RWA President

Janette Kerr PRWA: Extremes and Instabilities

2012-02-23T02:31:00.005-08:00

2012-02-23T02:26:00.004-08:00

Memorable imagery

Review by Andrew Lambirth in the Spectator, February 2012

The RWA galleries offer a superb setting for a sculptor, and Ivor Abrahams RA (born 1935) has taken full advantage of the beautiful top-lit space of the main rooms to present a lively retrospective look at his principal themes and achievements. The work ranges from the 1950s to the present day, and embraces a number of different media, from drawing, painting, collage and screen printing to relief and fully three-dimensional objects. The scale also runs the gamut from hand-held to overwhelming (‘Head of the Stairs’ is three-metres high), while the variety of materials includes bronze, plastics, ceramic and flocking.

This is the kind of work that cannot be judged from reproductions in books: it has to be seen and experienced to be fully understood and appreciated. The RWA display is not just impressive, it is life-affirming, original, subversive, witty and quite simply surprising and enjoyable. It’s the sort of show the Tate or the RA should be putting on, but somehow don’t quite manage, in their blatant pursuit of showbiz and box office.

The exhibition begins with a key early work in reinforced plaster and resin called ‘Red Riding Hood’ (1963). A large, commanding sculpture, it features a limbless, headless figure in a red dress under the canopy of a tree like a vast rhubarb leaf. A small bronze version from 1997 is nearby. The imagery suggests surrealism but has something cinematic about it: two influences that will recur in Abrahams’s work without ever compromising its innate originality.

For many years he was involved with garden imagery (hence the exhibition’s title), and in the beloved suburban backyard found a setting for his ideas which freed him to explore different methods and effects. He was one of the first to experiment with plastics, and when used in conjunction with flocking created some highly unusual and memorable imagery. Behind ‘Red Riding Hood’ a couple of 3D shrubbery sculptures occupy the floor, while round the walls hang various 2D garden pieces. Chief among them is ‘Summer Sundial’, a silkscreen with luxuriant flocking, ‘Open Gate’ from 1972 and a newer work, ‘Park Bed’, a powerful cut-out drawing with flock from 2009.

The far end of this grand double gallery is dominated by two large sculptures: the magnificent ‘Urban Owl’ (2004), grumpy deity of the parking meter, and ‘Head of the Stairs’ (2001), a post-cubist architectural extravaganza of plunging perspectives and intercut walkways. Another major presence is ‘Walking the Dog’: an exercise in ambulant architecture, which might be called ‘Taking the Lamppost with You’. The figure goes in and out of Abrahams’s imagery; mostly absent from the gardens, it re-emerges with a vengeance in the bronzes of bathers and gymnasts he made in the 1980s and 90s.

The smaller room off the main gallery is densely populated with these figures, striking various sensuous or acrobatic poses, and balanced by a choir of owls, including a trio of disreputable inebriates, rendered in mild steel and fired enamel. Birds have been a recent preoccupation for Abrahams, but he has also returned to suburban themes with his series of hieratic sculptures which take the façades of various dwellings (Stockbroker Tudor a favourite) and use them as the carved faces of totem poles. Here is a sculptor forever celebrating but also subverting the familiar and demotic.

One of Abrahams’s most innovative sculptural ventures has been to persist in working between two and three dimensions. He makes great play with collage and relief, and often paints his forms, effectively confusing the issue further.

2012-02-21T05:43:00.000-08:00

MARGARET GREGORY – Artist and Poet 1927-2011

A commemorative show of the work of a Royal West of England Academician

If you have not seen this show - carefully put together by her son, Will - then you really must! Exploring the show I came across these lines in one of her poem:

But what can I feed upon

In this old house

Watching fresh rain soft on the garden

And the edges of the carpets fraying under doors

Margaret fed on it all, channelling it into her art; her life is all there in her work. Derek Balmer, who was RWA President during much of Margaret’s association with the Academy, makes the comment that Margaret is a seeker of truth; in fact she is a seeker in many ways. Her work speaks of a collector of images - of the observed, the allegorical, the imagined, the written; it speaks of a deep engagement with her subjects.

All poured out and into Margaret’s work …onto the tiny scraps of paper and card that Will has found in her studio - images drawn, painted, collaged, scratched, scribbled, painted and smeared, worked over and over. Colourful, monochromatic, soft subtly toned, these are beautiful surfaces that speak of a response to the materials, the surfaces they inhabit.

Emotional, intuitive, playful and wry – there’s a painting called ‘My favourite Irish Bachelor’- who was this? (I remember when I was at the Cill Rialaig Artists Studios in Ireland, there was a man who we called the Irish bachelor who lived in a remote cottage at the far end of a track, so maybe we all have an encounter with one somewhere in our lives). There is poetry - even music - within her images, alchemy, producing something metaphysical out of the attention paid to her surroundings and experiences. Her figures look monumental, echoing the standing stones that appear in many of her paintings and drawings. Here we can find Ariel and Caliban, ships tossing upon the ocean, a pear in a blue bowl… the creation of something meaningful, and even profound, out of the combination of paint, surface and subject. They all tell us something about Margaret and her perception of the world – and of her world.

