Cadogan Jennings by Sladmore

Still Reading

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Paintings of books by Nancy Cadogan and sculptures of authors by Martin Jennings www.sladmorecontemporary.com

Still Reading Paintings of books by Nancy Cadogan and sculptures of authors by Martin Jennings

Shapero Rare Books

Sladmore Contemporary

Still Reading Paintings of books by Nancy Cadogan and sculptures of authors by Martin Jennings

32 St George Street Mayfair London W1S 2EA Tel +44(0)20 7493 0876

32 Bruton Place Mayfair London W1J 6NW Tel +44(0)20 7499 0365

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Intro

Nancy Cadogan In 2017 she was one of 93 women ar tists chosen to exhibit their work in The Ned, London, for its permanent Vault 100 exhibition highlighting the disparity between women and men CEOs. 2002 Graduation Show. Mall Galleries, London 2003 Gallery 47, London 2005 Recent Paintings: Utah Landscapes. Frost and Reed Gallery, NYC 2004 Recent Paintings: Morocco. Frost and Reed Gallery, NYC 2005 Solo Show. Sextant inc, NYC 2006 Grand Beginnings. GrandyAr t, Arndean Gallery, London

ancy Cadogan (born in 1979) is a British-American figurative painter living in the UK. Cadogan attended City and Guilds of London Art School and Canterbury Christ Church University from which she graduated with a Degree in Fine Art Painting in 2002. She moved to New York shortly there after, sharing a studio in the Starrett-Lehigh Building with artist Franco Ciarlo.

2007 Group Show. GrandyAr t, Smithfield Gallery, London 2008 Recent Paintings. Sladmore Contemporary, London 2011 Ar t for Charity Auction. Christie’s, Milan 2011 21st Chelsea Antiquarian Book Fair, London

After solo shows at Frost & Reed, New York in 2005 and 2006, Cadogan returned to the UK for a solo show at Sladmore Contemporary, London in 2008. Most recently she has featured in group shows in Miami and Southampton, USA and in The Blue Edition show in Knightsbridge, London.

2016 A Sense of Place. Ar t Bastion, Miami 2016 Ar t Southampton, 2016, Miami 2016 The Blue Edition. 68 Kinner ton Street, London

In 2008, she was named as one of the ‘Top 20 New British Ar t Talents’ by Tatler magazine, describing her as ‘the new Paula Rego’.

Read Every Thing

n Still Reading Nancy Cadogan explores the subject of books through the genre of still life. This series of intimate oil paintings presents the closed book mostly alone, sometimes stacked, framed or floating in colour fields, and often placed next to a single object. Here to the left of Keats we see a pink shell, there a tea cup balances on a Tiffany blue stack of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a red ribbon drops curling into the foreground of The Scarlet Letter. Each paired down composition invites contemplation, because it keys into our instinct to read things. We want to make sense of these relationships. Do these objects relate to the story within the pages? Why has Cadogan placed a Lindt chocolate bear next to three horizontal volumes of Dickens? Do the titles give us a clue? The answers, we discover, are revealed to those who give these paintings time.

become aware of its visual relationships: the way a light source picks up the curve of china and then bounces off the table or how a par ticular shade of deep blue brings out the warmth of a shell. The strength of this show lies in the simplicity of Cadogan’s love for books, and her honest, minimum appraisal of the things that hold meaning for her. By exploring the interior life, and exposing her idiosyncratic love for often random but somehow beautiful objects, Cadogan is also considering the shared life. Still Reading is about our deeply human need to surround ourselves with things that make us happy and feel connected. In their celebration, these paintings are a prescient reminder that books (physical repositories of imagination and knowing) matter. In an increasingly digital era, ar ticles online reflect a latent cultural anxiety about the longevity of ar t forms, in par ticular books and paintings. Yet despite this, the material world persists (last year hardcover book sales went up by 7%). A survey of this year’s international ar t exhibitions echoes this: Christine Macel began her exhibition Viva Ar te Viva as curator of the Venice Biennale 2017 with the Pavilion of Books; Mar ta Minujin created a Par thenon of Books for the inaugural edition of Documenta 14 in Athens; and Maria Eichborn’s Tower of Books was shown Kassel. In New York, where Cadogan once lived and worked (2002-2006), this year’s Whitney Biennale was dominated by Frances Stark’s monumental suite of text-based paintings after writer Ian F. Svenonious’s Censorship Now!!. Perhaps it is a coincidence that all these ar tists are women… but what is more striking about these major exhibitions is that, as ar t critic Ben Davies points out “ joyful painting” is a “mediumistic rarity.” Like books, painting is repeatedly considered a precarious - potentially disappearing medium.

