PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Autumn Leaves ( 1855-1856 )

 

John Everett Millais,at the precocious age of eleven won himself a place at the Royal Academy Art School. By the time he was twenty,in 1848, he was a founding member of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His painting Christ in the House of his Parents (1849-50) provoked accusations of blasphemy. This fueled his rise to fame, wealth, establishment respectability, a knighthood and eventual baronetcy. However, as is often the case, artistic child prodigies take their 'genius' far too much for granted

It has been frequently said of Millais's artistic career, that he squandered his talent for money and status. A view based upon subsequent work as an illustrator, the paintings executed for commercial advertising, the drained palate of his later painting used to such emotionless effect. All would indicate some truth to this opinion. The early colourful effervescence of his talent, didn't just fizzle out and die, it carried on afterwards as a deathless ghostly apparition of itself. But by the mid 1850's, when he was painting Autumn Leaves, Millais had become the leading light and acceptable face of the Pre-Raphaelites. A transgressively vivid painter of allegorical literary or biblical scenes,with often this sense for the transient,elements of mystery and complete mastery of the mournful mood. Autumn Leaves was the first in a sequence of paintings to explore that season as a metaphor for impermanence. Two other paintings in this occasional series The Vale of Rest(1858-62 ) and Chill October (1870) were to follow.

In some respects the progression of their subject matter exemplifies the slow malformation of Millais's artistic muse. The Vale of Rest appears, at first glance, to echo the sentiments of Autumn Leaves. Taking place at twilight, where two nuns are very hurriedly digging a grave before it gets too dark to see what they are doing. What was perhaps merely suggestive in Autumn Leaves, is made emphatically plain in Vale of Rest. The allegory is presented with a much heavier handed intent, earnestly reaching out to make itself known. It drives home its evidently mordant moral undertow. The seated nun on the right, looking pointedly straight out at the viewer, as if to say - remember this. As a painting this is not subtle.

By the time we reach Chill October fourteen years later, what we are presented with here is a rather bleakly plein-air painting of a Scottish loch, boggy and windy and cold hearted. No figures, allegorical or otherwise, are present, just a vague sense of an underlying mood from the earlier works resurfacing.The place is desolate, lost of any sense of direction for its soul, devoid of human context or frailty. Its not then unreasonable to question why this shift in focus happened ?

The original seven members of The Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood were an unwieldy mixture of like minded young painters and poets. For all their stated idealism, it is in the nature of such artistic movements to be internally fractious, loosely aligned and inherently fragile collectives. Holman Hunt and Millais, were the visual realists, whereas Rossetti and his artistic acolytes were the more seriously aligned medievalists. Both sides dedicated to restoring the spiritual to art. The religious controversy over Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents in 1850 proved too much for the devout Stephen Collinson, who left the group.

This was the first, but not the final straw for the Brotherhood, but that too would be supplied by Millais. John Ruskin had been the sole vocal champion of The Brotherhood, keeping them financially and artistically directed. Millais went to paint a portrait of Ruskin at his Scottish home, over the Summer of 1853. Ruskin had married Effie Grey in 1848 when she was nineteen, and he was twenty eight. Yet five years later when the handsome dashing Pre-Raphaelite Millais turns up, Ruskin had yet to consummate that marriage. Millais and Effie fast fell deeply in love and literally ran off together. The marriage to Ruskin ended up being very publicly anuled, bringing a degree of shame and disapproval into Ruskin's revered orbit. Though he continued to financially support Hunt and Rosetti, The Brotherhood was summarily ripped apart by the ensuing public scandal.

Three years later Millais married Effie, she has since been unfairly made to take the lion share of the blame for Millais’s declining artistry. Yet here he is in that very same year of his marriage painting Autumn Leaves. The two central young girls,dressed in the modest dark blue clothing of the middlingly wealthy, are Effie’s sisters, Alice and Sophie. The younger children are meant to be peasants, as they are wearing poorer styles of dress. They’re making a bonfire. All look upon the smoldering pyre of autumn leaves the girls have been gathering, collectively transfixed. The background sky has sickly sulphuric slashes of yellow and bruised purpley blue. It is twilight, the landscape shadowy, all we see are the barest of outlines.

