big gun like Bobby had. Then when the next art thieves come calling I can say, in the voice of the young De Niro: “Are you stealing me? Are YOU stealing ME?” That would be enough to scare the bejaysus out of them.

You have no idea what pictures get up to in the hours of darkness. Come midnight we’re up and out of our frames and living a life. Sun comes up and we’re all safely tucked back in our frames, but for hours we just party. And no-one stares. No-one mimics me or makes jokes

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

about Halloween. We accept each other.

And believe me, some of the Surrealists take a bit of accepting. But unlike the human beings who come to stare, we have real humanity.

Want to know a secret? Why I was screaming that day when Mister Munch captured me for posterity? Here’s his version: “One evening I was walking along a path, the city on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. The sun was setting and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I had heard the scream. I painted the picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked. This became The Scream” That’s one way of putting it. But the true way is this. I was out with my friends Eyulf and Ragnar. You can see them in the background of the picture.

We were having a great time, laughing and drinking the odd bottle of Babycham.

We didn’t have a care. We were in the first broken flush of youth. We were ‘roaring boys’ and free. And then I remembered the porridge. The porridge I was making on

the stove when Eyulf and Ragnar came to call. The porridge I was making on the stove that I didn’t turn off when Eyulf and Ragnar came calling. Suddenly I had this vision of what the kitchen would look like when I got home. And when that smokeblackened thought dawned, I let out a howl just as this painter guy walks by and from the look in his eye I knew he’d clocked me. I knew that he’d seen and filed away my traumatic porridge moment and for the rest of time he’d be trading on it.

Do you know what royalties I receive from the posters and postcards and T-shirts and Halloween masks ? Nothing.

Not one brass krona. Is it any wonder I’m stuck in the rictus of what we Norwegians call skrik. It’s the combination of burnt porridge and exploitation that’s so hard to stomach.

Ssh! What’s that? Someone is coming.

And they’re wearing stocking masks.

Time to attend to business. And, as Clint Eastwood said: “Do you feel lucky, punk?

Well – do you ?” And with that I’ll cock my .44 Magnum and whisper into their artthieving ears. “Go on … make my day”.

Bob Rudd Watercolours 24 November 2012 – 20 January 2013 All works for sale

Victoria Art Gallery

by Pulteney Bridge Bath BA2 4AT Tel. 01225 477233 www.victoriagal.org.uk Tue-Sat 10.00-5.00 Sun 1.30-5.00 Closed Mondays and Bank Holidays Free Admission

Old Harry Rocks, Purbeck (detail)

    



Hire the RWA Galleries for your special event

      



• • • • • •

Award ceremonies Receptions Weddings Conferences Lectures Dinners

Hire costs from £150 to £2000 per event.

Contact Angharad Redman on 0117 906 7608 or at angharad.redman@rwa.org.uk



RWA magazine

Winter 2012

45

// Friends News & Events

RWA Friends Painting Holiday 2013 The Friends Cultural Group opportunity to volunteer

RWA Visit to Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire On a glorious autumn day, the Friends Cultural Group entered gilded gates to visit Waddesdon Manor, a spectacular Rothschild Chateau, deep in the English countryside.

Under the National Trust mantle, Waddesdon houses the Rothschild’s collection of 18th century French decorative arts together with English portraits, Dutch Old Masters, a vast display of Sevres porcelain and 16th century Majolica. One room is devoted to gorgeous, painted panels depicting Sleeping Beauty in Pre-Raphaelite style by the Russian artist Leon Bakst (1866 – 1924).

The ceramicist Edmund de Waal has created a series of minimalist installations, specifically for Waddesdon and currently these are threaded throughout, and contrasting with, the highly ornate downstairs rooms.

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

Apart from a small collection of Lucian Freud portraits, the Edmund de Waal, and a magnificent contemporary chandelier, modern artworks are generally represented in the gardens where, in collaboration with Christie’s, the Rothschilds have developed an impressive sculpture park. Here we could view, at close quarters, works by artists such as Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Eva Rothschild while being close by the large, ornate aviary – a bird lover’s delight.

This was a fascinating and much appreciated opportunity to enjoy stunningly elaborate collections of the Rothschild family in a magnificent pastoral setting.

Geraldine Nicholls

The Friends Cultural Group works happily and efficiently under the auspices of the RWA although with some independence.

We meet for about two hours once every six weeks or two months and produce a series of exciting and interesting visits for the benefit of the RWA and Friends.

The group enjoys a most pleasant and productive atmosphere and would welcome someone who feels they can commit and contribute. The position involves researching and leading a visit approximately once (maximum twice) a year, with obvious support from the Group.

