'Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?' Catalogue by Tonbridge School

“ WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW ANDXX BLUE?” XX

Cover image: Twins III Virginia Bodman 2012 oil on cotton 178 x 165cm 2

“ WHO’S AFRAID OF RED, YELLOW AND BLUE?” ‘ In looking at colour and the ways we place it in our minds and in our worlds, we can in turn find out something about ourselves’.*

“Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” explores colour in the paintings of 3 contemporary artists: Virginia Bodman, Julian Brown and Gill Ord. They use colour to draw us into their work and seduce us, and also confound our expectations with unusual or dissonant contrasts. By using colour strategically they help us become actively engaged in the process of thinking and looking at painting; enabling us to unpick and discover our likes, dislikes, prejudices and associations. The title comes from a series of large-scale paintings by the American Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman, created in the late 1960s. Newman was critiquing the use of colour according to theory, rather than for its more expressive qualities. It highlights the way our understanding of colour begins with the rules we learn when we are young, and often develops unconsciously with our observations from the world around us. My mother was an artist and dynamic colour relationships were not only at the heart of her paintings, but were also in the palette she used to create our home. As a result the power of colour has been part of my consciousness ever since. Because of this, it has come as a surprise that despite the continuously innovative use of colour by contemporary artists in many disciplines, there has (arguably) been little acknowledgement by contemporary critics. By making colour the focus of this exhibition I hope it provides an opportunity for reflection of our own responses, both critical and emotional. This catalogue includes two essays that relate to the exhibition in different ways. The first, by Frank Woodgate, puts the exploration of colour into a wider art historical context. He examines the beginnings of the liberation of colour from naturalism, touching also on abstraction. In contrast Cherry Smyth’s writing responds poetically and philosophically to the paintings themselves, contextualising the artists in the contemporary painting scene. I would like to thank the artists Virginia Bodman, Julian Brown and Gill Ord for their immediate and warm response to the invitation to take part. Getting to know them, and their paintings has been a real pleasure. Heartfelt thanks are also due to our wonderful team of OBS Gallery Stewards and Assistants, without whom the exhibition programme would not be possible. EMILY GLASS, CURATOR

* David Batchelor, ‘Introduction: On Colour and Colours’ from Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art (London; Whitechapel, 2008)

‘ONCE OPENED, ROBBED’ Cherry Smyth ‘as if some ancient tomb were opened, and once opened, robbed half with delight, half dread.’1 There is an opening, into consciousness, the artist’s and your own, if you let it, that is one of the joys of looking at abstract painting. The looker is invited to lean into something unknown and wrestle with the decisions that brought this strange, wonderful thing into being. An apparently random series of colours and marks, takes you back to the blank canvas, and if you wait long enough, right to the source the artist tapped to create it. The viewer gains access to the physical experience of a nagging, awesome kind of insatiability – calm yet dissatisfied, serene but active – an ease that isn’t always easy. To understand the painting, you have to stand in for the painter in an intimate, expansive exchange that remakes how we see and ‘feel’ seeing. Each of these three painters approach the challenge of reinvigorating abstraction in distinct yet congruent ways. For Gill Ord, the aim is to ‘break the horizon’, invoking and interrogating the conventions of landscape painting to propose a part-dream, part-futuristic fantasy. Julian Brown’s template is geometric abstraction with its gridded rules and symmetries which he blasts apart with often anarchic exuberance. Virginia Bodman plies and pushes the figurative tradition into a riotous and amorphous evocation of what constitutes ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ around us. In paintings like Fallen, 2014, Gill Ord exploits the tension between the seriousness of compositional rigour and the almost off-kilter, long drops of paint off precipices. Here is a sense of slow splurge of vertical forms, whether it’s molten lava emerging under pressure, or the tidy accumulation of drips to form stalagmites and stalactites that poise between stasis and imperceptible movement. Ord pulls the eye from surface to depth using a graphic efficiency of colour – dirty tangerine, cool mauve and faint jade. This is friendly cool, not ironic cool. There’s edgy chemistry in the patterns of Novy Dvur, 2015, and questioning points where brown equals yellow, pale green sings to dark grey and the eye floats between the shapes like water trying to find its own level. There is less languid fear in Syntax, 2013, where the precipices have become structures – the body or buildings – and the confident alignment of shapes suggest the unfolding of a package into flaps and lids. The rougher limb of primrose yellow acts as a parvenu on the left and threatens to derail the balance but yet doesn’t. I’m reminded of Zaha Hadid’s attempts to collapse the distinctions of up and down, inside and out that she called ‘Planetary Architecture’. Ord’s seductive conceptual headlands and refusal of spatial hierarchies could be dubbed ‘Planetary Abstraction’. Mithras’ Cap and Saturn’s Sickle, 2016, presents a harder won obduracy where anxiety is much more apparent and a less lyrical experiment takes us to another, more denuded and bad mood, planet. In an essay ‘Painting Beside Itself,’ David Joselit argues that the body of a painting that enters the digital network is degraded, dislocated and degraded.2 Joselit developed his thesis in a recent catalogue essay, arguing that the painterly brushstroke is the ‘subjectobject’ which often appears ‘beside itself ’ as a gesture and a cipher of that gesture at the same time.3 These ideas are demonstrated clearly in Julian Brown’s work whose recurrent trope of the dashing curve (which could suggest a boat, a cradle or a smile), also acts as a critique of all it can signify. Like squatters,

