376 UNTITLED by JOHN HOYLAND

JOHN HOYLAND paintings 1964–1982


Power Stations
 , Newport Street Gallery, London 

until 3rd April 2016

Damien Hirst's brand new Newport Street Gallery and its curly staircases are vast: you could say it's of cathedral proportions.The building  occupies the whole length of a street which was once a terrace of listed industrial buildings, purpose-built in 1913 to serve as scenery painting and carpentry studios for the booming local and West End theatres The ground and upper floors within the five buildings are continuous and flexible enough to be used for large and small exhibitions.

To get there from my house I first walk along Lambeth Walk, made famous by the 1937 musical Me and My Girl and then  the 1942 American musical film Me and My Gal starring Judy Garland. Soon I turn into Old Paradise Street. I used to think that this name had a religious origin but am informed it had more to do with earthy pleasures..... 

 

  To celebrate the opening Damien Hirst’s  Power Stations exhibition presents 33 of John Hoyland’s large-scale paintings, dating from 1964 to 1982, drawn from Hirst’s own collection of over 3,000 works of art, many of which he intends to exhibit free to the public. Ben Eastham, co founder and editor of The White Review, writing in the London Review of Books (7.1.16): says Hoyland is 'concerned purely with the sort of overwhelming sensual experience only non-figurative painting can create, an experience utterly removed from our everyday visual life. Painting, in other words, for painting's sake'.

 In Hoyland's own words:

 'Paintings are there to be experienced … [they] are not to be reasoned with, they are not to be understood, they are to be recognised.' (1979)





 An interesting conversation between Damian Hirst (l) and John Hoyland (r) was published in the Royal Academy magazine  (28/8/2015)



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Postscript

 In 1998 with my daughter I  glimpsed a small acrylic painting in a Mayfair Gallery window - the first time I saw John Hoyland's work. It shone like a jewel. A year later I bought this small print. That was the year when he had an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I visited it on a Sunday morning. The top floor gallery was flooded with light, it was 10am and for 10 precious minutes I was alone. You don't forget occasions like that. 

 John Hoyland's work needs space, which is why the Newport Street is a perfect venue.
 

375 BELL by TANYA KOVATS

Bell , cast bronze, timber structure.  Photograph (c) Stephen Haywood

ONE AND ALL 

A voyage through sight, sound and sea at

SOMERSET HOUSE, LONDON

One and All is an exhibition found in a series of rooms and corridors in Somerset House, just by Waterloo Bridge.  The title comes from a poem of that name by John Betjeman who in 1965 was writing about the many threats to our coastline. Much earlier, in 1895, the National Trust secured a small piece of land, Dinas Oleu, on the Welsh coast, for the enjoyment of the public. This exhibition  celebrates 50 years of the National Trust's dedicated care of our coast line. 

Tanya Kovaks' tidal bell was cast at Porthcurno beach in Cornwall, near Land's End, where the tide starts its journey around the coast.    She has created a digital drawing that tracks high tide in real time as it moves across the coasts of Britain, arriving at Land's End, splitting north and south, and meeting again in the mouth of the Thames.The bell will be rung at high tide on the river Thames throughout the exhibition.  Online you can access her work, accelerate or pause the tide, discover harbours and headlands, while hearing waves slowed down to 'tide time'.

What does the sea say? by Martyn Ware  (c) Maija Handover

The multi-talented Martyn Ware is a sound artist with vivid childhood memories of outings to the seaside as well as his native Sheffield. You can see this beach hut on the River Terrace at Somerset House, resting after its travels round the country to various coastal resorts, each with strong links to Britain's industrial past. There  the artist, together with the award-winning filmmaker Benjamin Wigley, captured stories from the public which are woven into an online digital journey through poetry, sound, film and tide. Online you can make your own mix of Martyn's soundscape and Benjamin's films.

Owen Sheers' poem On the Sea's Land (ar-for-dir) grew out of two weeks' walking and researching the Gower coastline, seeking "to explore and excavate the internal  and external geography of this ancient, yet ever renewing landscape". Drawing on local history, anecdote and dialect, his poem starts by presenting the visitor with the inevitable question - sea on the left or the right? Whatever the choice the poem can be experienced online in both directions. Here is an extract from the Prologue;

...don't let a fog-forgotten shore,

or storms drawn to water

stop you from stepping out

and taking that path to the edge.

Within two fields crossing 

the light can lift and anchor the land again,

and you, gifted a place in it -

alone on these deckle-edged cliffs

their stone prows emerging from the mist

like armies from a forest....  