Please contact Chairman Tom Butt or Group Secretary Ann Baber if you would like to be considered or require further information: e: trips@rwa.org.uk Tom Butt

By popular demand we will again be hosting our annual painting holiday for 2013 at the Cottage Hotel, Hope Cove, Devon. This venue has always received great reviews from previous RWA Friends.

Probable dates 3rd or 4th week in May. Further information on prices and dates will be available after Christmas.

Please contact Ann Baber: t: 01934 513993 e: trips@rwa.org.uk

C0 M10 Y0 K50

Become a Friend and be part of the most exciting and inspirational regional centre for the visual arts

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types of membership single annual £35

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• unlimited free entry to all RWA exhibitions • you and a guest invited to private views and special events • a copy of ART magazine mailed directly to you • latest programme, early notice of events, lectures, workshops • 10% off delicious food and drink in our lovely café • see our website for latest offers and information about the Friends Annual membership single £35 joint £50 student* £15

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*Student membership requires ID, valid for a maximum of 3 years

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to pay your Friends membership • Please call the RWA on 0117 973 5129 to pay by card over the phone • Alternatively fill in this form, return it to the RWA and we will contact you to arrange payment • Or please feel free to visit us and become a Friend and straight away start enjoying all the benefits our annual Friends membership has to offer

Special offer • To celebrate our 160th Autumn Open Exhibition we are offering 20% off our RWA Friends Single and Joint Annual Membership until the 30 December • Friends memberships make great presents – why not give your art-loving friend a Christmas gift that will last all year

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, please complete this form and return to Royal West of England Academy, Queens Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1PX Alternatively please make cheques payable to: RWA and return this section to: Angharad Redman, 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.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

47

Academicians’ news 48

RWA magazine Winter 2012

Louise Balaam RWA has a number of forthcoming exhibitions and events including the New English Art Club Annual Open Exhibition, Mall Galleries, 30 November – 9 December; Christmas show, Fairfax Gallery, Tunbridge Wells; Christmas show, White Space Art, Totnes, Devon; Christmas show, Russell Gallery, Putney, 29 November – end January; Christmas show: 100 works under £500, Hilton Fine Art, Bath.

Jon Buck RWA has a forthcoming solo exhibition Turning Inside Out: recent sculptures and drawings, 7 November – 22 December, Pangolin London. www.pangolinlondon.com Nigel Casseldine RWA has work selected for the forthcoming East Anglian Art Fund, Norwich Open Exhibition – Vision and Reality to be held at Norwich Castle museum 20 October – 9 December. Inspired by a quote by the painter Cedric Morris, who lived and worked in East Anglia, the show will be staged alongside a major loan exhibition Cedric Morris and Christopher Wood: A Forgotten Friendship, 20 October – 31 December.

Nigel will also be showing at the Buckenham Galleries, Southwold, Suffolk, November to January in a small one-man show entitled; The Artist as Schizophrenic, Buckenham Galleries, www.buckenhamgalleries.co.uk PJ Crook RWA has been busy preparing her London show which runs at the Alpha Gallery, 23 Cork Street until 7 December. Her paintings will next be shown with Panter & Hall Gallery at the London Art Fair 16 – 20 January. On the weekend of 1 and 2 December she holds an open studio in aid of The National Star College (of which she is Patron) and Friends of Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum (of which she is President).

Gareth Edwards RWA has recently had a successful independent show Natural Capital: Working Title at the Newlyn Art Gallery. Edwards exhibited 8 mountain paintings as part of an ongoing project

that will culminate in a oneperson show at the Millennium Gallery in St. Ives in spring 2013. Edwards was selected for a major new show at Plymouth City Gallery as part of an NSA/ Plymouth collaboration called New Light on Newlyn, opened autumn 2012.

A group of Peter Ford RWA’s etchings were shown recently in an exhibition in Harbin, North East China.

The exhibition celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum and was on view through October and November last year. From mid-January to March, Peter will be showing a large print and paperwork at the Horst Janssen Museum, Oldenburg near Bremen in Northern Germany. This exhibition combines selected works from the 2012 Kraków International Print Triennial with works on paper by contemporary German artists.

Stewart Geddes RWA was chosen by Albert Irvin RA RWA as one of the representative artists at the 21st Discerning Eye show at the Mall Galleries, London.

Christopher Glanville RWA has completed a series of canvases based on the World Heritage Jurassic Coast. This is a continuation of his theme ‘At the Water’s Edge’. Several works from this subject developed in England, France, Italy and Africa have been exhibited at previous RWA exhibitions. Some examples in the latest series from Lyme Bay and Charmouth have already been purchased into private collections, and, in addition will be featured in the 2012 RWA Autumn Exhibition, others will be on show at the Jerram Gallery in Sherborne, Dorset.

