Patrick Heron at Tate St.Ives May 2018

Patrick Heron at Tate St.Ives ,    May 2018

How great to be exhibited in the Tate but what a pity they couldn't arrange it before the artist died. Patrick Heron was however asked to design a window for the entrance which is marvellously colourful. I remember the artist giving a talk in front of it about how he designed it on a small piece of paper and how a German firm able to make a window with large expanses of glass was used. Although very famous and respected,Patrick must have been a bit nervous because throughout his talk he was jangling change in his pocket which made it quite hard to hear, but no one protested.

Like the subject of the last show in the new big gallery, Virginia Woolf, Patrick was a member of the Labour Party and committed enough to have large boards exhorting everyone to vote Labour put up at election times on the coast road outside his home, 'Eagles Nest' , a strange name to choose although apt for the wild location because it was also a house name used by Hitler for his mountain retreat. Perhaps Patrick didn't know that?  Or insisted on reclaiming it?

So, what of the show? Patrick's writing on art put the St.Ives artists into public view. All artists need writers to become known and to become part of the accepted 'canon' of art history.

It's very enjoyable with captions featuring remarks PH wrote about painting, about the need to achieve balance, about the way the edges of a painting are so important as the onlooker's eyes look from them to different points in the composition and back and to and fro.

Some influences from Braque, Rothko, Robert Indiana,  etc. can be seen and PH mentions looking at Bonnard. 

The early paintings are more figurative

Antibes 1949

Christmas Eve 1951

with a middle period of more solid coloured shapes that could have been cut from paper like Matisse, and then later looser ones with more space and calmer, lighter colour. I think these are the ones PH began thinking of them as entirely abstract but later realised how influenced he was by flowers in his garden.

1972-4

I asked in the card shop if a favourite was emerging and they weren't sure yet, probably the ones indicating observation of St.Ives, maybe the one I chose 'interior with garden window' 1955 which is a complicated orchestration of shapes , colours and textures- enough going on to entertain you every time you see it and painted with what seems great aplomb possibly disguising the effort it cost him like watching a practised dancer whose arabesques seem easy.

Interior with garden window 1955

Crowds of children were being marshalled on the stairs and central area and asked to suggest rules of behaviour- not to run or knock sculpture over was being suggested  as I passed them. The Patrick Heron show is  going to suit the teachers because pupils will be encouraged to trust their instincts and enjoy themselves when they next get into the art room, as long as austerity allows enough paint and paper for their youthful exuberance. 

Perhaps this is PH's contribution, to enjoy the colours, shapes and fitting them into a rectangle.

He was doing this as art whilst I was learning it from a teacher, Mrs Roberts, who was in tune with what was going on, with Victor Pasmore and basic design exercises and that book teachers had that told you about good and bad design. How much more difficult to find a way to introduce the young to the fantastic array of art going on today. The influence of the PH sort of art is alive, very much so in St.Ives. Painters like Felicity Marr carry it on, most of the Penwithy art in the Penwith gallery down the road upholds it's aims, but there's so much more now, humour, politics, gender identity, ecology. After the Second World War 's carnage I think artists welcomed a refuge in a simpler world of art, art like music, form and colour, a rest from horror. I think our times cannot just keep that going, it's a new time.

However it's balm for the troubled soul to spend time in this show. I was visiting torn in two by the prospect of what disease can do to spoil our fun, on the edge of tears at the unfairness we all face at sometime, and it helped a little.

Thank you Patrick Heron.

Newlyn Society of Artists Drawing Exhibition, Tremenheere May 2018

Newlyn Society of Artists ‘Drawing’ at Tremenheere May 2018

I love going to an art exhibition especially if it’s free, there’s plenty of parking and there’s tea and cake available afterwards. Tremenheere has these factors in its favour although tea stops an hour before the show closes so I was lucky to get any.This time difference is of course traditional.

Unlike going to time based entertainments, at an art show you can spend as little or long a time on each of the contributions as you please and are not trapped while something you don’t like goes on and on.

So, I was very glad I went upstairs first and demolished metaphorically the pencil drawings of taps, the casts of tea spoon holding boxes and the shapes made of car body type sheets of metal. They were beauifully executed by Michelle Olson and Jack Davies but I wasn’t in the mood for them. 

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Downstairs there were a lot of works drawn in many ways and media. There wasn’t much really political or narrative.  Quite a lot based on landscape, gestural marks, lots of black on white. If you knew some of the artists you could spot whose was whose.

David Whitbread Roberts

A video was showing with each artist talking briefly about their use of drawing and I caught Suzannah Clemence explaining sometimes she drew to remember and sometimes to forget, which was interesting.

As you go in you are invited to take a stick with a pastel attached and draw on a large piece of paper hanging down. It was a bit frustatrating as there was no hard surface behind the paper and no way to draw satisfyingly but people were participating.

This is a gallery that allows work on paper to be pinned to the wall with no protection for its surface, making it seem so vulneraable if anyone should want to deface it or should even cough on it or have a child who might make a grubby mark with their hand. One such work was marked sold for £1600. It was Pippa Young’s ‘Judgement Day’ a very detailed portrayal of three RA judges, Grayson Perry, Cornelia Parker and a third one I don’t recognize, on a large sheet of paper.

I liked some of the works and as an exhibition it served to wake me up visually, to make me notice the world around me more, the exit signs and the loo signs, the flowers outside, the blueness of the distant sea.

Tremenheere somehow repells me as the most middle class place I can think of whilst I still like going there. A child of about 7 was letting their yellow dumper truck run across tables in the cafe outside area so that it repeatedlly crashed onto the stone chippings on the ground. I wanted their parents to stop them doing this, to tell them it would break, to require them to take care of it. Maybe they were too busy conversing intelligently to notice.

