18. IMAGE 27 by ANN BROMLEY

 

BEDFORDBURY GALLERY (now closed)  26.10.10

This picture has a strong physical presence: it divides into two rectangles of colour – rough, tufty green grass below and blue sky above - both  splintered by delicate but feisty buttercups with all their associations of children’s guessing games, nosegays and posies. And the angle ensures that we are no longer in a grown up world which looks down or across the scenery while tramping across a meadow. Like children, we’re there below, among a forest of plants and tiny unseen creatures. You can almost feel an additional  invisible presence in the picture, the sun, which must be around somewhere because the buttercups are stretching towards it so vigorously.

Pictures with Presence, Looking with the eyes of the soul  is the title of the show.  Ann Bromley  offers ‘an exhibition of photographs, an invitation to inner peace’. The timing of the exhibition ‘celebrates the visit to London of Eckhart Tolle’ (author of The Power of Now).

I saw it on a cold, sunny, Sunday morning after a walk across Waterloo Bridge to the edge of Soho. Bedfordbury Gallery offers exhibition space to artists or galleries on two light, airy floors in a street wedged between Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden. None of the photographs has a title. Image 27  describes the picture above because the artist fears that anything more specific might contaminate the viewer’s individual response.  Each is in a limited edition of 15.