This painting has a Chekovian air, of trapped lives with limited future prospects. The faces of the elder girls bare concerned strained faces. For some reason this bonfire building is not eliciting any childish playfulness, or sense of this being a fun thing to do. The girls look on instead rather sombre, with bowed depressed demeanours. It is as though something has died, and no one here feels willing to openly enjoy even a simple task. Whilst lost childhood innocence is a recurrent Millais theme, I’m not sure that is precisely what is being conveyed here. Its meaning feels more multi-layered than that. It is as though they’re mourning a loss, ritually burying someone or something underneath this huge pile of bronzed leaves. The tone is sorrowful, emotions just about staying contained. The littlest girl with the red bow is holding an apple, frequently interpreted as a reference to Eve and the temptation of the snake. What is the simmering symbolism of a smouldering pile of leaves? This is portraying life requiring death, as a cycle within life itself, of recurring moments of cremation. Millais understood all too clearly, what he had lost, destroyed and sacrificed to secure his love.

FEATURE - W.S.Merwin (1927-2019)

 

'What if I came down now out of these
solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain
day after day with no rain in them
and lived as one blade of grass' **

As I'm reading his poetry at the moment, I thought I'd see what I could unearth about W.S.Merwin and his life. Whilst there is not an awful lot of detail, he nonetheless had a long and extraordinarily productive creative life. By the time he died at the age of ninety one, he'd published thirty four volumes of his own poetry, plus twenty eight translations, three plays, nine prose works and edited two poetry anthologies. He'd been given most of the poetry awards available in the US. Winning the Pulitzer Prize twice, for the Carrier of Ladders (1970) and The Shadow of Sirius (2008) being most significant. And was the United States Poet Laureate, also not once, but twice, in 1999-2000 and 2010 -11. So he was no bohemian slouch. 

I Have Been Younger In October Than All The Months Of Spring

Sweeping in to New York to be born on the last day of September 1927, William Stanley Merwin always had this rhapsodic appreciation for the welcoming in of October. In 1936 his family moved from New Jersey to Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. Uncannily precocious by the age of five William was already writing hymns and illustrating them. His love of nature was also apparent, coupled with an instinctive mind that found history embedded in the fabric around him. Providing a sense of the ancestry of a place. 

By A Swooning Candle, In My Porchless Door.

After finishing a degree at Princeton, William then embarked on the first of his three marriages, number one was to Dorothy, moving with her to Spain, where there were two significant meetings, one with his hero Robert Graves and the other was with Dido Milroy, his second wife, with whom he later live with in London, where he was actively sought out and befriended by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, followed by much Trans-Atlantic flip flopping, till recently divorced from Dido, he relocated to Hawaii, later to marry Paula Dunaway, with no biological offspring to bring up, but inheriting her two. 

I See Only The Flatlands And The Slow Vanishing of Windmills
Poetry rarely feeds and clothes you. Merwin like every jobbing poet, took other associated work or adjunct literary commissions, such as playwright in residences, poetry fellowships, poetry editor at The Nation, and became a respected translator of literature in nine different languages.  Meanwhile, privately, he continued writing his poetry, which began by being influenced by Robert Graves with epic thematic verses on mythological legends. But by the mid 60's his poetry had become strongly autobiographical, political and ecological in focus. Never afraid to campaign and protest, he became a significant strong voice in his opposition to the Vietnam War and environmental degradation.

Inside This Pencil Crouch Words That Have Never Been Written

His poetic evolution required an ever shifting emphasis on the exploration of poetic structure, abandoning the conventions of punctuation altogether, dito standard line breaks and sentence structure, imagery folded half between lines, or snapped in two mid sentence. Sometimes his poetry stretches its long limbs across many a page. And then there are those concise freeze dried poems that expand once your eyes land upon them. Merwin's poetry never seeks to force feed you an idea, but opens up an exploratory space, where your imagination can make its own compositional sense out of what it is reading. Sometimes, it's as though he opens up a crack in the ceiling and you briefly glimpse a brighter sky.

