'Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter' at the RWA

I shook off my post-Christmas torpor and went to two fascinating exhibitions in Bristol today: The Staffordshire Hoard at Bristol City Museum, of which more anon, and 'Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter' at the Royal West of England Academy. 

You'll find far better photos than mine of the exhibits online, but I'll share some anyway.

'Castle' by Sarah Woodfine, right and above

Any exhibition with paintings by Leonora Carrington, Marc Chagall, Stanley Spencer, Holman Hunt, Dame Laura Knight, Paula Rego, Karl Weschke is going to grab my attention, but the more modern pieces easily hold their own. 

'Women's Place' by Juli Haas, above

As Carman Callil writes in the preface of the excellent accompanying publication, Carter was herself an accomplished artist, so it's not surprising that her writing should conjure fantastical images in the minds of these artists. 

'The Fairy Tale' by Di Oliver, above

Some of it is really quite creepy. 

This - 'The Shipwrecked Bride' by Katarina Rose - struck a chord and made me shudder. 

'Not waving but drowning' by Wendy Mayer

Heather Nevay's The Murder ...

... and 'The Lesson'

Details of Tessa Farmer's 'The Perilous Pursuit of a Python'

I was disappointed to see that the writing workshops associated with this exhibition are being on held on weekdays, which means I've no hope of getting to them; still, the exhibition itself runs till 19th March so and I hope to return to the RWA to see it again. 

'Blue Circus' by Marc Chagall

'The Pomps of the Subsoil' by Leonora Carrington 

'The Banquet' by Ana Maria Pacheco

Summer Art in Bristol

Here's a short review I wrote for the local rag. With added pictures.

William Hogarth: Painter and Printmaker  Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

James Ravilious : Rural Life / Peter Randall-Page RWA & Kate MccGwire

Into The Fields : The Newlyn School And Other Artists    

                                                    Royal West of England Academy    

 What delight for lovers of art in Bristol this summer!  You have until the end of August to get up close and personal with the ‘Father of British painting’, William Hogarth, and up close is really where you want to be, taking in details such as the tears in Sigismunda’s eyes as she mourns her slain lover, Giuscardo, whilst clutching a beautifully embossed golden goblet containing his heart to her own, or the foaming cataracts of white lawn worn by Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury, who inexplicably disliked his portrait.  I was struck by the humanity Hogarth sees in his sitters, from servants to aristocrats, and conveys to the viewer through fluid brushstrokes.

Sigismunda mourning over the Heart of Giuscardo, her murder'd husband 1759

Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury 1747

I have to say I was disappointed that Hogarth’s stunning triptych, originally painted for St Mary Redcliffe, was not included in the exhibition – at least until I read that it is way too high to fit into the ground-floor exhibition gallery.

However, it is possible to see it on Doors Open Day or by appointment in its current home, St Nicholas Church, where it rises in incongruous magnificence above the computer screens of Bristol Archaeological Services, also now housed within.

James Ravilious, whose work is being exhibited at the RWA until 6^th September, travelled North Devon photographing rural scenes for the Beaford Archive in the 1970s and 1980s.  

His work is almost exclusively monochrome, which might seem perverse given his subject matter, but which gives his work a timeless quality. His photograph of sheep lost in a lane could have been taken at any point in the past hundred years, and his portraits of people absorbed in their tasks can be dated mainly by what the subjects are wearing. 

Many of his images now verge on the iconic – odds are you’ve seen a reproduction of Archie Parkhouse and Ivor Brock dragging a sick ram across a field in a tin bath in a card shop – but this exhibition give you a chance to see some of his less well known work too.  I particularly enjoyed the movement of swifts swooping across in a lane, a young lad viewed from the church tower as he runs for the school bus, and a barking border collie outlined by the sun.  

 While you’re at the RWA, don’t miss sculpture by Peter Randall-Page and Kate MccGwire, and an exhibition of work by the Newlyn School and Other Artists also. 

Picturing Arcadia at the RWA

I've been a bit remiss because they've been on for a few weeks now, but the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol has a couple of interesting exhibitions on over the summer. 

