ART 'N' AB ART - Seeing And Believing - A Salthouse Church Exhibition

I'm reviewing this because my Husband said I had to, because he, much more than I, was incandescently annoyed by this exhibition. And whilst I can see and feel for his pain, I've encountered a lot of art of this quality over the years, so this disappointing exhibition gently rolled over me. They are artists who are trying and have no doubt put a huge amount of effort into this exhibition. I also have pause to consider, would I like harsh negative criticism thrown at me like excrement? Well, no I would not. But once you present your work in any public sphere, you do have to expect that it may not meet entirely universal praise and admiration.  None of this means a good public spanking is not required for the improved aesthetic health of the nation in general, you understand.

As you enter the church Jane Harper's artwork greeted you on the left as you enter. It was meant, in her eyes at least, to be some sort of homage to great woman from the past. These were most colourised stock photographs of female celebrities, sometimes in repetition with different colourways. There was some aspect of it that seemed misconceived, perhaps it was meant to be ironic or  a witty comment. Freda Kahlo sitting in a gas station, Audrey Hepburn dressed as a nun smoking a fag, Amelia Earhardt in her flying gear wearing an earring. I was left asking why? This did not raise a titter in me, this was just very lazy image making. More empty headed novelty than visually unique. I would expect to see this type of artwork in at sixth form A level, not by anyone who went to art school. I think it was this,  more than anything else that annoyed Hubby.

Later black and white photo montages in the exhibition, might be aiming to make a more direct point, but they were far too obvious or miss fired badly, if that is the case. The thing that made this still worse was these photo montages were just badly executed. Now, in my opinion you go one of two ways with photo montages, either execute it with the sharp precision of a photo-realist, or you exaggerate the collaged nature of it, by clumsily sticking a real earring on a stock photo of someone famous. Or do an Andy Warhol and crudely execute multiples of them in screen print. This does neither.

When it comes to Idris Walter's work, we have a very different and more tradition bound kettle of fish. That doesn't appear to complement or contrast beneficially with Jane Harper's.  Anyway, his work is all drawn in pastel. A varied mixture of landscape work, and drawings of rickety distressed walls or rural doors with bolts. The later are very competently executed, though to me the pastel gave them too soft an edge, so they always looked ever so slightly out of focus.

His landscapes don't really work for me, some of them looked too muddy as if the cat slept on them over night rubbing all the pastel into a mush of greeny grey fog. Traditional pastels lend themselves to softer gestural colour work, because they're inherently difficult to get sharp detail with. I felt a question all the time whilst looking at his work, why choose pastel? Surely there are much better mediums for this, watercolour, oil, acrylic. If you use photography as a reference in your drawing, as I think he must do, it begs the question what does pastel achieve that photography can't? What does executing these in pastel bring aesthetically to the fore that could not be better executed in another medium. And if, as I suspect, he may be drawing his beautifully copied rusticated doors in water based pastels or pencils, why not use water colour from the get go? 

When you chose pastel to work with, you have to go with the qualities of that medium. You have, in a sense, to prove to the on looker, that it is through this medium alone you can achieve something that is entirely unexpected to see executed in pastel. Here I see someone who seems most likely an extremely confident drawer in pencil, who moved on to doing work in pastel, simply in order to work in colour. Art sometimes requires a bit more than that. The Boyle Family made life sized casts of sections of roads and pavements, then painstakingly painted the cast to be a facsimile of the original thing, then hung that on a gallery wall to stunning effect.

I guess what is really annoying about this exhibition was its half hearted approach. I think these artists are both capable and can do better than this. We,on the other hand, have to See and Believe that what they are doing here is worth while our spending time looking it, this in the main it failed to do, sadly. 

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8