areas of shabby pink and polluted green disrupt and complicate the recurrent pattern in Baltic Moon, 2016. Brown’s mucky aesthetic revels in the temptation of the prettiness of pattern and its tyranny. While artists like Philip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli succumb to the demands of geo-abstraction, Brown wrecks the party with his anti-purity, fairground shoddiness. Comic Relief, 2010/11, almost obliterates itself in green slime swipes. This permission to fail swings from joy to trepidation and this swinging place is the daring, dynamic site of the ugly. ‘What difference is there between ugliness and repugnance to ugliness?’ asks Susan Medina. ‘Ugliness is always social, it doesn’t exist in nature. It may be that ugliness is a form of fear of the unknown.’4 In paintings like ‘Mamaroneck’, and ‘Galleon’, both 2015, the rhythmic riot of movement is enjoyed not resisted and chaotic energy channeled into glossy resolution. Brown has swung back into the beat and synergy of happy labour. Once, a girl who gained her sight and could only recognize objects through touch, described a tree as ‘the tree with lights in it’.5 In Virginia Bodman’s noisily expressive paintings the sunholes and gaps in trees, are given as much weight as the leaves. Her large plosive canvases test the boundaries of space and form, navigating the line we’ve drawn between ‘nature’ and ‘human’ and capturing the glorious moment of its dissolution. Headless, 2014, moves from the stable, grounded legs and skirt of a figure up into streams of vertical green ribbons and white and purple dots that inundate it. Bodman’s question is how to emerge from profusion or stay happily merged within it. There’s great tension and physicality between the planted figure and the fragmented filtering around it. Bridle Path, 2004-6, Somewhere, 2006-9, and Spring, 2006-7, teem with sensually dissonant blood reds, acidic greens and frank blue. They ask when is the artificial natural and vice versa, can we discern the difference and does it matter? Here is the legacy of the maternal lineage of floral wallpaper and paisley carpets that brought ‘nature’ into the domestic setting and defined strict rules of ‘natural’ femininity. Bodman posits an energetic and defiant ‘now’ against the invasive and often cloying experience of culture and tradition. The paintings may promise sweetness but they soon spoil it with the beauty of decrepitude and discolouration edging into raucous celebration. Painting is always at a self-conscious juncture of possibility, always asserting itself as the new imperative and these three painters excel at exposing the stoniness and landslides of the contemporary rockface, balancing the mass and mess of agitation with the steady holding of nerve.

1 Marianne Boruch, from ‘Raising Lumber’, Descendant (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989) 2 David Joselit, ‘Painting Beside Itself ’, October, Fall, No. 130 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009) 3 David Joselit, ‘Reassembling Painting’, catalogue essay for ‘Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age’, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 2015-16 4 Susan Medina, from Medinations, Gorse No. 5 (Dublin: March 2016) 5 Annie Dillard, The Abundance (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016)

