'Working in the Abstract'

Описание: 'Working in the Abstract' runs at Linden Hall Studio November 6th - 27th 2016.

Carol and John are a generation apart but they have the same aim: to create painted works that exist independently in the world we inhabit.

Carol comes from the painted tradition of David Bomberg and his student Dennis Creffield. John looks to the work from St.Ives and Paul Feiler. Each has experienced an art school training in the atmosphere of postwar painting and each wants to carry it further, extending the possibilities of oil paint on canvas.

Paul Delaroche complained in 1839 that painting was dead after the invention of the Daguerrotype. Ever since Cezanne flattened the picture plane, paving the way for Picasso and Braque to reorganise the observed world, painters have been freed from the restraints of representation and have scattered in every direction in search of new motifs and ways of seeing.

We live in a world now where painting, if not a marginal activity, is one which sits comfortably in the middle class experience of life, the cutting edge long since missed and no longer sought. To succeed and be noticed it often seems that art must be sensational, disturbing or brash. Artists banging these particular drums have, perhaps, made a generation deaf to that which is quiet, thoughtful and considered. Carol and John, in their work, have found themselves occupying that quiet ground, drawing and painting from the perceived world and then working and reworking until the final images emerge. Many of the works here have their starting points in drawings from cathedrals, landscape, flowing water or life drawing. Such works are sometimes enough just as they are, but locked in their production are shapes, colours and layers that can be reinvented. The use of paint, especially oil paint and the love of its qualities, enable John and Carol to build images that have surface, depth, texture and transparency. There are references to the real world but those references are subsumed into the construction of another world. Each canvas is a window on to that world.

October 2016