Kurt Jackson RWA launched a new book at Tate St. Ives in November published by Lund Humphries.

Sketchbooks sees Jackson’s sketches appreciated as work in their own right. Jackson is also launching The Artist’s Pint in collaboration with the St. Ives Brewery. For more information please visit www. stives-brewery.co.uk

Luke Mitchell, RWA Artist Network Member, has invited Academicians to be part of an exciting new project.

He will be working at the RWA from 8 – 13 December on a project that brings back the idea of the Court Painter in a series of largeformat daguerreotype-esque photographs. The historically referenced portraits, made using a 5x4 view camera will be complemented with hand painted backgrounds.

Taking place during the annual Autumn Exhibition, the project celebrates the history of the Academy and its Academicians, whilst creating a juxtaposition between the historical and the contemporary. The public will be able to view Luke’s work in progress at the start of this on-going project which will include future opportunities for the public to commission their own photographic portraits. Academicians have been invited to have their portrait made as part of this project. If you are interested in finding out more about the project please contact lukemitchell101@hotmail. co.uk Ione Parkin RWA has a solo show at the Quest Gallery, Bath from 4 December 2012 – 26 January 2013. There will be a catalogue for the show available from the gallery.

Her work is also featured in The Nature of Things, at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, as part of the ‘Art at the Heart’ programme of events celebrating the 80th anniversary of the hospital.

Maxine Relton RWA has new paintings, prints and drawings available to see at her gallery in Horsley, Gloucestershire. The gallery is always open to visitors by appointment. Relton will be leading her next small-group trip Sketchbook Journey to India 10 – 24 February. For all details, email the artist: maxine.relton@tiscali.co.uk

Masterpieces of conceptual art Dr. Tracy O’Shire picks her five favourites: Sol LeWitt ‘Conceptual artists leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.’

1

Erased de Kooning Drawing (Robert Rauschenberg, 1953) Is erasing another artist’s work in itself a creative act?

And is it ‘art’ just because Rauschenberg did it?

Artist’s Shit (Piero Manzoni, 1961) Ninety 30gram tins were priced by weight at the then current value of gold. They have since vastly outstripped inflation.

2

3

Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity (Yves Klein, 1962) Klein auctions his ‘aesthetic sensitivity’ to seven Parisian bidders in exchange for gold leaf. They receive a certificate of Klein’s ‘sensitivity’, which they must burn. Klein then throws the gold leaf in the Seine.

Clock (One and Five) (Joseph Kosuth, 1965) A clock, a photo of a clock and an enlarged dictionary definition of ‘time’. Which in all these is the work of art?

4

Shedboatshed: Mobile Architecture no 2 (Simon Starling, 2005) A wooden shed, dismantled and turned into a boat, is sailed down the Rhine then reassembled once more as a shed.

1 Maxine Relton 2 Jon Buck 3 Christopher Glanville 4 Kurt Jackson 5

5 PJ Crook RWA magazine

Winter 2012

49

People

Chris Friel Chris Friel’s unorthodox use of movement within his extraordinary images has attracted a wide, international audience of enthusiasts. John Umney recently met Friel for this exclusive interview.

There is an expectation that photographers depict the truth, that the depressed shutter captures a moment and that the camera never lies. There is however, an inherent fabrication in the proposition that the photographic process freezes that moment; the moment isn’t held – it continues. Life moves on between the opening and closing of the shutter, we are deceived to believe the moment is held in stasis for the amusement of the viewer. The development of the camera to this day continues to strive to deliver sharply focused pictures, which for the most part is what most people want, and in the digital age those shots which don’t comply with the norm usually find themselves in the deleted folder.

Photographer Chris Friel attempts no such deception; rather, with a highly

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

// Close-up

developed technique he amplifies the notion of time as he sets out to portray his personal view of, mainly, the Kentish land and seascapes near his home. Friel, who had previously painted these scenes in an abstract idiom influenced by the likes of David Greenall, Kurt Jackson and Howard Hodgkin, used the camera initially as a processor of record – to photograph his paintings – as a purveyor of truth, but he soon found the ability of the camera to express more accurately his view of those favoured vistas. In an interview in Oxford MOMA with Hodgkin, Andrew GrahamDickson paraphrased a quotation of Picasso by saying that all modern painters since van Gogh have had to develop their own language: Friel’s move to photography has helped to develop his own vocabulary into a more fully formed language.

Turning to photography in the digital age, Friel has had none of the physical encumbrances of film. Relying solely on one of two lenses he will often take hundreds of photographs during a trip and, utilising just the camera screen, reject all but a handful. This freedom of expression, where the construction of the image is largely created in among the

subject, helps to imbue an energy into the image; an energy he felt his paintings somehow lacked. Friel’s photographs of the sea in particular capture the many moods that it possesses and also express the energy of the ocean.