374. BROOKLYN BRIDGE: NIGHT ICE by ANN DESMET

Brooklyn Bridge:Night Ice - wood engraving, linocut and stencilling  22x17cm,

LONG & RYLE, LONDON

24 .11.15

Ann Desmet is one of only 3 engravers elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in its 247 years of history - and the only woman. But forget for a moment, if you can,  the exquisite  skill and mastery which  makes this artwork possible. 

Start by enjoying the view. You are invited straight into  a  hard, crisp, dry night, almost standing on the bridge itself.  Your eye is drawn  towards a small dark space flanked by what could be cathedral windows or butterfly wings. Scenes of this beauty conjure up the magic and mythology of fairy tales and of cunning Jack Frost. Crusty rime coats those slim poles on the right, whose shadows mark out a stern geometric pattern. On the left your eye greets machinery with spidery legs covered in snow which is covered by ice.  Nothing is soft or blurred, but on this dark, silent night this particular jumble of metal looks positively noisy.

St Paul's:Lights,Wood engraving & stencil on Gampi Vellum paper

 The art critic Laura Gascoigne points out that Ann Desmet is an artist who likes to  'leave our imaginative options open'.
 The sky behind St Paul's dome is crisscrossed with beams. We are not certain why. Is this a City of London Festival delight, a sky pierced by sharp lasers, watched by jostling, cheering crowds lining the banks of the Thames and the surrounding area? Or are those searchlights raking the sky for enemy aircraft? Does it strike a chill in the heart of Londoners old enough to remember the appalling attack, the St Pauls Cathedral blitz ' on  29th December 1940, resulting in what has been called the Second Great Fire of London (the first was in 1666)? 
  
 Below is a link to Long and Ryle's exhibition catalogue:
 Catalogue
 
 P.S.  Brooklyn Bridge is roughly a mile long. It opened in 1883  I'm told it carries six lanes of vehicular traffic plus a safe, elevated pedestrian and bike path. It takes about 30 minutes to walk across and a well-meaning  website brings us down to earth with 'walking across the bridge at a moderate pace burns about 100 calories; walking slowly burns about 80'.

373 EVENING WALK by DELIA TOURNAY-GODFREY

MALL GALLERIES, LONDON 20.11.15

Evening Walk, Oil on board 14x21cm

I could begin most of my blogs by apologising for the fact that no photograph does justice to an art work: it's the wrong size, and it cannot indicate the subtleties  of texture, depth and colour etc. But that would be tedious.  I make an exception in this case and offer an apology because Evening Walk is a prize-winning work whose quality cannot be wrapped up and delivered on this page.

Evening Walk is tiny. There is an underlying and satisfying abstract design and above all, an interesting surface texture which  hints at weather and wind. The work has a light-shimmering quality. It glistens.

Winter Sunshine

I featured an earlier work Winter Sunshine in Blog 92. At the time I wrote "The artist achieves a subtle range of colours from a limited palette. And I like her honesty. Sometimes the North Sea looks like molten glass. It’s heavy and strong, not playfully shredding itself into channels and ripples, nor dashing itself against rocks. Here it looks unhurried yet determined. The reflected sun makes a silver overlay like a lace cloth".

 ING Discerning Eye is a show of small works independently selected by six prominent figures from the art world, including Emma Bridgewater and Nicole Farhi, Stephen Doherty and Steve Pill. A total of 457 works – including paintings, prints, sculptures, drawings and photographs – by 197 artists were on display this year. Delia Tournay-Godfrey writes " I was amazed and delighted to win one of the eight purchase prizes at ING Discerning Eye on Thursday evening – The Lincoln Seligman Purchase Prize for my painting Summer Evening Walk".

372 MOONLIT AFTERNOON by ANN DESMET

LONG & RYLE, LONDON 16.11.15

TIME SEQUENCES 

It's the 1930s and this 'Napoleon hat' clock is what you would see centre stage on the mantelpiece of many a household, above a roaring coal fire. But when you walk into a gallery and approach this exquisite pretender, the last thing you must ask is 'What's the time?'
Ancient and modern, solid and shifting, paper and stone jostle together in Ann Desmet's creations. Laura Gascoigne describes her as 'a beachcomber, scouring the sands of time for interesting fragments to use in her work'. Worlds within worlds appear: a palm tree and a classical column stand shoulder to shoulder inside the clock. Collaged images, wood engravings and prints  are embedded within convex glass lenses. The view changes as the observer moves around. 

 Jim Anderson. in a profile of the artist in Printmaking Today remarks that her focus shifted from the human form itself to human concerns, often conveyed in architecture. Rome, where she studied, felt like a time machine: a collage of pagan, early Christian, medieval and baroque fragments. And what better place to explore this passing of time and challenge the viewer than to transform vivid images into a 'pop up'  theatre inside the cavern of a sedate, trustworthy wooden clock?