Artists are interpreters, and also magpies, soaking up influences around us. Within Margaret’s work can been heard the strains of Samuel Palmer, Graham Sutherland, Odilon Redon…and probably others.

I find looking at all the work here inspirational – even humbling. It makes me want to rush back to my studio and get to work.

Take time to look at everything in the show. It is really worth it.

I would like to thank Will her son for organising and giving us the opportunity to share and enjoy Margaret’s vision.

Margaret Gregory exhibited at the RWA from the early 1980’s, becoming an Academician in 1999. She was a full member of the Academy, in the sense of not just exhibiting, but also being very actively involved within it, serving on the Council, helping with exhibitions, attending events, and sharing her work with us - an artist who has been a great credit to the Academy.

Janette Kerr

The show is on at the Royal West of England until March 4th.

Welcome to my Blog

2012-01-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

As President of the Royal West of England I have been given my own Blog, and will from time to time be putting up information and my personal reflections on activities and exhibitions at the RWA. I hope that you will respond and send me your own comments.

Currently on show at the RWA are a series of exhibitions:

Ivor Abrahams RA: Eden and Other Suburbs

David Shepherd: A Crazy Life of Steam & Elephants

Brian May & Elena Vidal: A Village Lost and Found

Martyn Colbeck: Wildlife Photography

So what do the current exhibitions in the galleries of the RWA have in common? Well unsurprisingly very little; these are disparate shows that sit uneasily against each other. One might make a tenuous link between Ivor Abrahams RA 'Eden and Other Suburbs', and Brian May's 'A Village Lost and Found' in that Abraham's sculptures and print imagery references gardens, and May's collection of 19th century stereoscopic photographs allude to the garden of England. But there is no such associations that can be made between either of these exhibitions and the paintings and prints by David Shepherd, whose subjects range from steam engines and fighter planes to portraits, children in period costume, kittens and wild animals. The nearest I can get is that Abrahams and Shepherd were born four years apart in the early 1930's. So perhaps it requires closer examination...

While Abrahams is an acclaimed artist, a Royal Academician, with work in the Tate and collections around the world, neither May nor Shepherd are recognised professionally for their contributions to the visual arts, May being known as a guitarist for the rock band Queen and for his interest in astrophysics, and Shepherd for his conservation work.

Abrahams' work spans 50 years and demonstrates his eclectic interest in garden imagery - portions of buildings, gardens, domestic interiors, and people inhabit these works that are constructed from photographic images that are then cut, altered, painted over, and turned into three-dimensional form. Further works evolve from these assemblages in clay or resin, some painted, others cast in bronze and then painted freely or subtly patinated. Owls seem to figure often, and the work alludes to ideas and imagery from the everyday life and his domestic environment.

It is somewhat perplexing then when, passing from these galleries into the next, we suddenly find ourselves in the world of steam engines and wild beasts - paintings selected from David Shepherd's private collection, and prints that are for sale. There is a huge public appetite for Shepherd's sentimental paintings, and therefore perhaps we need to consider his work as part of the visual culture of the 1950's, with a nostalgia for a boy's own world. Neil Brown's review in Frieze suggests 'It is Shepherd’s shortcomings that make him interesting - the point at which his technical and artistic abilities fail him - and which provide a point of access for a more gainful appreciation of his work. '*. Painted with a nod to realism, Shepherd adopts pyramid compositions and low viewpoints so that as we look up at these machines and creatures - his steam trains, fighter planes, lions and elephants - there is an emphasis of their dignity and suggestion of their power. Placed against alternative images of Africa we might have considered the 'otherness' of the Elephant, and explored the allure of the exotic.

May's collection of stereoscopic photographs by an unknown19th century photographer, TR Williams, intrigue, presenting us with a victorian aesthetic - an idyll of life in an Oxfordshire village. And one can spend a happy half hour peering through the stereoscopic glasses at charming images of scenes at the cottage doors and happy farm workers in the fields making hay ricks, and compare them with the paintings of 19th century rural life by artists such as Helen Allingham or Myles Birkett Foster, both known for their sentimentality; idealized images of thatched cottages with roses around the door and contented happy harvest scenes. Then we might consider them in the light of our knowledge of rural poverty, enclosure and factory life. Such romanticised images of rural life can be found on table mats, posters and commemorative plates, as can David Shepherd's images (so maybe here is the link!).

All of these three shows together make us consider our sense of the place - whether it be Africa, and our perception and attitudes to 'the wild', or a more personal vision of place suggested by Abrahams' highly personal interpretation of his immediate home environment, or a greater nostalgia for the 19th C rural village presented by Brian May.

And when you need a cup of coffee and cake go and sit in the Papadeli cafe and be impressed by yet a fourth exhibition of the award winning photographer, Martyn Colbeck's B&W photographs of African elephants, which reflect the humanity and power of these huge beasts (and here is a final link with the work of David Shepherd!).

*See review of David Shepherd by Neil Brown in Frieze, Issue 51 March/April 2000 www.frieze.com/issue/review/david_shepherd/