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 - Alan Rankle

Our next featured artist is Alan Rankle. Here he talks about his art, insects, travel, Norman Road and the shared experiences of dogs and art restorers....  

 Hudson Spring (2017)

 oils on canvas 40x40cm 

Can you tell us something about your work in this show and something about how your work has developed over the years? 
The painting featured in the exhibition Untitled Painting XXVI (Bodiam) 2018 is from a series called Mothland. An evolving theme of these paintings came from my thinking about how various creatures experience the world in quite different ways. For example bats are flitting in the evening landscape focused on sonar. Moths are tuned in to the particular sound frequencies of predators and navigate by the light of the moon. Dragonflies and mayflies live their lives in the air and also underwater and then on the surface membrane of the water. As for your dog…. as well as seeing things only in blue and yellow your dog can hear many sounds you can’t and is of course seeing ultra violet light also…. itself the means by which an expert art restorer can spot a great painting from a fake. 


What do you find most enjoyable and/or difficult about the process of creating art? 
Since I’m interested in landscape painting the work begins with walking and catching ideas. 
I like to talk with writers and some artists I’m close to about the way painting can be a catalyst for noticing symmetries and relationships between all kinds of phenomena. As Shih Tao put it: ‘… in terms of penetration and development, painting is the greatest guiding form in the world.’ 

I don’t find it difficult, except maybe knowing when a painting is complete so I tend to ask someone and as Oska Lappin once said: ‘Well you could just walk away Renee or keep going and cross that line into genius…’ 

Fairlight from the Watermeadows V (2018) 

oils on canvas 91x76cm 

You travel a lot with your work, would you like to tell us about your recent projects?
Two projects I’ve worked on recently are an exhibition curated by Claudia De Grandi and myself for the Fabbrica del Vapore arts centre in Milan which we called Axis: London Milano and designs for six suites of rooms at the Lowry hotel in Manchester in collaboration with Rebecca Youssefi, the architect Veronica Givone and AFK Studios.


You’ve been based in St. Leonard on Sea for a number of years and have seen a burgeoning art scene evolving. Do you feel an affinity with the other artists who live here?
Well a few of them interest me a great deal and we’ve worked together on various projects over the years. The exhibition in Milan featured some artists who’re based here on the coast: Rebecca Youssefi, Oska Lappin, Charlotte Snook, Matthew Radford, Overlap, Kirsten Reynolds, Walter and Zoniel along with others who have connections to the town like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Cat Roissetter and Stephen Newton.

It seems quite special to be able to just walk down Norman Road to the Russian Cafe and meet up with artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers... what to say…. Bonjour Monsieur Torriset!


What would you like to see the Hastings Arts Forum do in the future? 

I think inviting curators to bring art from other places would be a good idea. Maybe you could link up more with the local museums and do joint ventures. 

Fairlight from the Watermeadows IV (Goya) 2018 

oils on canvas 100cm x 80cm 

ALAN RANKLE WEBSITE

Roberto Landin Solo at the Hastings Art Forum

Unusually for the Hastings Art Forum, the next two weeks will feature just one artist in the whole two-gallery space. It is not easy for a single artist to fill up this much space with consistently good or interesting work, especially at short notice, so what Roberto Landin has achieved here is really quite spectacular.

Gallery One is hung with large paintings that use simple and harmonious spectrums often containing metallic hues to reflect the light in the room. The paintings are the newest works of Roberto Landin and four of them were made especially for this Hastings Art Forum show.

They are accompanied by a totem of brightly coloured ceramic skulls that complement the use of colour in the room. A smaller totem of green seems to form a single piece with the painting behind it, while shiny, white skulls, cones and other decorative ceramics, beautifully glazed or part-glazed, sit almost in piles on ascending plinths.    

This gallery is a showcase for the artist’s colour sensitivity in paint and for his skill as a ceramicist. The combination of colours, objects and shapes and the way in which they are arranged has left nothing to chance and it looks fantastic.

From the seamless arrangement of Gallery One you step into the equally seamless Gallery Two. The room is made dark by blackout curtains and is lit entirely by hanging and sculptural light installations that cast a delicate, subterranean neon glow. Entering this room you encounter four massive sculptures of human bodies that are very far from the idealised and unrealistic norm. All are beautifully lit and their equally massive shadows rise majestically up to the ceiling above.