I heard that Ken Turner was so annoyed that his piece about refugees was refused that he has left the society. He was annoyed that they invited him to do a performance at the opening of a show for which his drawing had been rejected.

As always it would interest me to see the rejections, maybe on a slide show, or why not put the work closer together and get more in? Why were two artists given lots of space upstairs whilst the others were hung, some in academy style proximity and some more conventionally spaced?

Outside I noticed a rather chi chi use of placing things in threes, three pots, three cylindrical posts with acrylic tops and three huge pebble structures. A bit gardeners’ world.

Anyway it seems the Newlyn Society are alive and, if not kicking, drawing quite a bit.

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Newlyn Society of Artists 'Drawing' at Tremenheere May 2018

Newlyn Society of Artists ‘Drawing’ at Tremenheere May 2018

I love going to an art exhibition especially if it’s free, there’s plenty of parking and there’s tea and cake available afterwards. Tremenheere has these factors in its favour although tea stops an hour before the show closes so I was lucky to get any.This time difference is of course traditional.

Unlike going to time based entertainments, at an art show you can spend as little or long a time on each of the contributions as you please and are not trapped while something you don’t like goes on and on.

So, I was very glad I went upstairs first and demolished metaphorically the pencil drawings of taps, the casts of tea spoon holding boxes and the shapes made of car body type sheets of metal. They were beauifully executed by Michelle Olson and Jack Davies but I wasn’t in the mood for them. 

Downstairs there were a lot of works drawn in many ways and media. There wasn’t much really political or narrative.  Quite a lot based on landscape, gestural marks, lots of black on white. If you knew some of the artists you could spot whose was whose.

A video was showing with each artist talking briefly about their use of drawing and I caught Suzannah Clemence explaining sometimes she drew to remember and sometimes to forget, which was interesting.

As you go in you are invited to take a stick with a pastel attached and draw on a large piece of paper hanging down. It was a bit frustatrating as there was no hard surface behind the paper and no way to draw satisfyingly but people were participating.

This is a gallery that allows work on paper to be pinned to the wall with no protection for its surface, making it seem so vulneraable if anyone should want to deface it or should even cough on it or have a child who might make a grubby mark with their hand. One such work was marked sold for £1600. It was Pippa Young’s ‘Judgement Day’ a very detailed portrayal of three RA judges, Grayson Perry, Cornelia Parker and a third one I don’t recognize, on a large sheet of paper.

I liked some of the works and as an exhibition it served to wake me up visually, to make me notice the world around me more, the exit signs and the loo signs, the flowers outside, the blueness of the distant sea.

Tremenheere somehow repells me as the most middle class place I can think of whilst I still like going there. A child of about 7 was letting their yellow dumper truck run across tables in the cafe outside area so that it repeatedlly crashed onto the stone chippings on the ground. I wanted their parents to stop them doing this, to tell them it would break, to require them to take care of it. Maybe they were too busy conversing intelligently to notice.

I heard that Ken Turner was so annoyed that his piece about refugees was refused that he has left the society. He was annoyed that they invited him to do a performance at the opening of a show for which his drawing had been rejected.

As always it would interest me to see the rejections, maybe on a slide show, or why not put the work closer together and get more in? Why were two artists given lots of space upstairs whilst the others were hung, some in academy style proximity and some more conventionally spaced?

Outside I noticed a rather chi chi use of placing things in threes, three pots, three cylindrical posts with acrylic tops and three huge pebble structures. A bit gardeners’ world.

Anyway it seems the Newlyn Society are alive and, if not kicking, drawing quite a bit.

.

Virginia Woolf, a keynote lecture from Frances Spalding

Virginia Woolf, a keynote lecture from Frances Spalding at Tate St.Ives, April 2018

Virginia Woolf's study by Mary Fletcher

This lecture kick - started the weekend conference and I had forgotten just how enjoyable it can be to sit in a semi - darkened room with 40 other interested people while someone who really knows their subject inside out tells us about it and shows us pictures. Frances Spalding has a lovely voice and gave us a witty choice of anecdotes alongside more serious aspects.

Her title for the talk was 'suggestive images' which applied to Virginia Woolf's  writing as well as to visual art in the current show. 

 

Frances brought in reference to the present scandalous treatment of the Windrush immigrants and told us how Woolf was politically engaged. Virginia Woolf wrote in the 30's 'thinking is my fighting'. 

The development of buses in London helped women to travel unchaperoned and Woolf liked to wander in the city and observe people. When she was moved to Richmond with her husband Leonard because it would be quieter and more soothing for her mental health Virginia had written that in a choice between Richmond and death she would choose death.

The 'enduring resonance' globally of Virginia Woolf's writing today was emphasised. In 2016 there was an international conference in Seoul, S.Korea.

V.Woolf changed the emphasis in writing a novel, saying that in ‘The Waves’ the important thing was 'a rhythm not a plot'.

The importance of her contact with art by her contemporaries was brought out and also how her childhood holidays in St.Ives remained a vivid presence in her mind years later, mentioned in a letter to her sister,  written in France and received by Vanessa in Rome.

The lecture was in the newly contained space of the Foyle room, which I so much welcome as having acoustics suited to hearing a speaker, unlike most of the Tate spaces.

I studied art and art history at the same time as Frances Spalding at Nottingham University and reflected how differently my life might have gone if like her I had chosen a life of research, history and writing rather than teaching art in a school, becoming an art therapist and alongside all that maintaining my art 'practice' as its called, so much less a viable career but the one I wanted and continue to maintain, remarkably free of fame and fortune, but at last in my studio with 'a room of my own.'

Mary Fletcher.