On The Last Day Of The World I Would Want To Plant A Tree
In his later life living in Hawaii, Merwin would spend his mornings writing and his afternoons planting out palm trees, bushes and a wide variety of other plants. There was always a deep appreciation of nature and ecology running throughout his poetry. Capturing his momentary feelings and responses, as they flitted from noticing one thing to another, encapsulating how he was struck by it, what it had communicated to him. This was one characteristic of his constantly evolving writing style, it was so intimately personal, though this often remained half opaque to the reader. That all this wonderfully colourful imagery you bathed in, was sometimes left without a frame of reference the interpreting explanation of Merwin. They are snapshots of an experience, that then is move on from. Sometimes you just receive perceptions unadorned, and at other times you do receive the full multi-dimensional perspective. What a glory that is when this happens.

Where Did You Come From This Late Morning?

In 2010 Merwin turned eighty, and ideas about how to preserve his legacy began to be pondered. His papers, a collection of 5,500 items and 450 printed books were housed in The University of Illinois. He and his wife Paula were primarily concerned to provide a means of maintaining his eighteen acre property. Which over the decades he had transformed from a rough piece of scrubland, into a beautiful dense jungle like reserve, where the largest bio-diverse collections of rare palm trees in the world resides. A non-profit organisation The Merwin Conservancy was formed to preserve his hand built home and surrounding estate. His last book of poetry Garden Time, published in 2016, was a meditation on the loss of his eyesight, aging and living in the present moment, dictated to his wife.

Even Our Names Are Made Of Fire And We Feed On Night

Legacies are a difficult thing to plan for and sustain. Books and manuscripts once filed in libraries gather dust. Merwin has undoubtedly been a significant poet and influence upon US literature in his time. It remains to be seen how long after his death that survives. His name is hardly known at all here in the UK, or Europe. Partly I suspect, that in the sixties the Beat Poets somewhat over shadowed his work. His poetry is not overtly counter cultural, its far less vocal, attention grabbing and decidedly un-flashy. Its thoughtful, though often really paired back, almost as if its trying to evade you capturing it alive. We all want to comprehend what any poet is attempting to express. And sometimes, W.S Merwin just will not spoon feed you one single morsel.  Quite prepared is he to leave your hunger unfed.

'Some day it will rain

from a cold place

and the sticks and stones will darken their faces

the salt will wash from the worn gods

of the good

and mourners will be waiting

on the far sides of the hills' ***

***

Taken from the poem As Though I Was Waiting For That
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems 

By Copper Canyon Press. 2005.

**

Taken from the poem A Contemporary
Published in Migration - New & Selected Poems
By Copper Canyon Press. 2005

ART 'N ' AB ART - Continuum - A Salthouse Church Exhibition

 

Its a couple of years since Anglia Textile Works last had an exhibition at Salthouse Church, and I remember the art on show left a huge impression on me at the time. Coming just a few weeks since the rather excellent Stains & Traces exhibition, similarly focused on using textiles as a medium for feeling and self expression. Continuum is a group of female creatives, each with a recognisibly distinct approach to their medium, that maintains that tricky balance of being both adventurous and inspiring. Its also so easy to see how some of them have progressed and finessed their artistic styles in recent years. I'm certainly finding this artistic area hugely exciting to engage with as a spectator and as an artist. There is art here that frequently surpasses traditional paint on canvas. I come away with the bounce of a new fervour to approach my own creative projects in fresher exploratory avenues.

Niki Chandler

An artist whose whose work has becomes more impactful and controlled. The use of coloured gauzes in layering or printing continues, but its one large piece of quilting, a shimmering hanging of tones of blue that evokes seascapes. Their is also a sense of things visibly shifting uneasily, it is also apparently a meditation on her mothers dementia. 

Heidi McEvoy-Swift

A textile artist who also does work making theatre costume, she utilises this as source for thefabrics she uses in a variety of mediums, patchwork and sculptural forms. Some strikingly effective small sculptures made from leaves were a stand out for me here.

Annette Morgan

Annette employs quilting techniques in a wide range of richly dense colourings. Often hand printed fabrics of designs from sketch books, sewn and pleated to give the finished piece a sort of aged layering patina. 

Marian Murphy

A focus on forms hanging over-layered and textural bodies suspended in space. Some very accomplished hand work an emphasis on semi scupltural reliefs.  

Hannah Rae

Densely textured and sewn hangings, also ordinary items concealed beneath an intricate covering of coloured threads and stitches. Like many textile artists she is exploring the mark making potential of the hand or machined stitch, as a means of expression.

  

Claire Spender

Another artist utilising the hand sewn and textural qualities in a collage or semi sculptural manner. Its like free hand drawing but in threads and rough fabrics.