First, there's Monumental by Sophie Ryder which runs until 8th September.  Some years ago now Ryder hit on the figure of a woman with the hare of a head to counterbalance the mythical figure of the Minotaur, and she has been fascinated by it ever since, as this exhibition shows.  I don't think I've ever seen the same theme explored in so many different media by one artist, from huge sculptures in wire, bronze, fibreglass to maquettes and needlepoint miniatures.   

My favourite exhibition, though, is Picturing Arcadia, which draws on the RWA's permanent collection and features work by John Piper, Duncan Grant, David Inshaw, George Tute, Arthur Homeshaw and many more Academicians. And it's lush, look, this is Piper's print of Hautbois Church, which makes my eyes feel like they are bathing in dreams:

And this is George Tute's strange wood engraving, Landscape with Balloons, which shares the enclosed, even claustrophobic feel of landscapes by Robin Tanner, but in a more modern and slightly threatening (rather than threatened) sort of way:

And I had to love this one - Scorhill by Arthur Homeshaw, whom I mentioned in yesterday's blog and who reminded me, patiently, that I hadn't blogged about the exhibition.  

Picturing Arcadia is only on until 25th August, so do get along there soon.  It costs £4 to get in, £4,50 if you gift aid your entry fee.    

Unnatural – Natural History

The summer exhibition at the RWA this year is Unnatural - Natural History, billed as ‘an artistic exploration of an alternative world where the dominant species are not human and natural objects are metamorphosed into unexpected and unnatural forms’.

It was the express intention of the curators, Coates & Scarry, to ‘create a stir’ and to prompt discussion about what is and isn’t natural.  I’m always wary of exhibitions that set out to manipulate so visceral an emotion, as often what disturbs us at the deepest level is peculiar to us. I remember taking my elder daughter to see an exhibition of art by William Blake in what was then the Tate Gallery in 2000.  She was 12 years old and had such bad dreams that night that she woke up screaming and was sick.  Clearly the visionary artist and poet had made an unexpectedly profound impression!

Upon climbing the stairs to the exhibition, we were confronted by two installations by Kate MccGwire.  The sculpture, Wrest, was indeed challenging, consisting of a thick serpentine knot covered in meticulously layered feathers which were at once creepy and familiar, as anyone familiar with the Georgian feather frieze at the National Trust's A La Ronde would attest.  Similarly, ‘Stigma II’, consisting of two feathered holes in a sheer dark surface, was the stuff of nightmares.  I was also very impressed by Angela Lizon’s ‘Come Fly with Me’, in which a beautifully depicted newborn baby is flown in a sling by a very sinister-looking Marabou stork – the ‘Undertaker Bird’.  Never mind the Masai Mara, this bird looked to be heading straight for Baba Yaga’s hut deep in the forest.      

These, along with Natalie Shau’s memento mori, ‘Vanity’, were the high points.  Elsewhere, Patrick Haines’ sculpture ‘Hermetic Bird’ and Rose Sanderson’s ‘Starling’ were covetable but hardly alarming, and the rest of the exhibits were at best insufficiently innovative to provoke much of a reaction and at worst banal.  ‘Deep and meaningless,’ Dru's daughter, Katie, had pronounced and I’m afraid I have to agree. 

Beryl Cook Exhibition at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery

My friend Julie and I had intended to go for a walk this afternoon, but the weather was grim so we had a last minute change of plan and went to the City Museum to see the exhibition of paintings  by Beryl Cook.

Cook was a self-taught artist who was given a child’s paint box for her 40th birthday and embarked upon a career painting 'ordinary people enjoying themselves'. Her early efforts failed to satisfy her. 'I expected to paint like Stanley Spencer. It was a great disappointment to me when I realised that I didn’t.' 

The Art Establishment never thought much of her output either. 'I know there are some artists who look down on my work,' Cook said, 'and when you compare mine with some of the others, I can see what they’re getting at.'

Wandering around the gallery, I found myself wondering whether Robert Lenkiewicz, a fellow Plymouth artist whose work was exhibited in the RWA a couple of months ago, and Cook knew each other.  They were contemporaries, both figurative painters, both deeply unfashionable in artistic circles, but popular with the public.  Their work also shares a distinct sense of humour, although Lenkiewicz's is far more profound.   

