Coronavirus/Covid 19 and the Crowhurst Art Garden

I am kind of enjoying Covid 19. In fact I feel better than I usually do. Crisis? Excellent - I know exactly how to behave in one of those. No choice? Excellent - I know exactly what to do without a choice. Official sanction for doing nothing has removed my normally intense anxiety about not having enough to do while feeling I really should be doing something which, combined, render me incapable of doing anything anyway! 

So this period has given me pressure and anxiety free time in which I am getting things done. Creative things. I am particularly pleased to have two new additions to the Crowhurst Art Garden. This garden is a project created on a small piece of land adjacent to my house.  It was started in 2017 with 'Bonehinge' which was a pillar of stone, topped with a bone and a rusty hinge, all of which we found when we were digging over the space. These finds and the fun of putting them together gave us the initial idea for the garden. 
A call went out to friends and we then received the generous donations of Mantis by Martin Adams and Julie by Esther Neslen. Mantis began as golden plywood in 2017 but underwent a metamorphosis to forest green in 2019. 

Beautiful Julie is weathering wonderfully, displaying various mottled shades of moss and algae in the winter and then returning, more or less, to her original colour in the summer. 

The next addition was in 2018. Three cast iron radiators removed from the house during a new boiler installation were given an entirely new life as Sheepish.  

In March 2019 we received Jolyon Dupuy's Duchamp's Step- Ladder. Not only does the wheel spin but it also has its own original music video put together by Jolyon and Peter Schofield.  Thanks to Tim Vine for photos of this. 

Now here we are in April 2020 and I happy to present 'Flying Fish' and 'Still Life'. In the course of doing the 2019 Crowhenge project,  I met 92 year old master carver Ian Gordon. As well as contributing the carved title piece to the Crowhenge Project, he also gave me this piece of found wood which has now become 'Flying Fish'. The shape is just as he found it so all I did was sand and oil it and give it some eyes.

'Still Life' consists of an empty picture frame suspended between two trees on thin wire. This gives the illusion that the frame is floating in space.  What you see through the frame changes as you walk around the garden and will also change throughout the seasons. I found the frame dumped in the street in Hastings several years ago so am delighted to have finally transformed it into a less random public artwork.

(Lucky photo taken just as sun started filtering through trees). 

(Guest Photo from Laura Cecil)

I guess it's ironic that in this weird, pandemic period I have been busier than usual and it's not just the garden. I was also part of a team that set up a Coronavirus Support Group to match volunteers with people needing help. The community response here has been great, so I’m very happy that the time I’ve had to work on the garden means it can now be open to visitors. I am leaving the gate permanently open so no one will have to touch it and am sure visitor numbers in a village make it unlikely I will need social distancing queue markers! I may put a note on the gate asking people not to fall over, break their legs and sue me though because I don’t have public liability insurance.    
Despite my normal moaning about how much I miss London (I still do), I know it is a privilege to be living in a place like this at a time like this  We can go for walks without seeing anyone else and should the tanks eventually roll onto the lanes of Crowhurst we can jog round our garden and subsist on dandelion leaves and wild garlic. We also have a veg patch. It is also beautiful to see nature in its eternal cycle, regardless as always, of human affairs. The weather is wonderful, the birds are singing, trees are coming into blossom and leaf and there is a riotous abundance of spring flowers and colours. I am very grateful that this didn’t all kick off in November. So... thanks for that universe! 

Festival 15 - Matthew Burrows

'Painting is not born out of intelligence but the fine balance between confidence and surrender.' 

Matthew Burrows 

Wall (2017) 
Oil on board 152.5 x 124.5cm 

1. Can you tell us something about your work in this show and something about how your work has developed over the years. 

I am fortunate enough to live and work in the rolling hills of East Sussex, my studio, on the site of an old wind mill, is firmly perched on a ridge between valleys. Despite the beautiful views and clear vistas, my relationship to place is not one of description or nostalgia, but one of dwelling and ritual. It is a process of mythologizing, of drawing meaning from the particularities of the environment, of realising its wilderness and ours.

I’ve always considered myself a painter of people and places, and yet, it's rare to find these fully articulated anywhere in my work. In one sense this is about the problem of metaphor - a picture of a landscape is not the meaning of a landscape and can easily lead to trite illustration. My painting ‘Oasis’, on show at HAF, is a painting of absence, it depicts a structure in a barren landscape that could be an alter or building, a means of display or container of sorts. Beyond the suggestion of a ground and horizon there are few clues to construct a narrative, instead one is left with the density of pigment and colour, the movement of mark and tension across its hard yet porous surface. The title suggests hope in the harshness of the desert, it is the mystic’s landscape of solitude and temptation, a paradise of emptiness and rage, a country of madness and silence.