COLOUR AND ABSTRACTION Frank Woodgate In composing a painting, be it figurative or abstract, the artist has at his or her disposal, and is able to manipulate, line, form, space, scale and colour. Some abstract artists, such as Piet Mondrian, deliberately seek to eliminate space (or depth) from their work, while painters of grisaille works manage without colour. To many, however, colour is the most important, and can be used in a variety of ways. Sir Isaac Newton wrote Optics, or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions & Colours of Light in 1704 and demonstrated that complementary colours (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple) cancel each other out to produce white light when combined, or produce grey when mixed as paints. More importantly for artists, the Director of Dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry workshop, MichelEugène Chevreul (1786-1889), produced a colour wheel in 1855 which showed, inter alia, that the juxtaposition of complementary colours made them stand out more powerfully against each other. This was taken up to great effect by artists like Matisse and the so-called Fauves (or French Expressionists) in the early 20th century. In 1911, Wassily Kandinsky, a German Expressionist, published Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, translated into English in 1914) in which he propounded very positive theories about how we are affected by colour. These were informed by his interest in the relationship between colour and music, stemming from his synaesthesia (a condition in the brain, whereby when he heard sounds, he ‘saw’ colours). For him, “In music a light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello; a still darker a thunderous double bass; and the darkest blue of all - an organ.”1 Kandinsky also felt that music “acts directly on the soul”2 and that, properly used, colour in painting could also have this effect. He quoted Delacroix, who said that “Everyone knows that yellow, orange and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty.”3 This idea was taken up by the Abstract Expressionists in America in the late-1940s; they too felt that colours, particularly when displayed on a large canvas, could affect us at a deeper level than the mere visual. When Barnett Newman produced his iconic series, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue I, II, III and IV between 1966 and 1970, he wished to use the primary colours in their purest form, rather as Mondrian had. He said later “Why give in to those purists and formalists who have put a mortgage on red, yellow and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them as colors?”4 The four works’ titles were, of course, a reference to the controversial film of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?”, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Whereas Mondrian’s use of the primary colours was intended to suggest purity, tranquillity and harmony, the sheer scale of Newman’s works (and others by the Abstract Expressionists) gives them an even more powerful effect. In much modern painting, colour is not subservient to the subject, as in traditional art, but frequently is itself the subject. All three artists in this exhibition use colour to great effect, with varying degrees of abstraction, and it is worth considering the background to abstraction, as well as the importance of colour in their work. The three ‘fathers of abstraction’, of whom two have already been mentioned, were Kandinsky (1866-1944), Mondrian (1872-1944) and Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935). All started out as painters of figurative subjects but, in the second decade of the 20th century, all moved towards

complete abstraction. Of course, all art is an abstraction from real life; as Maurice Denis (18701943) wrote: “… a picture - before being a warhorse, a nude woman or some sort of anecdote is essentially a surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order.” 5 As they moved towards complete abstraction, both Mondrian and Kandinsky at first produced works in which something of the real world could be discerned, albeit with greater and greater difficulty. Mondrian sometimes helped by titling the work Tree or something similar, while Kandinsky moved from descriptive titles such as Cossacks (Tate) to the use of musical analogies (Improvisation, Composition etc.), which were not so helpful if one were looking for ‘real world’ subject matter. Eventually all three artists’ works became completely abstract (although Malevich reverted to figurative painting later in his life). Virginia Bodman has said, quite rightly, that “writing about colour is like singing about architecture” and the way to appreciate all art is, of course to look at it and allow it to affect us, if possible, in a more than just visual way. Of the works in this exhibition, Bodman’s are perhaps the closest to things in the real world, particularly since the starting point for some of them is photo-collage, resulting in abstracted images of female figures (such as Twiggy) in the landscape. Bodman’s works, such as Miss Perfect (2009) and Twins III (2012) strike us by her use of not only variations in colour, but also tone and, sometimes, fluorescence. Julian Brown’s interests range widely, from the works of Duccio (active 1278-1319) to the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-97) and, while some of his paintings are completely abstract, consisting of vertical and diagonal geometric forms (e.g. Broad Reach, 2005), others with evocative titles, such as Galleon (2015) suggest at least some sort of marine environment, if not the ship itself. Colour too helps to evoke an underlying subject, with the strong pinks in Flamingo Tide (2015) and Flamingo Wave (2015) suggesting the eponymous birds. Interestingly, the curved shapes in both of these works seem also to relate to the second part of each one’s title. Although the works of Gill Ord which are on display are ‘portrait’ shape, she describes them as landscapes and that is how they appear, albeit in very abstracted form. We want to see something in them, but if there is anything, it is very elusive. Is that a figure in the foreground (if we can even talk about foreground) of Spanish Moon (2012)? Are these trees through which we could walk in Mithras’ Cap and Saturn’s Sickle (2016)? Her variations in colour and tone are perhaps not as pronounced as those of the other two artists in this show, but her paintings are none the worse for that, with subtle variations between ‘autumnal’ colours and shades of blue and green. As with the earlier abstractionists discussed above, the artists in this exhibition show us that there can be a wide variety in abstract art, in which form, colour and texture all play a part in what can be an emotional as well as an aesthetic experience.

