Green Pebble Magazine


Articles> In The Frame: Colchester
In
The Frame: Colchester
By Will Teather
Green Pebble June 2009 issue

Colchester
lays claim to being Britain's oldest recorded town, something evident in the
stunning range of architecture lining the High Street. In more recent times
the streets have been a stomping ground for a number of important artists
such as John Nash, Eduardo Paolozzi and Edward Bawden, all of whom are represented
within the town’s public collections and often displayed at well-known
landmarks such as The Minories Art Gallery and Colchester Castle. Both of
these venues are bang in the middle of town, which is where I started my expedition.
Mick Smee at The Minories Art Gallery
The Minories was recently taken over by the Colchester School of Art and,
when I visited the gallery, there were a range of works on display from the
school’s permanent collection. Amongst these were several pieces by
Mick Smee, himself a past student and later a tutor at the school.
Smee is best known as a painter, being a previous prizewinner in the Sunday
Times Watercolour Competition amongst other achievements, but it is his charcoal
drawings that really sparked my interest. They are more simplified than his
paintings and have a heightened sense of tonal contrast, often rendering the
figures as hazy silhouettes. This stylisation helps bring an ethereal stillness
to the images, reflecting both his early interest in Dutch genre painters
and the sense of nostalgia evident in his chosen subject matter. Smee focuses
on the disappearing parts of British society such as the traditional English
pub or the recently lost Routemaster buses in London, hoping that someday
these scenes might provoke the same curiosity as Toulouse Lautrec’s
vibrant account of 19th century France. Pubs and ‘cafs’ have been
a recurring theme in Smee’s work for many years, being places of cosy
familiarity since his days as an art student.
The artist’s working process begins with small sketches jotted down
on location, in which he captures something of the atmosphere of a place.
It is these initial sketches, along with some reference photos, that he will
then develop into a more resolved composition at his studio. It is during
this stage that he produces his large charcoal drawings, many of which become
the blueprint for a painting. Sometimes, however, the drawing will become
an artwork in its own right, as was the case with those displayed at the Minories.
As a composition develops he will often edit the scene to aid its aesthetic
balance and sense of narrative, but will always ensure that the location remains
recognisable as a particular time and place. This process of editing and refining
an image, whilst retaining its essence, reflects his years after graduating
in which he worked in theatres as a set designer and scenic artist. These
jobs involved substantial research into period architecture and required an
eye for picking out the key features of a building.
In terms of technique, he adds depth by smudging and fading objects in the
distance, whilst using a more densely black conte crayon to foreground other
objects in the composition. This gives the images a kind of ‘aerial
perspective,’ something which occurs more visibly in nature over long
distances. Looking across a vista, objects will become less defined, lower
in tonal variation and the hues more blue, as the atmosphere between them
and our eyes scatters the light. Artists often use aspects of this theory
over shorter distances to create a sense of depth. Whilst not strictly accurate
when used in this way, it tends to be very effective and Smee would argue
that it gives a more genuine focus to a scene than that of a camera. Certainly
the camera lies as much as any painting, for instance it records with one
lens instead of two and has a static perspective, unlike the constantly shifting
viewpoint that occurs as an eye travels around a room.
Hearing Smee talk about his work, he is articulate and has the measured tone
of someone who has worked in art education for many years. He left teaching
a little while ago now and, at 63, should have many years ahead of him to
continue his work as an artist, capturing our transitory world.
Elizabeth
Morris at Colchester Castle Museum
Colchester Castle is sat just behind the High Street, nestled in the Castle
Park and Gardens. It is a spectacular building of unique appearance, its mottled
stonework reminding me somewhat of a gingerbread house. The Museum often mounts
temporary art exhibitions such as ‘17 in Print,’ a recent exhibition
of more than 80 prints from 17 of the region’s finest artists.
It was amongst this diverse display that I stumbled upon the work of Elizabeth
Morris, a printmaker living on Mersea Island, just off the Essex coast. Morris’s
work draws inspiration from her maritime surroundings, with a particular interest
in ‘sea myths and biblical stories with sea references’. Since
her images allude to wider narratives, their titles are very important, as
is the case with Jonah and the Great Fish, a print based upon the Old Testament’s
Book of Jonah.
According to this ancient story, Jonah is thrown into the sea but survives
after being swallowed by a large fish, in which he lives for the next three
days. Morris’s print is set in the middle of the action, at the point
where Jonah is sinking in the great ocean below the boat as an enormous whale
passes. As an aside, Morris comments that she found an authentic story in
the Peabody Museum, Salem, USA, of a seaman who survived being swallowed by
a whale, although the boat in her image is local to Colchester.
Alongside the Bible story, Morris explains that personal experiences also
played their part in the composition. Morris spends her summers on another
small island in West Cork and, some time ago, discovered a dead whale washed
up on the beach there. She tried and failed to take the skull from the body,
due to its enormous size and weight, only to have it given to her by an artist
friend a year later. It now hangs on the wall of her house. Suns are also
an important motif for the artist, which she explains is because her house
in Mersea looks west at the sun.
Stylistically, I can’t help but see her somewhat ornamental depiction
of waves and emphasis on the sun as referencing traditional Japanese prints,
but she points me back to British artists such as Stanley Spencer. Morris
enjoys his flights of fancy, such as sailors rising from their graves carrying
bedrolls.
The painter and printmaker Anthony Gross, whom she has previously met, was
also an important influence on her use of line and texture. Like Gross, her
prints are created entirely by herself, using intaglio processes such as etching
and drypoint for the linear detail and aquatint for tonal work. This is a
labour intensive process with several stages, and demonstrates the great skill
and patience that perfectly complement her playful imagination.
Emma Cameron at Hayletts Gallery

