FOREWORD

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FOREWORD

The art of Cutler Footway shows us, well over a hundred years past the advent of a plethora of movements that have defined and shaped the contemporary art world- cubism, suprematism, dada, conceptualism and all the other isms of the 20th and early 21st centuries- that even the most sophisticated palette may hunger for an aesthetic rooted within a tradition stretching back to the renaissance, one that still attempts to reconcile an inner vision with a pictorial language developed by generations of painters. For Footway is most assuredly a painter- not for him the devices employed by contemporary artists in their various practices. In his other life, as the art critic and historian Bruce James, he was obliged to assay and appraise the contemporary scene; work carried out, as Jonathon McBurnie notes in his essay, with tact and candour. As Footway, he has been able to pursue a goal few in the current era allow themselves, that of a pastoral Arcadia. His landscapes are however not located in the Peloponnese of myth but half a world away in the Burdekin region; his Arcadia is decidedly antipodean. Footway’s idylls are anything but plein air studies; no passer-by in the Burdekin will find these views. The landscape in which the artist’s nudes are draped is one of the imagination, idealised, undergoing a compression of tonal range while retaining its saturated colour. In his handling of brush and paint equal weight is given to features ranging from the permanent to the transient and even to the momentary; the flames in the cane fields have the apparent mass of rocky outcrops, or of the vegetation they burn.

As noted by Gitte Weise in her introduction, we can detect the influence of several artists in Footway’s oeuvre, some of whom James has written on. These works are the result of a creative tension between the necessarily omnivorous appetite of the critic with the artist’s need to integrate his sources. The title for the exhibition, as McBurnie points out, relates to the orientation of artists’ studio windows; but it may also direct us to the importance of artistic streams that found their full flowering in the northern hemisphere, in renaissance Italy and France at the end of the 19th century.

Like our own age, those periods were notable for political and social turmoil, in which artists produced works of profound beauty. In this exhibition Footway shows us that there is still a role for painters in sounding the depth and stillness that is at the heart of their vocation. I wish to acknowledge the substantial efforts made by the Galleries staff towards this exhibition. In particular Chloe Lindo and Jesse Escriva in the development of the catalogue and Jo Lankester in the management of the exhibition. I extend my thanks to Curator Gitte Weise, Jonathan McBurnie and artist Cutler Footway for their insights and dedication in bringing this exhibition into being.

Jane Scott Galleries Director