Art & Culture

ARTIST AT WORK

No.27: Pearl Gatehouse, Two Pink Roses, Oil on board, 60 x 40cm, £600

As an artist I try to be an interpreter, illuminating and conveying to the viewer my visual experience of nature.

I love painting seascapes and wide Dorset landscapes, with a feel of fresh air and a sense of freedom. Recent restrictions however, have led me to discover in my garden and locality new sources of inspiration; a desire to celebrate the rich colour of a briefly flowering peonie, pops of colour in a winter garden and the poetic, fragile beauty in imperfection; fragments of dry beech leaves, broken twigs and fading petals.

Drawing, mark-making and pleinair painting, the recording of form and sensation, are basic to my practice. Back in my studio and gallery space, the act of painting becomes an alchemy of sustained concentration, charcoal and juicy oil paints. Pots full of brushes and rags for wiping back complete the mix.

I prefer to paint on a well-primed, resistant surface, and start by lightly drawing out a carefully considered composition, which may change as the work progresses. Choices of colour and tone are integral to conveying the atmosphere or sensation of my original experience. Paint may need to be applied over several days and at different stages of drying, and some areas wiped back to retain translucency. A painting may need to be put aside and revisited over time before it is finished.

Each work is unique and, I hope, provides a source of delight and discovery to the interested viewer.

pearlgatehouse.com

Work by Pearl will be available to view at her exhibition ‘Talking Lines and Colours’ at Shaftesbury Arts Centre, SP7 8AR, 17th - 23rd March.

ON FILM

Andy Hastie, Yeovil Cinematheque

West Norwood Library, 1969

When I was a small boy growing up in SE London my father would walk me to West Norwood library in the early evening to choose my reading books. This would only take a couple of minutes as it was usually just exchanging one or two Jennings books, much preferred to Just William, for the next ones on my list. Jennings was an accident-prone, but good-natured school boy, illustrating an idealised version of rural or small-town life post-war, before the major social changes of the 1960s. West Norwood library was a beautiful Victorian building designed by Sidney Smith (the architect of Tate Britain), with an exterior of red brick and sandstone from Ham Hill!

So that he could carry on browsing, and to stop me pestering him to go, my father would sit me down and plonk a New Yorker Album in my lap. This was one of a collection of (very large) anthologies which just contained the cartoons from the New Yorker magazine’s

Image reproduced by kind permission of London Borough of Lambeth, Archives Department. lambethlandmark.com

"Here in 1970 the hall was used by Stanley Kubrick as a location site for A Clockwork Orange"

previous years. The cartoons I remember, mainly featured liberal New York open-plan 1950s interiors, art galleries (and usually modern art sculptures), men in bars, and bosses propositioning secretaries. What all this was supposed to mean to an eight-year-old boy I don’t know, but I took it all in. My favourites however were the cartoons by Charles Addams with dark, macabre characters, which later in the early 1960s developed into the TV series The Addams Family, and later still into two successful feature films The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993). In 1969 West Norwood library was moved just 100 yards to a new, modernist, award-winning, open-plan building (lots of bare brick and ramps everywhere, no steps), with a function room, the Nettlefold Hall, above. Here in 1970 the hall was used by Stanley Kubrick as a location site for A Clockwork Orange (1971). The scene where Alex, the Malcolm McDowell character, demonstrates his rehabilitation in front of an audience of dignitaries by refusing to engage with an aggressor, or touch a naked woman, was filmed here. Lambeth Film Society used the same venue for their programmes, and it has recently been turned into a Picturehouse cinema. Kubrick lived in Dulwich Village (just down the road) at the time, and used a lot of London locations during the period he lived there.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) a savage indictment of the dehumanising process the US uses to turn men into trained killers, is meant to be taking place in Hue City in Vietnam, but because this wasn’t jungle warfare, a lot of it was shot on an industrial estate in Enfield. The combat sequences were filmed at an abandoned cokesmelting plant at Becton, near Stratford in London’s East End. I only recently read that a number of the industrial buildings in this area were designed by the same French architects, post Second World War, who had built exact carbon-copies of their designs in the industrial area of Hue City. Stanley Kubrick has always been remembered for his attention to detail.

As for Cinematheque film society opening up again soon, the Swan Theatre want to be back functioning this July so maybe, just maybe, we will be able to resume around then. Watch this space!

A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket are both available on DVD, while The Addams Family and Addams Family Values are on DVD but also on Amazon Prime.

cinematheque.org.uk swan-theatre.co.uk

CONFESSIONS OF A THEATRE ADDICT

Rosie Cunningham

Like many others, I have resorted to watching missed shows on a digital platform. I saw Kinky Boots on stage2view.com for £4.99 which was such a small sum to pay for what would have been a theatre ticket. I had forgotten that the music was written by Cyndi Lauper. The show won a Tony and an Olivier and is wonderful escapist fun. I see that Red is available - this is Alfred Molina at his best in his role as the American abstract painter Mark Rothko. I absolutely loved this play when I was lucky enough to see it live two years ago.