This is the four th solo show for the painter Nancy Cadogan, and the second with Sladmore Contemporary. Unlike Cadogan’s expansive landscapes, this series explores the genre of still life through restrained, meditative compositions. Light, colour and form are pitched in subtle harmonies; elements that slip over the viewer like poetry. They offer us time to think and time to imagine. The theme of a shut book first emerged whilst Cadogan was painting four small still lifes for The Book is an Object during London’s Antiquarian book fair, in 2011. “I loved those paintings, for their simplicity, and I felt there was a lot more to be done. As the idea for this series took hold, I became increasingly interested in iconography and how those paintings act on the mind, like a vector for thought.” More than a literal connection to the book’s narrative, Cadogan creates visual relationships in her paintings that intrigue. They hold our gaze. Somehow, this mirrors the process of painting, because to read a painting is to 6

“I really love to read, but I also love the actual book, the way it ages, the way it smells and becomes familiar with time. Books are also visual reminders, they connect us to memories that don’t necessarily have anything to do with what’s inside, but about the time we read them,” says Cadogan.

a Bouquet and Skull, often showed the book as open, to suggest the element of passing time. “That is why the books in this show are all closed, I was actively thinking about the passing of time, but more about how objects connect us to memories whilst making this work,” says Cadogan.

Ar t historian Simon Schama says, “Almost all ar t aims to nail the fugitive passing of time.” And yet here is a different proposition: these paintings suggest that a moment’s sustained look will reveal things that only you will ever see, with associated visions that cannot be shared, and therein lies the secret joy. In the painting Honeymoon we see a black and white wedding photograph - the only self-por trait in the series - next to an old paperback swollen with salt water and faded with sun. Given the narrative in Middlemarch describes a bad marriage, it’s an odd pairing, this book next to a photograph of the ar tist on her wedding day. But the painting’s title gives us a clue. From this ironic juxtaposition we can infer that this is a painting about nostalgia for a time - a moment on honeymoon- when the ar tist was reading. Just like words, an object’s meaning changes with time.

We see this most clearly in her painting More Time Please. An eclectic stack of ar t history books towers on a child’s wooden chair. Unmistakably a reference to Van Gogh’s Chair (held in the National Gallery London), we are reminded of the joy and discovery of learning, and the wonder of youth. However, Cadogan has left a deep pitch of empty space behind the chair. This speaks to the weight of ar t history; there is so much to read, so much to look at. “Whilst considering the books around me I began to see that it can only ever be a random collection. There was once a time when you could have had a library that contained all the knowledge in the world. But knowledge and its dissemination has grown exponentially, so we must read as much as we can but also know when to put something down, and just think or even imagine.”

“Visual memory is different to narrative memory, as if the stories become pictures, and so the books chosen become a memory slideshow. As a child all the books I read became pictures in my head that I can still remember, so in my paintings about books I am using my repository of visual memory.”

Ar t - as opposed to enter tainment - rewards the lingering, “slow” attention of the viewer. These paintings invoke the cultural manifesto of deceleration as proposed by Ponoma College in Slow Ar t: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Image to James Turrell, Ponoma. “I came to define Slow Ar t as what transpires between the beholder and whatever she is looking at… it is not a series of things. It’s a collection of encounters…” says College. Unsurprisingly, many of the books por trayed are anthologies of poems, the most spacious of literary forms.

These paintings are both celebratory in approach to subject, and very much of the moment: so many things we once took for granted are now on the brink of extinction. Of all the genres in ar t, it is the still life which is most connected to, and most concerned with time. Dutch and Flemish 17th century still lifes, objects were painted to suggest human achievement and learning, in combination with “nature mor te” (flowers and fruit) to imply the transience of life. Also known as ‘Vanitas’ these paintings, like Adriaen van Utrecht’s Still life with

“Good poetry slips over you, it is so alliterative which instantly becomes visual for me. I have always loved meanings being hinted at. Auden is so honest and ar ticulate about the human condition… and then there is T. S. Eliot and Wendy Cope.” 7

we have come from or the things that matter most (especially books and paintings).