Friel believes that his work with early computers in the development of aleatoric music, where pure chance is part of the process, has probably influenced his photographic output. The intentional introduction of movement into a process that has prided itself on the capture of super-sharp images seems a particularly and purposely transgressive act. The movement of the camera will introduce random effects that may by chance emphasise the photographer’s impression of the view. The notion that Friel could accurately pre-visualise the image in the way that ‘real photographers’ such as Weston or Adams strove to do, would be made a lie by the sheer volume of pictures he takes on a visit to the beach in front of his house. Combining both the random elemental wind and sea with the movement of the camera, the use of tilt / shift lenses all contrive to bring about the extraordinary images that characterise Friel’s work.

Red Sea

While most of his output is in landscape and influenced by, among others, the Canadian photographer Frank Grisdale, there are appearances of people in his work. Friel also states that Alexey Titarenko and Susan Burnstine are among his influences, both of whom figure the human condition as a central motif in their work.

Titarenko’s influence can be seen here: what these people were doing when Friel captured them is not the point, he has provided for them a sombre prospect emphasised perhaps by the abstraction of monochrome. These figures appear lost and perhaps forgotten in the fog of abstraction that Friel has created in the frame.

These are pictures which take an age in photographic terms – up to five seconds and sometimes longer – that spend very little time in post-processing on the computer, “...if they need more than five minutes then I’ve done something wrong...” These are photographs born in the digital age, so the great majority of them are destined for the ‘waste bin’ and never get printed; much of Friel’s output is never seen beyond the computer screen. The ephemeral nature of his

photographic practice denies a great conceptual process. The output is all that matters to Friel, not the input. Whereas Titarenko, especially his early work in St. Petersburg, has strong political and social connotations, Friel’s output is about the joy of making photographs. If he is lucky in an afternoon of taking 600 or so photographs, he’ll get one that he is happy enough to show and if it elicits a response one way or another then, on his terms, he feels it has been a productive session. Not having the patience to work with film has defined these work practices, which, whilst prolific in terms of captured images is, by ratio of taken to shown, quite poor. The unrepeatability of his work, which relies on chance is the beauty that defines Friel’s work. Like Fay Godwin, one of his earliest influences, Friel hasn’t been schooled in photography. He has found his own way – free to develop his interpretation of, principally, the landscape. His paintings, while interesting in their own right, lacked the energy and freedom that his technique now infuses into his photographs. Friel has found a seam that he has mined extraordinarily well and these photographs are becoming known

“

...with a highly developed technique he amplifies the notion of time as he sets out to portray his personal view. by a wider and wider circle of enthusiasts for his work. Chris Friel photographs for fun, his work is found almost exclusively in the virtual world and if he secures reaction to his work by those who discover it, then he has succeeded. There are doubts in his mind, as with most artists, about how much longer he can explore his chosen subject, but my guess is that as he is trying to capture the infinite, it could be a long time yet.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

51

Artful Cuisine

1

An exclusive Directory of places to enjoy brunch, lunch or dinner – all within a short walk of the RWA. 2

ôte C Brasserie

27 The Mall, Bristol BS8 4JG t: 0117 970 6779 e: bristol@cote-restaurants.co.uk Monday to Friday 8am – 10.30pm Saturday 9am – 10.30pm Sunday 9am – 9.30pm Côte Brasserie is open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner serving classic French dishes such as steak frites, tuna Niçoise and moules marinières.

9 8

Côte’s weekday lunch and early evening menu provides outstanding value at £9.95 for two courses.

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3

5 1 4

6 7

2

At Falafel King

Falafel King A ‘middle eastern haven’ in Cotham Hill

The KHAN Cavern hosts live music nights is also available for special occasions and parties, all individually catered for Please Bristol contact 6 Cotham Hill, BS6 6LF / 0117 329 4476 t: 011707855 329715878 4476 07855 715 878 otham Hill BS6 6LF Mon to Sat6 C9am – 11pm Sun 10am – 8pm

A ‘middle eastern haven’ in Cotham Hill.

The KHAN Cavern hosting live music nights is also available for special occasions and parties, all individually catered for.

British

French

Gastro Pub

Italian

Japanese

Mediterranean

Middle Eastern

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

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

3

The Lido

5

Papadeli

7

Rosemarino

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

1 York Place, Clifton Bristol BS8 1AH t:0117 973 6677 www.rosemarino.co.uk Open seven days a week from 9am Dinner Wed to Sat from 6pm

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.