Moving away from the High Street altogether I found
some further venues that showcased a range of contemporary art, notably the
University of Essex’s ‘University Gallery’ and Colchester
Arts Centre which, whilst not possessing a dedicated gallery space, is the
Eastern region’s staunchest supporter of Live Art. There are also venues
situated in the Essex countryside that amply cater for the discerning collector.
One such space is Hayletts Gallery, located in the picturesque town of Maldon.It
shows prints by famous British artists such as Peter Blake, Terry Frost and
Bridget Riley, alongside serious professional artists from the Eastern region
such as the aforementioned Elizabeth Morris and the remarkable work of Emma
Cameron.
The colours in Cameron’s oil paintings are bold and rich, contrasted
with the deft subtlety to her draughtsmanship. They depict what seem to be
mythological scenes, although she finds it difficult to explain exactly why
or what they mean, preferring to leave this up to the viewer. This may have
something to do with her novel working methods, which sound like a voyage
of discovery in their own right. She tends to paint a series of colours onto
a canvas in an arbitrary manner and enjoys allowing random abstractions to
form in the paint-work. She will leave this abstract beginning to settle for
a while, before coming back to it to see if an image seems to arise of its
own accord, much like children do with clouds. As Cameron points out, Leonardo
Da Vinci used to see images emerge in the cracks of a wall. Eventually something
does appear and Cameron will then tease the scene out further with linear
brushwork. She is clearly very confident in her drawing and requires no reference
material for the figures that she creates. This facility might be related
to the fact that, in the present, she still spends a lot of time analyzing
the human figure as a part-time life drawing tutor at Colchester School of
Art.
Her animals, when they appear, need a little more help to be fully realised
so she does find herself relying more on reference material when completing
them. She doesn’t tend to copy straight from a picture though, as the
source material is rarely in the same position as the animal she wants in
her painting. In the case of her painting New Animal, the creature in the
foreground kept changing from being one thing to another until she decided
it must be a new animal in its own right.
Although Cameron has a relatively haphazard approach to creating her compositions,
there is a consistency in her subject matter and style. She brings to life
an archaic dreamworld of people and animals, princes and angles. This makes
one think of Christopher Le Brun’s ‘half-world’ of horses,
heroes and legends flowing seamlessly in and out of abstraction. Cameron is
indeed an admirer of Le Brun, and also identifies with other painters who
enjoy the medium in its own right but ultimately bring to this a level of
representation, such as Peter Doig and Ken Kiff. These are grand figures for
Cameron to aspire to, but the quality and originality of her work makes such
comparisons seem credible. I’d love to see how her work might develop
if she were to push the scale of her canvases to that of her heroes, allowing
for an even more comprehensive glimpse of her inner world.