Before the 19th century most women who enjoyed the professional status of painter were the daughters, and often the wives, of male ar tists. The most prized academic category, history painting, depended on drawing after the male nude, which women were debarred from doing in public. Many women, like Rachel Ruysch and Vigee Le Brun, specialised in more ‘domestic’ categories: por traiture, genre, still life and animal painting. It is wor th noting that the Gwen John (1876 - 1939) painted a series of ten works titled The Convalescent between 1910 and 1920 which repeatedly shows a woman reading. Cadogan is subtly engaged in this history, and repeatedly talks about her paintings being “quiet paintings.”

“but for this special interim, so restful yet so festive, Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Fog” Notes: With the advent of the camera, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists no longer concerned with realism experimented with colour, shapes and painting techniques. Early in their careers, both Vincent Van Gogh (1885) and Henri Matisse (1890) painted Still life with Books and Candle; Van Gogh then repeatedly painted the Bible whilst Matisse was drawn to the compositional possibilities of women in the act of reading (The Three Sisters,1917).

Whilst painting for this show, Cadogan was reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quar tet, novels focused on the friendship between two women. With par ticular attention to the minutia of women’s lives, Ferrante’s prose is tightly focused on the ordinary, domestic objects women encounter, and the quality of their female (mother, sister, daughter) relationships. In Still Reading Cadogan has intentionally included por traits of her three children, not in the very least because they are so precious to her, but also because she wants to acknowledge that being at home, being a mother, a wife and an ar tist is a careful balance. Just as our idea of feminism has to evolve, so too must the ar tist must adapt in a materially changing world.

Nico Kos Earle

We must believe that the things we leave behind will bear witness to the small triumphs of our lives; and an ar tist must hope that the things they make will stand the test of time. Consider the painting Lionhear t, a crisp ripe apple moons over a tiny little prayer book with only a gold cross to indicate its contents. It is a work that balances the material and the immaterial, the masculine and the feminine, a need to sink our teeth into this physical, visceral life of knowing, but also reflect. This “quiet” still life reminds us to never lose sight of where

1. In the minor key Four Quartets - T. S. Eliot Oil on linen · 20” h x 20” w

2. On Receipt of a Peculiar Shell

I took this Penguin classic on my honeymoon, which made me laugh so much, as a book all about choices leading to unimagined and not necessarily happy places, just when I had made the biggest decision of my life.

Selected Poems - John Keats Oil on linen · 20” h x 20” w

3. Untitled The Heart is Strange - John Berryman Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

4. Honeymoon Middlemarch - George Eliot Oil on linen · 18” h x 12” w

The weather had just become wonderful in early spring and I couldn’t face being inside the studio looking at the sunshine, so I took Arcadia with me outside to the garden, where maybe it was always meant to be.

These little yellow trumpets seemed to reinforce Wendy Cope’s joyous and funny poetry.

6. Arcadia and the Anemones 5. The Odyssey · Oil on linen · 36” h x 30” w 12

7. Spring

Arcadia - Tom Stoppard Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

At first this painting was a night painting, which then seemed all wrong as Betjeman is, I think, very much a day poet.

I took a long time deciding how legible the title of this book should be. But with the clean, sharp emptiness of the picture it seemed entirely necessary to read the title plainly.

8. A Spire in Sight

This apple is in fact a paperweight.

There is such a glorious whiteness to those early bright days.

9. Whitewashed

John Betjeman’s Collected Poems Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

A Grief Observed - C. S. Lewis Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

11. Spring Light 10. Lionheart

The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

The Warden was one of the first book paintings in 2011. I had just started reading Trollope and had no idea he was so funny.

13. Untitled Thank you, Fog - W. H. Auden Oil on linen · 20” h x 20” w

12. Sun-Maid

14. Tiffany Blue

The Warden - Anthony Trollope Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

F. Scott Fitzgerald Oil on linen · 20” h x 20” w

16. Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart, The World of Pooh - A. A. Milne Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

17. Christmas Time 15. Homage to Tiepolo

Charles Dickens Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

Selected Works - Swinburne Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

It was hard painting a chocolate Lindt bear and not eating it.

George de la Tour’s Mary Magdalene is in the background.

18. When the lights go down 19. Tea and Tennyson

Shakespeare’s Tragedies Vol 1 Oil on linen · 10” h x 16” w

Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

I find this yellow just so wonderfully positive.

20. Love Letters

21. It’s All Yellow

Dorothy Osbourne and William Temple Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

World Within World - Stephen Spender. Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

We were in the kitchen. Arthur turned to me. At that moment, his face was steady and direct and his expression even. And for the first time in 9 years, we could make this painting.