And yet I liked Beryl Cook's best paintings.  For all that they lack subtlety and nuance, they achieve the artist's aim of making people feel more cheery for looking at them.   I even found myself coveting 'Dancing Couple' with its stylised symmetry (which definitely reminded me of Stanley Spencer) and 'In the Snug' which was painted in the historic Bristol harbourside pub, the Nova Scotia. And following a post-exhibition mug of tea and shared slice of coffee and walnut cake, even this wash-out of a summer Sunday didn't seem quite as dreary.   

Death and the Painter: Robert Lenkiewicz Still Lives

On the way into the Royal Academy of the West of England’s latest exhibition, I misread the banner over the door.  ‘Robert Lenkiewicz Still Lives’, it declared.  I started.  But he died a few years back, at the horribly early age of 60 or so – didn’t he?

My momentary confusion is understandable given that Lenkiewicz did once fake his own death in order to publicise a forthcoming exhibition on that very topic.  I know this because every summer throughout the 70s and 80s when I was down in Devon and local newscasters were pleading nightly for somebody to contact them with news, Lenkiewicz’s eccentricities were constantly on screen.  Another of his more notorious acts that caused a huge stir was the post-mortem embalming of his friend and model, Edwin Mackenzie aka ‘Diogenes’, ‘for use as a human paperweight’. 

Add to this the scandal of many wives, lovers and children; a propensity to surround himself with vagrants and addicts; his apparent penury (although he ended up leaving over £6,000,000); such challenging subject-matter as mental disability, suicide, old age, and sexual behaviour; and, worst of all, the fact that his art is (whisper it) figurative, and it maybe isn’t surprising that it sometimes slips under the radar. 

But what a shame that this is the case.  I know little about art, so approach it with the most basic of requirements: what determines whether I find a work engaging or not is whether it excites an emotional response.  So whilst Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy leaves me cold and the Chapman Brothers soon pall, Lenkiewicz can exalt and humble me, charm and repel, arouse curiosity, concern and a determination to make the most of the time left to me. 

Death plays a major role in the work of all the above artists, but it is Lenkiewicz’s tenderness, the humanity with which he depicts our mortality, his refusal to avert his gaze, that is so affecting.  We too are made to look upon Death, not just in the form of ubiquitous memento mori (skulls and hovering intimations of figures on the edges of his canvases), but also literally in the case of Diogenes, naked but for his dignity, and as distant in time as Lindow Man or an Egyptian Mummy.  I was reminded of Yossarian’s assertion in Catch-22 (the film, I think, rather than the book): ‘Well, he died. You don't get any older than that.’ 

Good, then, to see the old man alive and sparkling elsewhere in the exhibition, gazing out of this and that work, alone or with his fellow vagrants or the artist himself.  There is a joyous defiance in so many of Lenkiewicz’s sitters – the self-possessed young Muses, lovers and offspring; the elderly who return your gaze with equanimity; the terminally sick and the disabled who dare you to glance away.  It is when his subjects look askance that I feel alarm and discomfiture – the parents of disabled children, whose situation I can identify with so well; those close to death who don’t look back, who seem already to have slipped behind an invisible glass screen.    

And Lenkiewicz’s own gaze fixed unwaveringly on things we might prefer not to examine closely, such as the subject matter of the diptych Still-Born Child in Kitchen.  In one panel there is an almost burly-looking, purplish newborn lying in a bowl, still attached to its placenta, against a sterile and mechanical backdrop of white kitchen appliances; in the other, members of the artist’s family, including very young children, standing and sitting around while the artist avidly stuffs raw umbilical cord into his mouth, the remainder of the placenta flopping on his lap like a grotesquely swollen scrotum.  I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, when I would have preferred to turn away.  Is the father celebrating the birth of his dead baby? Is he celebrating its death? Given that it is part of a project, does the diptych have a wider symbolic significance, or is it just a fellatory joke?

A revelation to me was Lenkiewicz’s mastery of light.  The highlights in a young woman’s hair, the fringes of another’s shawl, the satiny sheen of a coat lining all sensuously, deliciously depicted.  Also, the extent to which he was in thrall to the Great Masters: work after work described as being influenced by this or that painting in the National Gallery, which Robert had haunted as a young man.  I plan to go on a bit of an odyssey with him over the next few months, and also to return to the exhibition at least once more before it closes at the end of May.  For all that it is about death, this is the stuff of life and living.