One of the inspirations behind this radical new departure in her work is  Joseph Cornell.a man the New York Times called “a poet of light; an architect of memory-fractured rooms and a connoisseur of stars, celestial and otherwise”, and whose work was to be seen in an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art earlier this year. This is the same Royal Academy  as appointed Ann Desmet a Royal Academician in 2011, one of only three wood engravers so honoured in its 247 years of history.

Moonlit Afternoon; wood  engravings and monotype (printed from found lino block0 collage on paper presented under convex glass face of wooden 'Napolean Hat' clock

Collage of linocut & wood engraving prints on paper, plus small mirror and other found objects inside hinged wooden door at back of clock at' clock (1920s) 

371 YOU by RIVELINO

TRAFALGAR SQUARE. LONDON 21.10.15

YOU weighs 25 tons and is 14.5 metres long. It was unveiled on King Charles Island in  Trafalgar Square in August. It consists of two identical bronze index fingers pointing towards each other. Whenever I pass through Trafalgar Square I'm bound to find some member of the public bring photographed in the space between. 
 
 The work is part of Contemporary Mexican Sculpture: The Vision of Four Artists, an exhibition of new large-scale sculptures in volcanic stone, bronze, and resin by the  sculptors Yvonne Domenge (b.1946), Jorge Yazpik (b.1955), Paloma Torres (b. 1960), and José Rivelino (b.1973), who together represent four successive generations of Mexican artists.
 

Nuestros Silencios

I wrote earlier (Blog 49) about Rivelino's majestic Nuestros Silencios in Victoria Tower Gardens on the banks of the Thames, which has now toured the world. Rivelino has demonstrated again and again how intervention in an urban landscape is a fertile way to engage the public, prompting dialogue with collective memory.  What is real and surreal, tangible and intangible? My first glimpse of YOU made me think of confrontation, of guns, not fingers, perhaps because there are passers by who still carry the memory of the terrible Blitz of central London in the 1940s.

 Public space is always the most sincere, challenging place in which to display an artist’s work...In a world that is self-evidently unequal, YOU calls upon viewers to question their attitude towards the highly significant issue of equality between human beings. Rivelino

 www.contemporarymexicansculpture.com/rivelino.html 

mexicouk2015.mx 

www.domenge.com/en

www.contemporarymexicansculpture.com/paloma-torres.html 

www.contemporarymexicansculpture.com/jorge-yazpik.html

370 TWO CAPE LOBSTERS by KURT JACKSON

A CORNISH BESTIARY

Redfern Gallery, London

Bestiaries started life as early as the 12th century in England, in the form of detailed depictions in words or pictures of all sorts of animals, real or imaginary. They drew on compilations of even earlier sources and  were never meant to be a scientific text. Humour, accurate observation and imagination combined to make  a heady mix. Improving people’s minds and souls was the aim, particularly 'those who have difficulty comprehending with their ears but will perceive with their eyes'. 

Jackson's contemporary bestiary at the Redfern Gallery is superb. It draws on this religious medieval tradition, a desire to stimulate our connection and appreciation of the world around us. Spider crabs, foxes, coley, grasshoppers, a sperm whale, barn owls, pinkish smudges which suddenly turn into elephant hawk moths, red admirals, a tiger beetle - his work is full of surprises.

 

Two Cape Lobsters, (mixed media on paper, 65x50cm), above, at first glance might be a beguiling abstract painting. Daddy Long Legs, (oil and collage on canvas, 92x92cm), depicts these frail, ghostly, scary, unpredictable, tiny creatures which seem on the point of falling apart and you wish they would go away and do that somewhere else. In life each one is indistinct and negligible. Here a number have gathered together in an almost military formation. Below Wet Buzzard in the Rain, (mixed media on paper 56 x 60cm), has a haunting soulful beauty of its own.

Wet Buzzard in the Rain

 

There are landscapes and seascapes too.  The Big Basker, oil on canvas, 122x122cm,  shows a vast  familiar blue grey sea, empty until you spot a tiny black triangle, a fin jabbing its way through the water. I have taken many photographs of Cornish seas - never have I given a thought to the life teeming inside them.

Karl Jackson is 'an ambassador for Survival International and frequently works with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WaterAid, Oxfam and Cornwall Wildlife Trust'. In his new book (see below) -  A Kurt Jackson Bestiary (2015) - he has returned to zoology, the subject he studied at Oxford University. He combines  stunning imagery with commentaries, his poems, and an account of his working life. It features a Forward by Lord John Krebs and an introduction by Charlotte Mullins.

www.redfern-gallery.com/kurt-jackson_1035 

wwwkurtjackson.com/A-Cornish-Bestiary-2015

www.charlottemullins.com 

www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/fellows-and-staff/fellows/lord-krebs