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Articles> In The Frame: Cambridge
When I visited
Cambridge recently I found a beautiful city, rich in cultural heritage and
packed with galleries. Well-known landmarks include The Fitzwilliam Museum
and Kettle’s Yard but there were also many smaller galleries scattered
throughout the city, each with their own distinctive flavour. I found many
artworks that stood out for their individuality and beautiful execution. Below
are three artists that I felt had reinterpreted their personal experiences
into images with wide-appeal.
Mychael Barrett at Cambridge Contemporary Art
Cambridge Contemporary Art is bang in the centre of town and was the first
stop in my expedition. It displays a wide range of work by local, national
and international artists in a spacious and minimalistic setting that gives
individual works the space to breath.
Set against the backdrop of the gallery’s white walls, Mychael Barrett’s
busy and energetic prints leap out immediately with their charming mixture
of the fantastical and familiar. Barrett’s work draws on his everyday
experiences which he reinterprets as visual fables that nod towards the fairytale
imagery of well-loved illustrators such as Arthur Rackman and Edmund Dulac.
The Pursuit of Happiness, for example, is an amalgamation of his experiences
on the day of the 7 July 2005 London Bombings.
Barrett was travelling across London, towards his studio, when the bombings
occurred. His assistant Carina breathed a sigh of relief when he finally arrived,
believing that he might have been caught in the turmoil. The pair then set
about ‘working a normal, albeit distracted and surreal, day,’
Barrett explains. Meanwhile, nearby, Carina’s friend John ‘was
stranded with no transport working, halfway between home and work,’
says Barrett, and ‘called Carina to see if it would be alright if he
came by.
‘[John] brought some lovely food, made us lunch and spent the rest of
the day just hanging out in the studio. At the end of the day, John walked
Carina home whilst pushing her bike. Within a few weeks they announced that
they were getting married and I've always believed that they fell in love
that day.’
This episode sparked something in Barrett's imagination. After retracing parts
of his journey and making some preliminary sketches of landmarks such as St
Pauls, the artist reinterpreted his recollections as a scene in which two
lovers float above the imposing architecture of London. London itself has
a certain romance for Barrett, who arrived for a visit from Canada twenty
years ago and has never looked back.
The sense of tender nostalgia evoked within the final composition is reflected
by the painterly subtlety and softness to its execution. This is an unusual
quality to achieve in print work and points to the vast range of techniques
employed by Barrett in the creation of his etchings.
The detail is achieved with ‘copper plate line work’, with different
sections worked in a soft or hard ground, due to it affecting the sharpness
of the lines. Essentially, this is where the copper is covered with an acid-resistant
ground and details are scratched out before the acid is applied. The acid
burns the linework into the copper, ready for printing.
Anna
Pugh at The Lawson Gallery
Walking across town, after a quick visit to the excellent Byard Art, I find
myself at The Lawson Gallery. The walls bustle with a wide range of affordable
prints and paintings, many of which are high quality reproductions of works
by famous contemporary artists.
Amongst these prints is the work of Anna Pugh, whose originals are sold exclusively
through Lucy B Cambell Art in London.
Pugh’s works have a similarly idealised and escapist quality to Barrett's
but fall more into a folk-art tradition than that of a fairytale. They have
an enchanting quaintness born from their focus upon an almost lost sense of
rural England, coupled with the naïve appearance of her drawing and paint
work.
Curiously, it is her technical weaknesses that form the backbone of her strengths,
bringing a distinctive style and childlike innocence to her works. The flattened
perspective and precise paint-work with its lack of shadow tones remind me
stylistically of the paintings of Imperial China. Since China had yet to be
introduced to the Western concept of perspective, their flattened images were
so assured and consistent in their execution that one cannot imagine them
any other way.
Pugh says that, as far as she is concerned, the perspective in her work is
correct and as she sees the world, although she does often like to paint characters
in profile for simplicity. She admits that she initially found painting very
difficult and it is this trepidation that has led to the tight finish to her
works.
Her acrylic painting technique sounds idiosyncratic to say the least. She
initially begins with a black ground and works with inverted tones, none of
which one would guess from seeing the final images.
Pugh enjoys working from things she has seen in the course of normal village
life, such as a picnic, a country walk or folding the linen. She tries to
choose scenes that are happy because, if she has to live with a painting for
six weeks or so, she needs it to be something that makes her feel positive.
As the composition develops her main concern is to make things look pleasing
to the eye, and if that means changing the colour of a flower’s petals,
so be it. Her shameless pleasure in aesthetics is apparent in her mastery
of colour and texture, and may reflect her background as a graphic designer
and furniture painter. In fact, her first commission came when a customer
asked if she could paint something on a canvas similar to a design that she
had already completed on their chairs. These days, however, she doesn’t
like to work to commission and clearly doesn’t need to. Her work is
both beautiful and in high demand.
Sarah Cawkwell at New Hall Art Collection
New Hall, recently renamed Murray Edwards College, is a bit further from the
centre of town than the other galleries that I visited. It is well worth the
trek though, particularly since you can pop into Kettles Yard en-route.
The College is part of the University of Cambridge and houses nearly 350 contemporary
works by women artists. The collection includes works by Maggi Hambling, Barbara
Hepworth and Paula Rego alongside many lesser-known talents. The work has
largely been donated to the college, which may account for the varying quality
of the artworks on display, but it would be impossible not to find a number
of works that spark your interest amongst such a vast collection. I spent
a long while just meandering through the college since, alongside some specialised
gallery spaces, the collection sprawls across the entire building.
Cawkwell's drawing Large Plait No 1 reveals a very accomplished draughtswoman
capable of intense observational scrutiny, whilst the immense scale of the
picture allows one to appreciate her mark-making further as a series of rhythmical
abstractions. The scale also enhances the sense of intimacy within the domestic
scenes that she depicts, bringing you almost uncomfortably close to the subject
who, nonetheless, remains introspective and leaves you as a voyeur.
Cawkwell would describe these works as feminist, in that they highlight female
concerns. Whilst she is unsure if this is as politically important today as
it was when she created these drawings, the works are sufficiently subtle
and insightful to still make considerable the unconsidered. Her compositions
from this period seem to centre on female rituals such as a women platting
their hair, weaving, or using their hands in some other way. These almost
instinctual actions are wonderfully observed and have a timeless quality,
reminiscent of Kathe Kollwitz’s stark interiors.
Her working method seems to reflect a similar set of preoccupations, being
very labored, building layer upon layer of charcoal and pencil. Cawkwell describes
how she becomes lost in a work, almost disengaged from her surroundings, and
is often the subject of her pictures. The resulting images seem both deeply
personal and universal in their exploration of the female condition.
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