'Flora'at Penlee House

 

Flora, curated by Kurt Jackson - 150 years of environmental change in Cornwall, 9 0ctober - 11 January 2025, Penlee House in Penzance, Cornwall.

This show is a collaboration between painter Kurt Jackson and curator Katy Herbert.

 

 

 

 

 

 Harold Harvey 1922 'Chy-an-Mor'

 

What a bright idea - environmental concerns being the popular theme now in art circles - to take over 50 past paintings of Cornish landscape and contrast them with Kurt Jackson’s new paintings of the same places, adding information about the ecological changes that have taken place over many years.

 

 

 

 

Kurt Jackson  'Green and leafy Chyenal Scent of water mint, wrens chatter in the willow carr' 2024

 

At first I felt resistant to reading the long tracts of information but I gradually warmed to it and took in the information about what plants have disappeared or become rare and how climate change is affecting the landscape.

I ended up wishing there was a book of the show but there are no plans for one.

I also noticed how painting has changed from the soft gentle observations of the Newlyn school to Jackson’s brighter colours put on with their own elan and detail.

How frames have altered from carefully crafted carved gilded wonders to simple white wood.

These quietly observational ways of painting exist extensively in the western world.

It’s quite something to put your own pictures next to these old favourites but Kurt Jackson has his own equal attention and delicacy.

Interestingly he has avoided pricing his work but given details of how to enquire about buying them. 

The older revered paintings are from collections including Penlee’s own.

Anima Mundi , St.Ives, exhibits Joy Wolfenden Brown and Carlos Zapata

 Anima Mundi is a serious art gallery. They hang the paintings with big gaps between them and small numbers that refer to titles on the information sheet which is printed in a tiny font, grey on grey, with quotations from famous people and art world jargon and they don’t use red dots to indicate sales. The prices are also serious - from £1,300 to £16,800.

At present, until October 19 for six weeks there are two very serious artists on show- Carlos Zapata being the filling on the middle floor between two floors of Joy Wolfenden Brown.

Joy Wolfenden Brown works she tells us spontaneously and spontaneously repeats an image of a lost looking afraid ghost - like woman. Apparantly I was not the only visitor to ask if she looks like this and she does a bit. I was aware that  if I was still working as an art therapist I would be thinking this person is for some reason stuck. She says there are slight changes so I would be asking about them. Then I see she has worked as an art therapist herself for ten years - so then I wonder does she interrogate herself for reasons why this image obsesses her?
There are some other works, very darkly indistinct with birds and feathers in them so perhaps the artist is beginning to break new ground.

Carlos Zapata is a skilled wood carver. Here he also returns repeatedly to a similar image - to kneeling supplicant small figures, many with no arms or feet. Colour is used on the wood, sometimes pale touches, sometimes intense hues or silver. We are told he recently suffered the death of a parent but which  one is strangely not disclosed. Maybe that’s why his recent figures seem so isolated and immobile, injured and joyless.They are carved in three dimensions but I feel drawn to only seeing them from the front. They seem like statues suited to a chapel, for contemplative introspection.

Comment in the visitors’ book is admiring and as written on tripadviser the work in this  gallery certainly offers a change,  in its gloomy exalted misery,  from the relentless optimism of many of the holiday souvenirs in other shows in other less serious shows in town.

Look Group visit to St Ia church, St Ives

 Our Look Group ( like a book group for art) met at St Ia Church in St Ives. A knowledgeable guide called Martha kindly showed us round.

It’s an old church with a medieval tower, a very ancient stone carved font and dark oak carved bench ends, best seen with a torch. The ceiling bosses are stunning, some painted in gold and bright colours.
There are remarkable carvings by two Victorian sisters, some under the altar cloth.
A lot of the works have no labels.

 

The Victorian stained glass repays detailed study. I particularly like the Jonah and the Whale in the Lady Chapel and a later  Crowned Mary with Child, on the left of the entrance going in.

There is a Barbara Hepworth marble mother and child relief, a Bryan Pearce painting of the angel figures and a Margo Maeckelberghe drawing also of a mother and child.

 

 

 

 We spent over an hour enjoyably discovering different things and talking about them.

The most recent was a temporary exhibition provocatively called ‘the f word’ with photographs of people affected by violent crime and the perpetrators, who had met and whose moving words considering the possibilities of forgiveness were printed there.

 

Normally the group meets monthly on a Friday afternoon at Tate St Ives and we all contribute to discussion of themes chosen together.
If you want to join please contact the Tate.