Papadeli make “legendary” cakes, superbly creative salads and light lunches. Our Café @ RWA is a unique place to meet for mouthwatering food in gorgeous surroundings. All the food is made at its ‘mothership’ – deli, café and catering service, just round the corner on Alma Road. “The nicest piece of lemon polenta cake that I have ever had. Great atmosphere, nice staff and wi-fi. It really is good!”

Bristol good food award 2012 winners for both best Italian and best breakfast, Rosemarino is the 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.

4

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.

6

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.

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You may have noticed some changes going on at what used to be Bistro La Barrique - so we are writing to let you know that Zazu’s Kitchen is bringing its quirky décor, quality food and friendly atmosphere to Gloucester Road from May 17th.

You can look forward to our usual fantastic breakfasts, wonderful lunches, and sublime suppers, together with a brand new tapas menu, and a delightful selection of wines, beers, ciders, and spirits, all of which can also be enjoyed on our heated cosy terrace. We are child and grand-parent friendly, and all those in between, so please come and join us to raise a glass to the new Zazu’s Kitchen.

azu’s Z Kitchen

225 Gloucester Road Zazu x Bishopston 225 Gloucester Road Bishopston Bristol BS7 8NR twitter @zazuskitchen225 Bristol info@zazuskitchen.co.uk 0117 944 55 00 www.zazuskitchen.co.uk BS7 8NR t: 0117 944 5500 e: info@zazuskitchen.co.uk Enjoy our fantastic breakfasts, wonderful lunches and sublime suppers, together with a brand new tapas menu and a delightful selection of wines, beers, ciders, and spirits, all of which can also be enjoyed on our heated cosy terrace. We’re child and grandparent friendly and all those in between.

ilks W Restaurant

1 – 3 Chandos Road, Redland, Bristol BS6 6PG t: 0117 973 7999 www.wilksrestaurant.co.uk Wed to Sun 12 – 2pm / 6 – 10pm Welcome to Wilks. We offer delicious, creative cooking and attentive service in an informal dining room. We champion all that is local; farmers, growers, suppliers. We are art lovers and support local artists.

Our current exhibition is by Emma Dibben.

We offer great value set menus for lunch and early dinner 6 – 6.45pm and our wines are young and adventurous like us.

RWA magazine

Winter 2012

53

CONTEMPORARY ART AND DESIGN ON SHOW AT 4.22 PAINTWORKS, AN EXCLUSIVE

BY APPOINTMENT VENUE. FOR INFORMATION ON THE LATEST EXHIBITION OF WORK BY EMERGING AND ESTABLISHED ARTISTS, CALL 0797 721 9037 For news of gallery artists and other updates: follow us on twitter: @CourtydGallery or facebook: CourtyardGalleryBristol

we are designers, listeners, thinkers.

PRIVATE TUTORIALS

JANE CARTNEY

WITH

STEWART GEDDES MPhil (RCA), RWA These tutorials are for experienced artists who wish to have their work reviewed in order

ART�STUDIO & Gallery

by appointment Tel: 01934 418198

to assist its development. Formerly Head of Painting and Senior Lecturer at Cardiff School of Art and Design, Stewart Geddes has extensive teaching experience at art schools, clubs and societies around the country.

For more information contact: stewart@stewartgeddes.com 07985 440 324 www.stewartgeddes.com

54

RWA magazine Winter 2012

www.janecartneyfineart.co.uk

www.courtyardgallery.org

Preparing for the new season...

COURTYARDgallery

SUBTLY STRIKING QUIETLY SHOUTING INTANGIBLY DEFINED EVOCATIVELY STARK AUDIBLY SHINING CLEVERLY SIMPLE DRAMATICALLY CALM UNASSUMINGLY BOLD WWW.WIRESKY.CO.UK

// Listings Arnolfini 16 Narrow Quay Bristol BS1 4QA t: 0117 917 2300 e: boxoffice@arnolfini. org.uk Tue – Sun 11am – 6pm Until 6 January Matti Braun Gost Log A selection of key and new works, including R.T./S.R./V.S. – a dark and shimmering lake in the exhibition space, which can be crossed via logs.

From 2 February Version Control

Arts Centre – Sidcot School Winscombe, North Somerset, BS25 1PD t: 0117 985 8439 e: sidcot2012@id-artists. co.uk Open 10.30am – 4pm Saturday 1 December – Sunday 9 December Closed Monday 3 & Tuesday 4 December Winter Exhibition – affordable art by ID-Artists Recent new work including paintings, prints, ceramics, photography, sculpture and textiles, all at affordable prices.