  

Cherry Vernon-Harcourt

A minimalist landscape aesthetic plane, applied here with fabric and threads. The use of linen often layered over laid on items, or scumbled with colour stains, and fine twisted lines of many coloured threads which offer us a shimmering moving horizon point. Really refined skills on show here.

Irena Wilmott

A really interesting application of felted textiles as wrappings and coverings of often recognisible items. As though something alien and intrusive has taken them over and is concealing and absorbing their essence. Genuinely unsettling and fascinating work.

 

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

THEATRICAL REVELATIONS - The Power of Theatrical Madness

A performance conceived by Jan Fabre, given at the ICA in 1984 & The Royal Albert Hall in 1985.

In the mid 80's I would go to the ICA in London, and take in some performance work or exhibition. Often just on hearsay alone. This prompted my first encountered with Jan Fabre's work The Power of Theatrical Madness. I guess, buoyed by Laurie Anderson's recent breakthrough into the mainstream, everyone was on the look out for who the next performance artist might be, to do a similar cross over. 

Fabre's work had shock value. It had its moment of ART charging into the rarefied halls of middle brow culture. Robert Mapplethorpe produced a book of photos of it. But these days I think its largely forgotten, quite how impactful and influential The Power of Theatrical Madness was at the time.

Jan Fabre's The Power of Theatrical Madness, was, as the title indicates, quite a bit more of a 'theatrical' than an art performance event. Large set piece dramatic happenings that evolved into these often bizarre rituals across the stage. This was a collective ensemble presentation, tightly choreographed, executed with devotion, physical stamina and passion. At over four hours in length this performance was not for sissys. Click here to see trailer -The Power of Theatrical Madness

With no particular narrative thread, The Power of Theatrical Madness, had more the air of a lunatic grand opera, with its evocatively lush background of minimalist music by Wim Merton. What the piece celebrates is the strength of grand dramatic events on stage as a window into the soul of humanity. Whilst also showing us its darker Wagnerian shadow side.

One major theme is our desire to think we are in control of our lives, relationships and reality itself. In this we always fail. By falling into habits, we are touching on an air of regret and ennui. The larger this is writ upon the stage, the more powerful it becomes as a theatrical staging. But also more dangerous, as Fabre's work points toward the use by monarchical and fascistic powers, of all our present elite forms of theatre.

This work exploits the drama inherent in  simple human movement endlessly repeated. A gesture, that might start out as banal, changes in our perception as we watch it repeated, into drudgery, irritability, exhaustion, empathy, beauty, pathos, and on occasions, transcendence.

We have a line up of men in black fatigues and shirts, forced to carry and hold up stacks of plates. At the conclusion the plates are deliberately shattered. In a crashing cascade of rebelliousness and creative carnage. There are also naked kings wearing crowns waltzing around  together. Yeah, it's a bit kinky too.

The piece was long, it tested your power of endurance to be sure. But, for me it was entirely worth it for the last plaintive element in the entire performance. This was set to the a beautiful elegiac movement by Merton, called Whisper Me. In it there is a man and woman. The man down stage moves upstage and lifts the woman into his arms, taking her down stage where he places her on the floor. The woman rises and initially with a certain playful coquettish spirit moves back to where she was at the start. 

This scenario is repeated over and over for the duration of twenty minutes. By which time the man is becoming increasingly tired and clumsy in the execution of picking her up and carrying her upstage. Whilst the woman progressively asserts her own agency with more stridency. This one section of The Power of Theatrical Madness, was worth the entrance fee. It was probably the most beautiful moving piece of theatre I've ever seen. Both poignant and profound. 

Such was its success at the ICA. A much larger venue, the Royal Albert Hall was booked. And I went along to see the same piece on much a larger stage, with larger back projections. The power of the grand gesture in a small space, did feel diminished when you placed it in a performance venue that possessed huge size and grandeur itself. Whilst I understood why they'd chosen to do this. The whole piece lost the sense of human intimacy by that transference. A long gallery in a stately home, or a smaller opera house might have worked better. Though it did strike me that it's ironic gloss of the fascistic rally, was made even more unpalatable by the vastness of the elliptical hall context. Over forty years later, it is still something I'm really glad I saw.