Janet Leach by Joanna Wason

 Janet Leach - potter -  by Joanna Wason 2024

Joanna Wason knew and worked with Janet Leach for many years and has written this vivid account of the American potter’s life, well illustrated with personal photos and showing us her distinctive pots.

Janet Darnell Leach grew up in Texas but left to become an artist in New York 1937.
As her sculpture did not sell she changed to pottery and was an occupational therapist in a mental hospital for three years.

The first pot she bought was an unglazed, burnished black Pueblo  pot by Maria Martinez,
which she kept all her life.

In 1950 she heard Bernard Leach speak and later she attended a two week seminar on which he taught at Black Mountain college, where she was much influenced by Hamada’s freedom of technique and wrote to B Leach asking to study with him in Japan.

Janet thrived in Japan but after she and Bernard agreed to marry she came to St Ives to be the third wife of a man 30 years older than herself  who was a less than ideal husband.
She unwillingly took his name and managed the pottery, her own work suffering. After eight years they were living apart.
After Bernard died Janet made changes at the Leach and in her last 16 years made more work in her distinctive style.
Janet  had a relationship with a woman - Boots Redgrave to whom she left everything.
She was also friendly with Kathy Watkins who ran the Penwith gallery and with Barbara Hepworth.
 
The book gives a marvellous picture of Janet Leach, her personality and her accomplishments, with the economy, style and judgment of one who is herself an excellent potter.

[Its available at the Leach Pottery]

Judy Chicago 'Revelations'

 Judy Chicago ‘Revelations’ 2024  published by The Serpentine Gallery and Thames and Hudson to accompany her exhibition, which runs in London May 23-September 1st.

Judy Chicago has been a famous feminist artist since the exhibitions in the 1970’s of her ‘Dinner Party’ which commemorated women’s achievements through history. Controversially most were represented by vaginal imagery on plates around a triangular table.

This book gives us her writings which, ‘challenge the myth of a male god’ through her own fantasy narration using many myths and historical figures. She wanted it to be like an illuminated  manuscript with her own illustrative colourful flourishes, saying ‘drawing is like breathing for me.’

I respect her tremendous efforts, her tackling of new subjects for art such as birth and the holocaust and the topic of the use of many trees to make breast cancer treating tamoxifen.
She has thought big but now acknowledges the small, she admits her early work lacked inclusion of black women, and her hopes for a future of equality of the sexes are admirable.

Judy Chicago tells us , ‘I’m a very direct, honest,vulnerable and fragile person, which comes across in my work’, and she insists she early on developed  ‘an egalitarian and empowering studio environment, unusual at the time’.

She is certainly a phenomenon. She tries to counter early criticism of herself as exploiting her collaborators and gives credit now to her longtime helper Diane Gelon and husband Donald Woodman.

However I remember vividly how critical an audience of her attitude to her embroiderers and ceramicists was at her lecture in London in 1971 as she strode about on stage proclaiming that she had to help these women carry out her great ideas and that she was the genius and they the craftswomen. At the time she seemed to many of us overconfident and strident, egotistical just like any male master with his assistants.

Then there is her style - to me her use of form and colour is over decorative and stuck in a stylised ombré  pastel insipid sweetness reminiscent of illustrations in a magazine proclaiming the faith of Jehovah Witnesses.
Her philosophical tales have old fashioned biblical cadences and her beloved cursive handwriting is bland and characterless.
Her Revelations are inspired by Blake although opposed to his visions but lack his subtleties of poetry and expressive art.
Hers is an essentialist view - a feminism of women exalted in a sort of uncritical religious way.

I’m left torn between wishing Judy Chicago were more wonderful than she is and being glad she has done what she has.

 

'Female Rejection drawing from Quintet'

Audrey Flack

 Audrey Flack ‘With  Darkness Came Stars’   a memoir  2024, Pennsylvania State University Press

This memoir is written with great verve and swept me along with a sense of how remarkable Audrey Flack’s experiences have been.
It’s presented as reflections on her life from a bench in the Bowery where she sat during over more than  a year of artistic block, in her fifties when she was a famous photo realist painter.

By good luck and determination she had obtained an art education despite her unencouraging  background and gambling addicted mother.
Remarkably her brother had brought home to his Jewish family from WW2 souvenirs of Hitler’s paintings  from the nazi Eagles’ Nest retreat.

Audrey drank in the Cedar bar with Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionist men but kept apart from their alcoholism and sexual invitations.
She left abstraction and studied the Old Masters, chose modern life as her subject, worked with a therapist and sought a stable family life despite marrying in haste with the following repentance and eventual divorce.