Homemade cake and tea/coffee available www.id-artists.co.uk

The Art Room 8a The Strand Topsham EX3 OJB e: theartroom@eclipse.co.uk theartroomtopsham.co.uk Sat, Sun and Weds 11am – 5pm 17 November – 16 December Benedict Rubbra 10 – 31 March Philip Hogben

Bath Contemporary 35 Gay St, Bath BA1 2NT t: 01225 461 230 www.bathcontemporary. com Exhibition from 7 December

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery Queens Road, Bristol BS8 1RL t: 0117 922 3571 www.bristol.gov.uk/ museums Mon – Fri 10am – 5pm Sat, Sun and Bank Holiday Mondays, 10am – 6pm 15 December – 2 June

No Borders: Contemporary art in a globalised world Free entry. 14 artists explore globalisation, histories, migration, the city and conflict.

Featuring the monumental Ton of Tea by Ai Weiwei.

In partnership with Arnolfini. Presented by the Art Fund.

Gordano Textile Artists Nature in Art, Twigworth Gloucester GL2 9PA t: 01452 731 422 e: enquiries@nature-inart.org.uk Tues – Sun 10am – 5pm 19 February – 10 March Gordano Textile Artists 14 talented members of Gordano Textile Artists show their work exploring the natural world. Work for sale.

Courtyard Gallery 4.22 Paintworks, Bath Rd, Bristol BS4 3EH m: 07977 219037 Preparing for the new season Contemporary art and design on show by appointment. For news of gallery artists and updates follow us on twitter: @CourtydGallery or Facebook: CourtyardGalleryBristol

The Holburne Museum Great Pulteney St, Bath BA2 4DB www.holburne.org Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm Sun and Bank Holidays 11am – 5pm 26 Jan – 6 May Admission £6.95 / concs.

Painted Pomp Art and Fashion in the age of Shakespeare

Diana Porter Contemporary Jewellery 33 Park Street, Bristol BS1 5NH t: 0117 909 0225 f: 0117 909 0223 www.dianaporter.co.uk 1 Nov – 11 Jan Crackers Christmas Exhibition.

Rich golds, luxurious textiles, creative forms and innovative techniques make this a cracker – perfect for Christmas gifts.

Featuring the work of: Imogen Belfield, Myia Bonner, Eleanor Bolton, Natalie Harris, Bryony Stanford, Katherine Richmond, Charlotte Lowe, Diane Turner, Liz Willis, Jessica Neil and Rachel Eardley.

IMPRESS International Printmaking Festival Gloucestershire Printmaking Co-operative Unit 16b/c Griffin Mill London Road, Thrupp, Nr Stroud, Glos. GL5 2AZ t: 07711 582 678 e: festival@gphq.org.uk info@gpchq.org.uk www.gpchq.org.uk (www.gpchq.org.uk/ impress_festival ) 1 March – 31 March IMPRESS National and International Exhibitions across Gloucestershire (Hughie O’Donoghue, Antonio Romoleroux, He Kun, Havana Taller, many others), masterclasses, workshops, Symposium (16/17 March), tours, talks.

Gallery Pangolin 9 Chalford Ind. Estate Chalford, Glos. t: 01453 889 765 e: gallery@pangolineditions.com Mon – Fri 10am – 6pm Sat 10am – 1pm 1 – 21 December Christmas Cracker!

Our popular exhibition returns with an exciting mix of sculpture, prints and drawings.

23 February – 28 March Sculptors’ Prints and Drawings Our annual exhibition of sculptors’ works on paper, part of ‘Impress’ the International Printmaking Festival centred around Stroud.

Innocent Fine Art 7a Boyces Avenue, Clifton Bristol BS8 4AA t: 0117 973 2614 e: enquiries@ innocentfineart.co.uk www.innocentfineart.co.uk Tue – Sat 10am – 5.30pm Sun 11.30am – 4pm 20 Nov – 23 Dec Mixed Christmas Exhibition 2012

Jamaica Street Studios presents… The Art Box Christmas Shop The Parlour Showrooms 31 College Green, Bristol BS1 5TB t: 0117 924 1171 e: jamaicastreetstudios@ yahoo.co.uk www.jamaicastreetartists. co.uk Open every day 10.30am – 6pm late night shopping Thursdays till 8pm 10 – 23 December 2012 Jamaica Street Artists will be showcasing a wide variety of original art works, limited edition prints, Christmas and greetings cards, bespoke mugs, hand stitched home ware and a whole range of beautiful gifts, come and take a look.

Jane Cartney Art Studio & Gallery rear of 80 Regent Street Weston-super-Mare BS23 1SR t: 01934 418 198 m: 07779 178 736 e: artist@ janecartneyfineart.co.uk Viewings welcome by appointment Jane Cartney: Paintings An exhibition of recent framed work from the studio of Scottish-West Country colouristexpressionist. Inspired by – Architecture, Cows, Sheep. Limited edition prints. Portrait Commissions.