This room is composed of earlier works. The oldest is a huge canvas of two figures, one with a protruding tongue, painted over the pages of a bible. The tongue is a motif that recurs in several different forms including an intimate video installation viewed in soft orange focus through a perspex box. It also features in two mirrored works - one contains a circle of sacred hearts, tongues and organs fused into one object, while the other has two rows of disembodied tongues chattering into infinity.  

This gallery has an element of circus sideshow in which the audience comes to see a spectacle, possibly something grotesque, that reaffirms perceptions of their own normality. However, as soon as they step inside they are part of the show and the boundary between what is perceived as normal and what is not ceases to exist. Such merging of art and audience is underlined by the fact that Roberto Landin is also a performance artist and there are two performances scheduled.

The first will be a meditation on sound in which the audience is asked to understand sound as something physically felt rather than heard. This will explore how the body resonates with sound and how that connects to the emotional catharsis often associated with music. Performance times are is 12pm to 4pm on Saturday October 8th.

The second will be a meditation on gender. The artist will appear androgynous and will sit facing an empty chair. Members of the audience can sit opposite the artist for as long as they wish. No words will be exchanged. The point is to feel and reflect on what you have seen using the artist’s performance persona as a projection board for your own response.This will take place from 12pm – 4pm on the following Saturday October 15th. 

What is contained in the two galleries is pretty much the entire creative output of Roberto Landin since 2010, which gives the show the feel of a small retrospective. However, it also reflects a very contemporary artistic practise. This is not an exhibition so much as a complete artist environment which makes it as contemporary as it gets. It is something for the visitor to experience rather than to view and has the potential to transform, particularly in the context of the performances. It may also transform some perceptions of what art can or should be. Not one to miss. 

Roberto Landin 
From Light to Dark
4th October – 16th October


Private View:  Friday 7th October - 6.30 - 8.30pm

Paperworks at the Hastings Art Forum

Paperworks at the Hastings Art Forum

20 September – 2 October

Private View: 23rd September 6.30 - 8.30 

Traditional expectations of works on paper are drawing or watercolours. However, this group exhibition completely overturns any conservative notion of how paper should be used in art. The only works that appear to be watercolours in this show are far from traditional and the drawing consists of graphite renditions of rubbed pavements reassembled into huge paper rolls.

This is a celebration of one of the oldest, most flexible and varied materials we have. It is paper as a means to convey images in multiple forms, as a material for sculpture or installation and as recycled object transformed from practical to conceptual use. In the latter category, for example, books such as the one below must be opened by the viewer to make sense.

The beautifully produced concertina artist books of Nikki Davidson Bowman are collages of images and words perfectly bound into multi-dimensional art objects. Caroline Sax's tiny sculptures are unrecognisable as paper and seem to be made of a different and harder substance altogether.

There is a humorous nod to the subject in several of Ian Barraclough's prints, particularly his depiction of the unique qualities of the final sheet on 9 different toilet rolls.

Gill Streater's work reminds us of the importance of paper to calligraphy while Helen Rawlinson uses paper like a textile on which to add thread, buttons and colours to create small and imaginative abstracts.

Collage features in several guises in this exhibition. The pop art sensibilities and clean minimalism of Duncan McAfee, the apocalyptical colour and atmosphere of Kate Gritton and the surreal compositions of Jeff Stancliff which are compelling, mysterious and not entirely comfortable to view.

As always with such a large group show there is too much to comprehensively preview plus the detail in the works cannot possibly be conveyed here. So to conclude here are images that cover all the participants with their websites following below.

Paperworks at the Hastings Art Forum

20 September – 2 October

Private View: 23rd September 6.30 - 8.30

Participating Artists 

Ian Barraclough
Nikki Davidson-Bowman
John Davies
Kate Gritton
Lorraine Mailer
Duncan McAfee
Sally Meakins
Danny Mooney
Helen Rawlinson
Margaret Roberts
Caroline Sax
Jeff Stancliffe
Gill Streater
Teri Walsh
April Yasamee

1066 Mono and Mark Glassman

1066 Mono Photographic Club (Gallery 1) 

In a contemporary environment of high definition, colour saturation and constantly moving visual stimuli, the black and white photograph increasingly seems like a radical  new art form. A moment of restful, monochrome reality in which there are no distractions and no demands other than a slow appreciation of subtle shadows and focused content. 