ART n ab ART - Thinking Through Drawing Exhibition

This exhibition has a broad and eclectic range of artists. They are all using drawing as a means to explore ideas, ways of thinking about what they are doing - through technique imagination or concept. Four exhibitions into this year's programme, and this is the first one to both excite and challenge.

There is the usual mix of bold, the boring, as well as baffling work on show here. Stretching your ideas of what drawing can be and do. Proving you can sketch using a wider variety of media, it doesn't have to be just pencils, pens or charcoal. Though there are example of those here too. The rapidly executed sketch and the slowly evolving and more considered drawing. But there is also room for drawing that has immense thoughtfulness and insight within it. 

The stand out work, for me, was Sam Hodge's beautifully evocative drawings of broken tablet and smart phone screens. The cracks in the screens are carefully transfered and etched into plasticated sheets, that are then inked and printed. There was also an accompanying book, which has text on the opposite page explaining how the screens got broken in the first place. With brilliant titles such as - It works, which is the main thing - Nick thinks there is a delicious irony in the Universe -  A lot of things have happened. The overall title for this work A Catalogue of Misfortune, could be a statement about the human condition. The associations and humanity of these drawings provoking further thought.

Other drawings worthy of note are Phillip Walmsley's 3D sculptural like drawings of imaginary spaces and Marion Piper's sequences of tonal forms and shapes.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

ART n ab ART - 8 x 8 Exhibition

The second exhibition of The Salthouse summer season, is work by a handful of professional artists. The styles of art work on show is very broad, from cleanly formed still life's, to horse paintings, to richly textural abstracted landscape painting, to paintings of striped mugs in various stacked formations.

It was not an aesthetic triumph on the whole. Collectively it feels just a very odd mix of not very complementary styles of painting. Little noticeable dialogue going on between the disparate range of pieces on show. The artist whose work I most appreciated was Rachel Thomas, whose loose and expressive use of colour, playing with the form of the landscapes she paints, I've appreciated previously. It's exciting to look at someone fully in charge of her style, but constantly pushing at its boundaries. The other artists, frankly, I could take of leave. Skilled painters, but with not a lot to say, at least to me.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

ART 'n' ab ART - Exhibition Reflecting God's Glory

It's April, and the exhibiting venues of North Norfolk kick off this seasons arts programmes. The opening exhibition at Salthouse Church, arrived mid April. Its by a group of artists who are practicing Christians. The Salthouse logo has been updated, as has its byline -  Christian Creatives - Reflecting God's Glory. Perhaps this is to make it clearer what the objective of these exhibitions is. An emphasis I wasn't aware of previously.

The first thing arising out of this change was a question of what it meant - are these Christians who are also artists, or artists who make overtly Christian themed art? Well, judging by this exhibition, its mostly the former. Is there then anything in the art that draws on a Christian perspective or experience in a specific, identifiable manner?  Not particularly. The experience of nature as a creation of a divinity, is this one only the artist themselves experiences in the act of creation? Is it something we as a viewer can also experience? Not necessarily. It feels a much more nebulous conception than that.

These type of thoughts thumbed through my mind as I took in the art. I am just the same when I've seen art exhibitions of work by Buddhists. This is not me having a bash at Christians or their art. The sacred and artistic creation are old bed fellows. I believe that the sacred may be experienced through art, but almost by accident, not conscious design.  It's not unreasonable to ask, what was it in what I was seeing here that came from a particular Christian perspective? Was it tangible?

Our present views on nature, of being in nature, of painting nature,  arrived with Romanticism in the 18th & 19th century. They turned closeness to nature into a mystical, spiritual, neo religious experience. That this has so entered into our contemporary lexicon of ways to relate to the world, it is hard to see this today as the secular substitute for religious experience that art and nature now are. The idea of connecting with divinity through nature, thus powering your creativity, is not then something unusual, or specifically Christian in viewpoint anymore. No one can claim exclusive rights over it. Though Christians are perfectly free and entitled to point out what there inspiration is, as is everyone else.

However, words do not convey what a recipe actually tastes like. I tend not to think much about the context of a venue, and what that contrubutes to an exhibition. Salthouse provides a lovely medieval church setting within which to frame your exhibition. Despite all of the centuries old creativity all around me. I found a lot of the art work here visually underwhelming. There were a couple of artists whose work I really did find I appreciated.