22. Arthur · Oil on linen · 14” h x 14” w 23

This book contains the most wonderful descriptions of artists’ studios. It makes me think about my dream studio, which would almost certainly have many palms in it.

This is about soaking up the brilliance of other painters. This particular set of artists’ books are in my studio currently, normally open. Then occasionally rushed shut when I tidy up.

24. Sanctuary

23. More Time Please

Britain’s Artists and their Studios. Oil on linen · 36” h x 30” w

Oil on linen · 36” h x 30” w

25. PJ the Secret Service Boy - Lord Frederick Hamilton · Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w 25

27. I drink therefore I am Roger Scruton All oil on linen · 14” h x 14” w

28. Small is Beautiful A study of economics as if people mattered E. F. Schumacher Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w In 1940, Schumacher, who became a hugely influential economist, took refuge in Eydon, where we had lived for a year. Here, he became inspired and grounded in the land, and enthused by vegetable growing.

26. Make Way for Ducklings Oil on linen · 20” h x 20” w

It was another brilliant spring morning, and there was a mass of forget-me-nots, and the books, and I had to go outside.

This book is almost without dialogue. Its silence seemed to echo the snowy silence of the mountains.

29. Blue Morning

30. Take Me With You

English Love Poems Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

A Whole Life - Robert Seethaler Oil on linen · 12” h x 12” w

I think often of that brilliant scene from ‘A Room with a View’, when Eleanor Lavish says, ‘Two lone women lost in a foreign city, without a Baedeker, now THAT is what I call an adventure!’ Just so funny.

31. An Italian Adventure · Baedeker · Oil on linen · 18” h x 12” w 29

I changed the butterfly from a small cabbage white, to this rather magnificent, more regal specimen.

33.Fragile Possibilties Wordsworth’s Prelude Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

32. Grey Areas The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

34. A Pleasure Dome Coleridge, selected poems - Richard Holmes Oil on linen · 20” h x 20” w

Oil on linen · 10” h x 10” w

35. Homegrown · Delightful food, with a forward by Noel Coward and illustrations by Oliver Messel · Oil on linen · 36” h x 30” w

36. August · The Well Tempered Garden - Christopher Lloyd · Oil on linen · 36” h x 30” w

Martin Jennings M

ar tin Jennings lives and works in Oxford. He is a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. He has made many carved stone lettering inscriptions and bronze por trait sculptures and now concentrates on public statues. He has been commissioned by the National Por trait Gallery, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Palace of Westminster, the University of Oxford and many other public and private institutions both in this country and abroad. He is widely recognised as one of the best sculptors of public statues working today.

Jennings has sculpted many prominent figures from the worlds of politics, the military, royalty, academia, literature, industry, medicine and the law. His statue of John Betjeman at St. Pancras station is now a celebrated London landmark adored by the travelling public. There is a magnificent statue of the poet Philip Larkin by Jennings in Hull city centre. In 2014 he made Britain’s first statue of Charles Dickens for Por tsmouth. A monument to the pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe has recently been completed for East Grinstead as well as a sculpture of the Women of Steel in Sheffield city centre. Jennings’s towering monument on London’s South Bank to the Crimean War heroine Mary Seacole was unveiled in 2016 to great public acclaim. A dynamic statue of George Orwell by Jennings is shor tly to be unveiled at BBC Broadcasting House in central London. Jennings’s work has received much coverage in the national press over recent years and has featured regularly on radio and television. 34

37. Charles Dickens maquette · Bronze on slate base · 14” h x 21” w x 16” d.

38. Charles Dickens bust maquette · Bronze on bronze base · 7” h x 5” w x 4” d.

39. John Betjeman maquette · Sterling silver on silver base · 16” h x 6” w x 6” d.

40. 40. John John Betjeman Betjeman maquette maquette ·· Bronze Bronze on on bronze bronze base base ·· 12” 12” hh xx 4” 4” w w xx 4” 4” d. d

Philip Larkin 41. Philip Larkin maquette · Bronze on bronze base · 15” h x 7” w x 5” d

at Hull Paragon station, London

42. George Orwell maquette · Bronze on bronze base · 19” h x 9” w x 7” d

43. George Orwell small maquette · Bronze on bronze base · 6” h x 2” w x 2” d

44 Acknowledgements: Ken Adlard, Steve Russell Studios, Norman McBeath.

Charles Dickens