Articles> In The Frame: Colchester

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

Mick Smee

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.

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

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