This group show includes all types of monochrome photography by the 1066 Mono Photographic Camera Club who practice traditional darkroom photography, digital capture and printing, as well as alternative photography like cyanotype and bromide print production. There are 14 photographers in this exhibition and there are some stunning photographs that beautifully showcase the range of interests and skills among this group. Obviously what people like differs greatly from viewer to viewer but there is most definitely something for everyone in this show.

I really liked some of the portraits and how the exhibition communicates a question about what actually constitutes a 'portrait'. This includes a sheep (David Mills), some musicians,(Terence Page and Bob Harvey), an attitude (Liz Scott) and a hand holding a pair of glasses (Rob White).

I also liked how some of the images were composed in a way that suggested photographic history particularly 'Abandoned Mine' (Chris Upton), 'Cliffe Bridge, Lewes' (Bob Harvey) and 'Fairfield Church' (Chris Shore).

'Colossus' (Jeremy O'Keefe) also had that quality about it as well as being a remarkably effective rendition of scale. These images also suggested old postcards as did Lesley Parkinson's remnants of structures on the West Pier, although these are particularly ghostly given the pier's story.   

The mix of perspective and subject in this show reminds the viewer of the achievements of photography and its always current possibilities. I really liked 'The Old Pig Sty, Barrington Court' (Ian Weston) and his image of 'Stormy Lyme Bay'.  David Hoad's series of images using brushes is quite surreal whereas Andy Thurgood's 'Locomotion' is a detail so beautifully shot that it captivates whether you are interested in trains or not. Michael Attrill's 'Accidental Art' provides gently abstracted and unusual views of nature and Robert Barfield's 'The Kiss' is a lovely observation of nature's resilience. However, if it's sheer exhilaration you want then Helen Taylor's dogs running along the shore is the one for you. 

It is of course impossible to photograph photographs behind glass in a very light room so I can't provide any close image details here. I also can't provide a website for the 1066 Mono Photographic Club because they don't seem to have one. This is a shame because it would be good to be able to see some of the works of this group on a permanent basis - both for pleasure and for reference.  

Mark Glassman (Gallery 2)

As often with the Forum, entering the other gallery is entering a different world. In this case it's the world of Mark Glassman, a painter who has spent a lot of time on the beach preparing for this show. Themed around shingle and coastal scenery it is clear that he is fascinated and inspired by the colours, shapes and textures that are found in the stones,  pebbles and beaches of the Sussex coastline.

His colour palette reflects this with browns, greys and yellows interspersed with the blues of sky and water - whether in the distance or retreating back through the shingle to the sea. In fact the meticulous and multiple tumble of ovals and rounds interspersed with light, makes the distinctive sound of stones pushed back and forth by the sea almost audible.

Abstracted body shapes that seem to have become part of the ground itself, sometimes emerge from the paintings and very effectively transmit the Sussex beach experience in which your body ends up contouring itself to the stones. Sand is for wimps in Sussex. 

The shingle paintings give a sense of looking down,  while others look out to the only feasible straight line in nature - that between the sea and the sky. There is a mix in this show of those two perspectives and in each case paint is applied and used differently. The horizons are generally smoother while the ground is more textured and occasionally features pieces of driftwood. A few of the pieces, however, are pure colourful abstractions. 

Once again the contrast between the shows gets you thinking about what each says about the other. Interestingly Mark Glassman's choice of subject often means that the colours are complementary without any overly saturated contrast. In that respect there is a nice juxtaposition with the monochromatic themes next door. The fixed location of the paintings, however, provides an effective contrast with the breadth of subject and place enabled by 14 different photographers. 

The discipline required by photography is certainly not immune to lucky accidents whether analog or digital but unexpected outcomes of a particular moment or mood are a wonderful part of both photography and painting. The frozen expression of a single moment that can be achieved by photography contrasts greatly with the absolute freedom that can be deployed to capture the essence of something in paint. However, both need research and practice while freedom will always benefit from a little discipline. 
    

1066 Mono and Mark Glassman

Hastings Art Forum

26 July – 7 August 2016 

Private view for both shows is on Friday 29 July from 6.30 - 8.30

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.