1 Wassily Kandinsky ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ in Harrison, C. et al eds. Art in Theory 1815 – 1900 (London: Blackwell, 1998) 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., quoting Paul Signac’s D’Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme. 4 Statement in Art Now: New York, 1992. 5 Maurice Denis ‘Definition of Neo-Traditionalism’ in Harrison, C. et al eds. Art in Theory 1815 – 1900 (London: Blackwell, 1998)

ARTISTS Virginia Bodman Julian Brown Gill Ord

10 16 22

Credits 28

Virginia Bodman Virginia Bodman lives and works in Sunderland, where she is a Senior Lecturer at Sunderland University. She gained her BA at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1977 and her MA at the Royal College of Art in 1981. She has had numerous one person and group shows both nationally and internationally and her awards include the Abbey Scholarship at the British School at Rome in 1981, a Leverhulme Fellowship in 1996 and she was the first Artist in Residence at Durham Cathedral in 1984. “Colour, as a critical tool, has been a long term preoccupation and I often use it to challenge the viewer, for example by making paintings with a palette so sweet that it makes the eyes’ ‘teeth’ wince, or so loud and ‘happy’ that it gives a false ring, especially when it acts as a distraction from dark or pessimistic subjects. The choice of colours used in paintings (the palette) may not align with a viewer’s personal or ‘good’ taste; responses to paintings are often intuitive and instant. Challenging these first reactions seems essential to engaging the viewer with the subject.” www.virginiabodman.com

VIRGINIA BODMAN

Headless 2011-14 oil on acrylic on cotton 153 x 120cm

Bridal Path 2004-6 oil on acrylic on cotton 186 x 236cm 12

VIRGINIA BODMAN

Miss Perfect 2009 oil and dry pigment on cotton 221 x 196cm 13

Spring 2006-7 acrylic, leaf litter and oil on cotton 191mm x 203cm 14

VIRGINIA BODMAN

Somewhere 2006-9 oil and dry pigment on cotton 168 x 229cm 15

Julian Brown Julian Brown lives and works in Brighton. He gained his BA at Liverpool John Moores University in 1996 and his MA at the Royal Academy Schools in 2001. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the UK, and has recently been shortlisted for the John Moores painting prize. His work is held in private and public collections including the Abbott Hall Art Gallery, Falmouth Art Gallery, Debenhams and Oliver Spencer. “The imagery in my work is influenced by nostalgic visions of the 1980s and the folk art from my mother’s Polish heritage. Both of these worlds have a handmade geometric quality that has a playful and primitive relevance to the world we now live in. I try to explore this ‘clunkiness’ with tactile images that sit somewhere between order and chaos, structure and collapse, expression and control. While the underpinning of the process is held together by predetermined structures, the freewheeling application is purposely engaging and ambivalent to the expressive urge to dictate the paintings.” www.julianbrownart.co.uk

JULIAN BROWN

Mono Fauna 2012 acrylic on canvas 50 x 40cm

Flamingo Wave 2015 acrylic on canvas 50 x 40cm 18

JULIAN BROWN

White Horse 2015 acrylic on canvas 50 x 40cm 19

Mamaroneck 2015 acrylic on canvas 30 x 40cm 20

JULIAN BROWN

Flamingo Tide 2015 acrylic on canvas 50 x 40cm 21

Gill Ord Gill Ord lives and works in London. She gained her BA in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art in 1980 and her MA from Manchester Polytechnic in 1981. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and in 2014 received an Abbey Fellowship in Painting at the British School of Rome. Ord is also a founding member of Braziers International Artist’s Workshop and Supernormal Experimental Arts and Music Festival, and an advisor for Batroun Projects, Lebanon. “There are decisions in the studio, decisions that rely on a mix of conscious and unconscious actions. The colour is a suggestive sometime blocking device, it can throw up ways forward or create tension and provoke conflict” Michael Keenan www.gillord.co.uk

GILL ORD

Syntax 2013 oil on canvas 183 x 122cm

Spanish Moon 2012 oil on canvas 152 x 107cm 24

GILL ORD

Novy Dvur 2015 oil on canvas 180 x 120cm 25

Fallen 2011 oil on canvas 183 x 122cm 26

GILL ORD

Mithras’ Cap and Saturn’s Sickle 2016 oil on canvas 180 x 120cm 27

OBS Gallery Tonbridge School High Street Tonbridge Kent TN9 1JP 01732 365555 obsgallery@tonbridge-school.org www.tonbridge-school.co.uk/obsg

Published to accompany the exhibition: “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” OBS Gallery, 17 September – 6 November 2016 Curated by Emily Glass

Edited by Emily Glass Proofread by Kim Jacobson Designed by Michael Lenz at Draught Associates Printed by Windsor Published by OBS Gallery Images © the artists

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“Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” explores colour through the work of 3 contemporary painters: Virginia Bodman, Julian Brown and Gill Ord. Although their practices are diverse, each uses colour strategically to confound our expectations, challenge our assumptions and draw us into their work. As a result we become actively involved in the process of thinking and looking at painting, unpicking and discovering our likes, dislikes, prejudices and associations. This catalogue provides biographical details about each of the artists alongside their paintings in the exhibition.