Sue Walsh's textile pieces use a botanical eco print technique enhanced by natural dyes. I enjoyed the subtlety of their muted tones and the loose sense of patterning across soft thin fabrics. They reminded me at times of faded Roman murals painted on pigment absorbing gesso. Fabric has that ability to soften edges and create mists of illumination around printed objects.

The other was a sound installation by Cecilia Tyrrell. Echoing wild sounds of winds and movement, with accompanying darkly atmospheric photographs. Which they seemed to capture the earthy fetid and salty nature of this sea marshy area. Both artists seemed to have something to say that made you stop, and want to contemplate them further.

There was a wide range of skill levels on show here. From slightly unformed drawing and painting skills through to the highly polished professional level paintings of landscapes. With the latter, I was left wondering whether the observation of an actual place and landscape had parted company, and had become subsumed by the fully worked out execution of a style of painting. And this being mistaken for expression. Feelings abstracted, perhaps to the point of not reaching the canvas.

Not generally a notable start to this seasons programme. Lets hope for better over the coming months.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

FEATURE - The Yellow Scream

 I owe my Husband for this one. He has put me on to the work of this guy. Its sort of self explanatory, so I'm not going to write anything about it at all. Yes, its hilarious, but I also would call it truly wonderful. This is a drastically edited version, the full video lasts forty minutes.

Now, doesn't that make your day feel a whole lot better?

ART 'n' Ab ART - The Vanity of Small Differences

Grayson Perry Exhibition

Usher Gallery, Lincoln

You may have seen the Channel 4 series for which these huge tapestry were originally designed. A contemporary take on The Rakes Progress, Grayson Perry, with his usual perspicacity, insight and wit. explores the idiom of the self made man, the rags to riches narrative. How class itself, and how each of us sees class, informs and bedevils what our aspirations are for ourselves.

What TV cannot adequately convey is what the scale of these works feels like. They are huge, taking up a good part of the gallery walls in the splendid Usher Gallery extension. These are objects that you can stare at and study for ages, and still discover another aspect that is not apparent on first view. It is full of wry comments a plenty. 

One of my favourite remarks is a representation of a Hello magazine cover that says - Alan de Bottan shows you around his temple. Which has more mischievousness than at first appears. Satire is almost Grayson Perry's not very secret weapon. Amidst all the late 60's alternative comic styling and caricatures in his drawings, Perry has always been the inheritor of Hogarth's mantle. In this exhibition he is paying overdue direct homage to his eighteenth century antecedent.

And like Hogarth, Perry takes us through the birth. aspirations, successes and fall from grace of his contemporary version of the rake. These cross references, between today and the 18th century - the moral decadence, the corruption inherent to fame and success, the role of substance abuse in a person's decline. But no one here is treated unsympathetically, they as much the victim of the values, delusions and moral vacuum of the surrounding society, as the progenitor of their own fall.

His chosen medium, tapestry, holds another parallel, of the biblical or classically inspired wall hangings, meant to be instructional to the viewers, that once would have hung on baronial walls. In Perry's hands, these develop a garish colourfulness and rich range of stitch and effect. Manufactured through computer aided design and weaving processes, these works of art are also quite stunning visual pieces. Which communicate instantaneously what they are trying to say. This readability and accessibility is a touchstone of Grayson Perry as an artist, communicator and as a person. What you see is what you get.

ART 'n' Ab ART - Colour Autumn Show

Alastair Grey

Bob Catchpole

Ulrike Behrendt

Earlier open exhibitions at Cromer Artspace were a very mixed bag in the skill and talents of those exhibiting. This years choice of a theme, rather than random submissions, makes the Autumn Open Show a much more coherent event. Plus the quality of the work has risen considerably, now that the Artspace is getting better known and renowned. So there was some quite striking and notable work on that theme of Colour on show.

Jennifer Lovatt

Charles Sharpe

Juliet Goodden

Clive Dunn

As ever with the curating of their exhibitions, it manages to show you a wide range of interpretations of how a feeling for colour can be expressed. So we have figurative, abstract, photographic, etchings, screen prints, collage and inevitably mixed media, plus things which are three dimensional utilising woven textile, leather, wood or glass. This was, yet another, really fine show, from this still relatively new art venue.

Polly Cruse

June Croll

Antonia Clare