Single and Divided (2017) 

Oil on board 122 x 94cm

2. What you find most enjoyable and/or difficult about the process of creating art? 

The most enjoyable part of making art is that it asks so much of you, it asks everything, no stone left unturned. Of course, that’s what makes it difficult too. It’s a hard task master, mostly it leaves you frustrated and despondent, months can go by with little or no joy. But there’s something compelling and surprising in its mystery that keeps you moving on.

3. What would you like to see the Hastings Arts Forum do in the future?
HAF plays a significant part in the artistic fabric of Hastings, it gives a sense of place and purpose to artists who live and move to Hastings. Moving forward it would be really exciting to see HAF look again at how it shows work, perhaps taking a more creative approach to the design, layout and structure of the walls etc. It maybe a step too far but an open competition to ask for design solutions to this may create some refreshing and surprising outcomes.

Eclipse II (2016) 
Oil on board 77.5 x 59.5cm

More about Matthew and his work can be seen on his website 

Matthew Burrows Website

ELEGY - AN OPEN PROJECT ABOUT DEATH AND DYING

Elegy is a project I have been thinking about for some time. It now has its own page on the website and all submissions and ideas are welcome. 

Death looking into the window of one dying 
Jaroslav Panuška, 1900

Elegy - An Open Project about death and dying

Life's only certainty is its end. The manner of that end is unknown but the universal consensus is that it be quick, peaceful and painless.

Such a luxury does not correspond to the facts of human ageing and prolonging life medically, as an end in itself, is an increasingly double edged sword. Nor does it correspond to a contemporary environment where violent death as entertainment merges into 24 hour media cycles of violent death as reality.

Death defines life. The extent to which it is an abstraction is dependent mostly on where and when one’s life is located. It can also be choice as well as no choice.

It is always present
It is often welcome.
It is often feared.
It is also mostly ignored.

This project is an entirely open platform for people to communicate about death and about dying. This can be in the form of video, audio, text, poetry, images, animation, playlists or a combination of these things. Each submission will be given its own page and the only stipulation is that videos do not exceed 5 minutes and playlists do not exceed 5 tracks.

If you would like to contribute to this project please send an initial email with your contact details and a brief outline of your idea. New and existing work can be submitted and in some cases I may be able to help facilitate new projects

Please send messages via website: Elegy Project

Eliza John and Wendy Smith

Going to the Hastings Art Forum is always a pleasure and always a surprise. I have seen a huge variety of work there just in the last two months and the new exhibition of paintings by Eliza John and Wendy Smith is different again.

Eliza John’s work touches on themes of family, friendship, place and occasion. She mostly uses oils but also works with combinations of acrylic, watercolour, gouache and charcoal. Most of her paintings are an interplay of abstraction and figuration from which shapes, figures and landscapes emerge.

Scenes and characters melt into the texture and colour of the paint giving impressions of the personalities depicted or reflecting the delicate intimacy of relationships. Sometimes the figures are sublime shadows standing ghost-like against beautiful combinations of background colour. Occasionally, there is an underlying emotional ambiguity in her scenes or characters which can make for uneasy viewing. This is balanced by work using lighter spectrums that allow moments of exquisite stillness and calm subtlety. 

The amount of work here combined with the variety of sizes, colours and frames sometimes makes it difficult to focus on any one piece. However, it is worth taking time to appreciate the fine line between the abstract and the figurative in this work and what it communicates about human perception. There is fascination in believing you see a scene from afar that then clouds over into abstract colour as you get closer.

The work of Wendy Smith also combines abstract and figurative but the contrast between the two artists gives the viewer a completely different experience. There are fewer pieces but they are larger and her palette is bright and colourful. Where figures are present they are from nature - leaves, trees or birds in flight.

The freedom of application sometimes makes it seem as if the paint had jumped there by itself and combined with the colour choices the effect is one of exhilaration and joy. In some cases the limited use of paint leaves white spaces within each work and this adds to the sense of light and airiness around it. Walking into the gallery from a grey and rainy day is like walking into summer. It's worth a visit for that reason alone. 

Although the spectrum and style of each of these artists is very different, both use their mediums freely and both work within the shifting boundaries of figurative and abstract expression. It is in the contrast, however, that the show is complete. The two rooms complement each other beautifully with a sense of lightness and space in one and darkness and intensity in the other. Dipping between the two enables the viewer to shift between two different experiences of art and of life. 


Eliza John and Wendy Smith
Hastings Art Forum
12 - 24 July 2016
Private View - 5.00 - 7.00 Saturday July 16th.