There are a lot of memories of the famous which bring out their bad sides. Audrey claims she directed Ruth Kligman how to locate Pollock, which soon after lead to his death as he drunkenly drove Ruth and her friend into a tree.

I noticed all the factors that were usefully present in that area of New York then - the artists, the bars, the galleries, the wild lifestyle, new ideas and opportunities and critics writing.

Audrey had humdrum jobs, then worked in graphics, and remarkably turned from abstract expressionism to developing photo realism, learning a lot about photography but always painting from her images rather than exhibiting them as photography. She explains  that the sense of
 flat compositional surface of abstraction was important in her later paintings. She was criticised for using photos.

Audrey Flack had a difficult time as a young mother as her first daughter Melissa had severe autism and never learnt to speak. The condition was not understood and she and others
were called ‘refrigerator mothers’ and encouraged to leave their offspring in institutions.

Throughout her life art was a therapeutic help and she also performed on a banjo and formed two bands.

There was some good luck- when she was surprisingly given art opportunities and when her first, stable and calm boyfriend, Bob, got in touch and they were eventually happily married with him  being very supportive.

Audrey Flack was able to travel in Europe and painted after the Renaissance work of Luisa Roldan who made over the top baroque sculptures of female saints..
She joined a feminist consciousness raising group and did some paintings of still life deliberately featuring women’s feminine belongings in contrast to the cars and planes the male photo realists favoured.
She featured Marilyn Monroe and did a picture about the Kennedy assassination. Her ‘WW2’ about holocaust survivors  was much criticised but won an award from female survivors even though she had only depicted men in it.

In another remarkable change Flack gave up painting, withdrew from exhibiting for ten years and studied sculpture, looking  into creation myths. Her huge commission for a figure of the Portuguese Queen Catherine for Queens district was eventually rejected and destroyed as she had not been aware of that monarch’s involvement in the slave trade.

 Audrey Flack ends, ‘Art kept me alive and still helps me cope with the most heartbreaking situations in my life.
In the midst of all the darkness that life can bring, art reminds us that with darkness can come stars.’.
There are  similarities to this in my own life and through reading this memoir and examining  the many illustrations of her work I have come to know and respect Audrey Flack’s contribution to art.

Audrey Flack died 28 June 2024 aged 93

 

 

 

Photos are 'Flashback'

 

'World War 2 '

 

 'Queen Catherine'

 

  

Tate St Ives Beatriz Malhazes and Rothko

 Tate St Ives have a new show on until 29 September ‘Maresias’ meaning salty breezes, by Beatrix Malhazes who lives in Rio, a show coming from Margate and also a room of Rothko paintings from London.

To go from one to the other is like a trip to a tropical carnival full of colour and pattern hearing dancing salsa rhythms, seeing luscious vegetation around Beatriz Milhazes studio in Rio and tasting bubbly cocktails, moving through spacious light rooms and then being plunged into a narrow dark cave confronting death in the knowledge that Rothko killed himself, almost drowning in sorrow with Mahler as a suitable soundtrack in my mind.

 

Rothko

 

 Milhazes is a new name to me but Beatriz has had exhibitions in many places in the world. You can find her on YouTube explaining her various inspirations and her printing techniques. She mentions liking Bridget Riley but I also thought of the American Pattern and Decoration women artists of the 70’s.
The surfaces of her works are not slickly pristine as she allows marks made during their production to be left.
Also her collage methods make motifs stand out with three dimensional vitality.
Whist the imagery remains variations on the same highly patterned decoration there are different developments as Beatriz Milhazes surprises with her inventiveness.
She speaks online of how her place of work, her home in Brazil is important to her and I am so pleased to find an exhibitor not reacting to Cornwall in a superficial way but bringing us her visions from Brazil.

Then on the way out of Tate there are the Rothko paintings from London, made in New York.
 Years ago I used to walk through that room in Pimlico dismissing them until I heard a lecturer recommending visitors to give them time. I sat down then, and had to alter my opinion as the powerful fuzzy edged  colours vibrated and the rectangular forms affected me. Being in a smaller space in St Ives you are closer to the pictures, hemmed in by them, and if you have time to sit down and gaze for a while you may be surprised by your reactions.

Leaving, I found myself noticing colours- contrasting rubbish bins, bright children’s windmills on sticks and also my view of the Sandra Blow and Brian Wynter paintings in the gallery, which use bright colour and pattern, had been refreshed.

The Diamond

Carlyle

Beatriz Milhazes