The Jerram Gallery Half Moon Street, Sherborne Dorset DT9 3LN t: 01935 815 261 e: info@jerramgallery.com www.jerramgallery.com Mon – Sat 9.30am – 5pm 1 Dec – 22 Dec Christmas Show 2012 15 artists Contemporary pictures and sculpture. To see all our current stock and future exhibitions: www.jerramgallery.com

Quest Gallery 7 Margaret’s Buildings Bath BA1 2LP t: 01225 444142 www.questgallery.co.uk info@questgallery.co.uk Perceptual Motion 4 December – 26 January Paintings by Ione Parkin RWA. Glass by Slovakian and Hungarian Masters, Peter Layton, Rachael Woodman, Shelley James, Layne Rowe and Bruce Marks. Jewellery by

Wendy Ramshaw CBE, Nan Nan Liu, John Moore and Barbara Bertagnoli. Silver by Ane Christenson and Jacqueline Scholes.

Ceramics by Sarah Purvey, Pippin Drysdale and Keith Varney.

The Searchers Contemporary A new roaming gallery project led by Ruth Piper 14 St Michaels Hill Bristol BS2 8DT t: 07711 541 852 e: ruth@thesearchers contemporary.com Mon – Sat 11am – 5pm Thurs 11am – 7pm Closed Sundays 11 Dec – 8 Jan 2013 Surface disturbances – Evidence of biological time – Part 2 Artists working with paper collage, drawing and construction.

Original handmade artist’s greetings cards.

Sky Blue Framing and Gallery 27 North View, Westbury Park, Bristol BS6 7PT t: 0117 973 3995 Open Mon – Sat Mixed Christmas Exhibition Affordable limited edition prints featuring FIVE NEW IMAGES

by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson. Alongside other new work by many of our favourite bestselling artists such as Quentin Blake, Susie Brooks, John KnappFisher, and many more...

Victoria Art Gallery

by Pulteney Bridge Bath BA2 4AT t: 01225 477 233 www.victoriagal.org.uk Tues – Sat 10am-5pm Sun 1.30 – 5pm Closed Mondays Free Admission 24 November – 20 January Bob Rudd Watercolours All works for sale 26 Jan – 7 April Roger Mayne Retrospective

Bristol School of Jewellery at workshop 22 22 Upper Maudlin Street Bristol BS2 8DJ t: 0117 329 0393 e: info@workshop22.co.uk www.facebook.com/ workshop22Bristol Silver Jewellery Courses Learn to make your own beautiful silver jewellery in our friendly, well equipped studio.

Small class sizes.

6 week beginners’ £150 Weds mornings/evenings Starts 9 January 12 week mixed ability £300 Tues evenings / Weds afternoons Starts 8/9 January

University of Bristol Theatre Collection 21 Park Row Bristol BS1 5LY t: 0117 331 5086 www.bristol.ac.uk/ theatrecollection e: theatre-collection@ bristol.ac.uk Opening hours please see website 28 November – 28 February Shine Contemporary printmakers respond to tinsel prints from the Mander & Mitchenson Collection.

Artful quotations “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.”

View Art Gallery 159-161 Hotwell Road, Bristol BS8 4RY t: 05603 116 753 www.viewartgallery.co.uk to 13 January True Identity Beth Carter, Amelia Ciriello, Ann Goodfellow, Catherine Knight, Andy Price, Clem So, Fran Williams.

Chosen by Jilly Cobbe “At different times you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.”

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”

“…Already there are many paintings in our time that are bereft of speech and lie around like lazy odalisques.”

“When the Academy (RA) exhibited the bronze horses of St. Mark’s it did so in daylight, and in the shifting shadows they changed colour from cool morning to warm afternoon, and visitors... returned at different times of day to witness this beautiful phenomenon.”

Robert Melville

Brian Sewell

Edvard Munch

Andy Warhol

Pablo Picasso

Diane Arbus “I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.”

Back Chat

Actor, comedian, historian, TV presenter, political activist, writer... which gives you the most pleasure, and why?

I’m a bit of a butterfly.

I always hated the regulation of the school timetable, and still enjoy flitting from one job to another. I’d go off my nut if I had to work in an office.

Mike Whitton

Tony Robinson

You were born in Hackney, but can we claim you as a Bristolian?

I moved to Bristol in my late 20s to work at the Old Vic, both my children went to school in Bristol, and though I now spend most of my time in London and abroad, I still have a flat in Clifton overlooking Dundry.

One of your first roles was as the Artful Dodger in the original production of Oliver.

What memories do you have of that?

I was cast as one of Fagin’s gang, but a few weeks after we opened, the boy playing the Artful Dodger bunked off school and couldn’t be found.