Shakespeare’s Globe also has available all its performances to watch on Globe Player. Each play is £4.99 per viewing and you can also send

a performance as a gift. I am currently studying Twelfth Night and there are two performances to watch from either 2012 or 2017. The 2012 performance stars Mark Rylance as Olivia and Stephen Fry as Malvolio. Don’t forget that in Elizabethan times, young men mostly played the female roles because it was thought unseemly for women to be on the stage.

Recently my daughter and I had a discussion about what makes a piece of art. We had been to see the Bruce Nauman exhibition at the Tate Modern. My senses had been overloaded by repetitive blinking neon lights, a jumble of shouting voices, overlapping, and deconstructed chairs. Controversial ideas expressed in a simple child-like way. Mesmerising and uplifting for some and completely perplexing for others. As we exited the exhibition, we passed a 1964 replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain which is basically a white ceramic urinal. This had caused a huge upset in 1917 when it was exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists. This was an ordinary manufactured object, designated by the artist as a work of art. He had conceived it and placed it – therefore he considered it a piece of art. Would you agree?

An exhibition of Paula Rego’s work is on at Tate Britain from 16th June. She has had an extraordinary life which is reflected in her paintings, pastels and drawings. Definitely worth a visit.

I also saw a beautiful exhibition of new work by the artist Richard Hoare, titled Alchemy of Light, at Messums Wiltshire. This is a series of pictures painted from the same spot at the lake on the Fonthill Estate nearby, year after year, capturing the changing light reflected off the water. He is a young local artist with amazing talent. Henry Lamb RA’s oil paintings and sketchings are on show there from 4th February.

To Kill a Mockingbird is on at the Gielgud Theatre from 27th May. This is the story about racial injustice and childhood innocence based on Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, transferring from Broadway and cited as the most successful American play in Broadway history.

Finally, Get Up Stand Up! is the world premiere of a brand-new Bob Marley musical coming to the Lyric Theatre from 28th May starring Arinze Kene who was appointed MBE in the 2020 Birthday Honours list for services to drama and screenwriting. I can’t wait.

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AN ARTIST’S VIEW

Laurence Belbin

My wanderings, like many others, have been closer to home of late, so my first outing was to Lime Kiln Farm. For those that do not know where that is, it is situated at the foot of the Terrace playing fields, in that triangle of land between the main Dorchester Road and the one that takes you to Thornford. You may have smelt the roasting of coffee beans whilst passing because this is where Read’s Coffee is based. I found a gathering of people stood about drinking freshly ground coffee which is sold from a converted horse-box. I found out that there are a few who walk regularly and stop for

a break and their ‘fix’ then continue on their way. It is a very popular place. It’s a process I know very little about but I was fortunate to be shown the basics. At one end of the ‘roasting house’ is where the hessian sacks of beans are stacked. There are many varieties from a number of places around the world waiting to be put through the roaster. They finally come out the other end to cool before either being served as takeaway drinks or packaged up for you to have at home. I think there must be more to it than that otherwise any Tom, Dick or Harry would be doing it! I had a very warm welcome and a cup of coffee to take away the chill whilst doing this little pen and ink sketch. Nice stone buildings are always worth a drawing or two. I applied a little artistic licence but you will have to visit to see where!

My second location, just out of Sherborne, was on a cold late afternoon watching the murmurations of starlings. I try and do this every year but it is normally the Somerset Levels I go to. The only down-side to the levels is the pot luck of being in the right place as the area is so large they could end up roosting a couple of miles from where you pitch yourself. Also it sometimes gets so crowded and noisy, the atmosphere can get somewhat lost. You can’t guarantee seeing them but my wife and I have been lucky on occasions. They gather in small flocks arriving over a period of time joining those already there until they form a huge cloud whirling and diving like a sea swell. I took the general atmosphere and added my own ‘feeling’ to come up with this little illustration. It is a combination of watercolour on tinted paper and ink. The birds are ink applied with a homemade rubber stamp made from old wellington boots – the bit round the top so they can still be worn! The main idea is to get the rhythm of the mass which is always changing but has a kind of echo in the performance. The pushing and pulling of this volume of birds, at one time being drawn out and stretched and at the next forced together as if by some gravitational force at its centre, is fascinating and mesmerising. Then, as if a command has been issued, they drop from the sky, a chittering black/grey mist into the reed beds to roost for the night. At dawn the show starts again until they disperse then the process is repeated in the evening.

Free entertainment and no health and safety measures to stop them bumping into each other!