Unfortunately it was a matinee day, and ten minutes before the curtain was due to go up, the theatre manager asked me if I’d be prepared to go on as the Dodger. I did so, and from then on every time the original Dodger had his stipulated three weeks holiday, it was me who sang Consider Yourself and lured Oliver away from the primrose path.

Bristol is firmly associated with Banksy. Is graffiti an art form or a blot on the urban landscape?

I’m split down the middle on graffiti. Part of me thinks it’s vibrant and energetic, the other half thinks it’s a selfish and uncaring assault on people’s houses and shops. I do have a link with Banksy though; my daughter used to drink cider with him on College Green when they were both in their mid-teens.

What was the first piece of art that you remember purchasing – and what have you bought recently?

The first piece of art I remember buying was a primitive by a Devon artist (I think) of a ship steaming through green fields. I recently bought a beautiful Andrew Crocker at Beaux Arts in Bath.

Should art be political?

It’s not a question of whether art should be political, all art is, even the most avowedly apolitical. Oh, yes – and all politics should be artistic.

What museum or gallery exhibition have you recently visited that particularly impressed you?

Recently I took my granddaughter to see the dinosaurs at the National History Museum. She’s only two and a half but her enjoyment of them was all consuming.

I’ll never forget the experience.

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RWA magazine Winter 2012

born 1946 If you could own any work of art what would you choose?

I’m not mad keen on ‘owning’ works of art, but I’ve just commissioned an oil painting of my dog Winnie, and if it turns out as well as I hope, I would rather own it than any van Gogh or Titian.

You have been honoured for promoting public understanding of archaeology.

Why is it important for us to understand our past?

How do you know who you are unless you know where you’ve come from?

If you could meet any wellknown person from the past, who would you wish to meet, and why?

I’ve always wanted to meet Alfred the Great. At the beginning of his reign England was little more than twenty square miles around Athelney, but by the end of it the whole basis of our present day nation had been created. What kind of man was he? Was he a puppet?

Was he surrounded by brilliant advisors, or did he do it on his own? And what was that cake burning business all about?

What current political issue causes you the most concern?

On a national level it’s vital that we should know the full extent of the banking system’s debts. The banks obdurately refuse to tell us, but until they do so Europe will be prey to international speculators and we’ll be unable to move on from the wreckage we’re now surrounded by. On a local level I’ve always been frustrated that our city has been unable to bring major enterprises to fruition – we lost the opportunity to have a symphony orchestra, we lost the international animation festival, we can’t even find a home for our football club. Will an elected mayor be able to break that kind of deadlock? Fingers crossed.

Do you have a cunning plan?

The Avon Barrage.

PAINTED POM P

Bringing you the best handmade jewellery, accessories & homeware from contemporary designers in the UK and Ireland

Art and Fashion in the Age of Shakespeare DOWER & HALL

GENNAMARIA

26 JANUARY - 6 MAY BERTIE & JACK

Mon - Sat 10am to 5pm Sun and Bank Holidays 11am to 5pm

AMANDA COLEMAN

Admission £6.95 / Concessions

MIMI BERRY

Great Pulteney Street, Bath, BA2 4DB

ANORAK

Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset William Larkin, oil on canvas © English Heritage

ROBIN & MOULD

www.holburne.org

RAWXCLUSIVE

SOPHIE HARLEY CHARLOTTE BEZZANT

32 The Mall, Clifton Village, Bristol, BS8 4DS // 0117 370 6180 // www.madejustso.com Opened October 2012

// PJ Crook

‘Dog With Flying Ears’ Limited Edition Print by Michael Ogden

Reigning Cats and Dogs issue

& Gallery

ISSN 2044-2653

Sky Blue Framing

MBE RWA DArthc

MIXED CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION Affordable limited edition prints featuring FIVE NEW IMAGES by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

‘Tennis in the Garden with Gathering Rooks’

‘Summer Night in the Garden’

// Guernica // Jamaica Street Artists // Tony Robinson

NATIONAL FRAMING AWARD WINNER

‘The Gardener’

Alongside other new work by many of our favourite best selling artists such as Quentin Blake, Susie Brooks, John Knapp-Fisher, and many more...

Reigning Cats and Dogs

‘Cliff Walk in Spring’

EASY PARKING NEAR WAITROSE

// PJ Crook MBE RWA DArthc

// Guernica

// Jamaica Street Artists

BackChat // Tony Robinson

Winter 2012

Sky Blue Framing 27 North View Westbury Park Bristol BS6 7PT Tel: 0117 9733995

11 Winter 2012

We can also help you to create framed Christmas gifts for yourself and your family. Call in to see why we have a reputation for designing creative solutions that make stunning presents. We offer FREE advice and friendly prices, and all our work is finished to conservation standard.

11

‘Rocks at Old Harry’