Articles> In The Frame: Ipswich

In The Frame: Ipswich
By Will Teather
Green Pebble October/November 2009 issue

Kiss At Tower Bridge
Considering that I grew up in the neighbouring county, I’m embarrassed to say that this was the first time that I have visited Suffolk’s capital town. It was a pleasant surprise to discover a place rich in history with an ample range of galleries and an active contemporary arts scene.

Antony Micallef at The Town Hall Galleries
Looming above a bustling street market, the Town Hall Galleries are housed in a wonderfully ornate Victorian building. I was quickly transported away from the noise and heat of a midsummer’s day as I walked through the period portico into an elegant interior. The galleries are both light and spacious with high ceilings, making an excellent venue for the changing programme of contemporary visual arts and crafts that are displayed across the ground floor. Further exhibitions linked to community heritage and the town's recent past are on the floor above, with forthcoming exhibitions planned by local artists such as Valerie Irwin and Colin Moss.

The theme of the art exhibitions on display during my visit was printmaking. The Suffolk Craft Society had an exhibition of printworks by regional artists, including some charming etchings by Jill Desborough, whilst the main gallery space was celebrating over 50 years of The Curwen Studio.

Founded in 1958 in London, and now based at Chilford Hall, near Cambridge, Curwen has been one of the most innovative printers and publishers of prints in this country. From its earliest days, the studio has followed a principle of working in collaboration with artists. More recently, with the guidance of Tom Martin, the studio pursues experimentation and innovation. Both artists and printers develop designs in the studio through the medium of lithography. Curwen clearly has an illustrious history, as was evident from the many famous names scattered across the exhibition space. Amongst others I spotted work by Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and a stunning print by one of my living heroes, Paula Rego. I also saw the work of a younger artist who is making waves in the contemporary art world, Antony Micallef.

Micallef creates highly original work with familiar materials such as oil paint and charcoal, revealing that the infinite possibilities of such traditional media are far from exhausted. The work combines figurative and abstract elements with linear graphics, happy accidents and assured tonal work. He is represented by Lazarides Gallery, who also have Banksy on their books, so it is unsurprising that the work often seems confrontational and deals directly with our ambivalent relationship to notions such as modern day consumerism and the industries of war. ‘The trouble with pop imagery is that it doesn't really go deeper than the surface,’ he once said. ’You have to drag it down and challenge it to make it interesting, marry contrasting emotions and motifs. The union of two opposites make an intriguing and strange chemistry.’

Contrast seems to be a dominant philosophy to both the ideas and techniques employed in Micallef’s work. Kiss at Tower Bridge, which was on display at the Townhall Galleries, contains tourist views of London that reflect Micallef’s appropriation of ‘pop’ sensibilities. The artist seems to undermine this somewhat quaint motif through the image’s sinister distortions and strong sexual charge amongst the protagonists. What struck me about this piece was that, for a printwork, there is a remarkably organic and loose quality to the image. It appears extremely painterly and spontaneous, whilst containing a lot of fine line work. Printmaking is normally a time-consuming process, and often involves a lot of planning, so the elements of chance that seem to have fed into this artwork are very refreshing. The print is a photo-plate lithograph and was made at the Curwen Studios by Micallef in collaboration with Thomas Martin and his staff there.

Thomas Gainsborough at the
Wosley Art Gallery

After looking around the rest of the old Town Hall I strolled northbound towards Christchurch Park. It was a glorious day and this 70-acre area of rolling lawns, wooded areas and delicately created arboreta is stunningly beautiful. Set back a little way from the entrance to the park is its centrepiece, Christchurch Mansion. As soon as I walked through the entrance I was surrounded by panelled walls packed with historic portraits. I reached the Wolsey Art Gallery, which houses a collection of work by Suffolk-born artists, focussed around the works of John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough.

The Gainsboroughs make interesting viewing. Not only are there a number of acknowledged masterpieces on display, but several early works which reveal an artist still refining his trade as a portrait painter. This is the young Gainsborough, based in Ipswich, still struggling to make a living, borrowing against his wife’s annuity, his clientele including mainly local merchants and squires. Maybe he was ‘banging them out’ – always trying to get onto the next commission since they weren’t fetching enough money to deserve his closest attention? Or maybe he simply hadn’t seen enough great art to raise his game, like the Van Dykes he studied later when he moved to Bath. Whatever the reason, it is reassuring to see fallibility in the early years of someone who would later become a truly great artist, making his name through a plethora of poetic portraits of 18th century aristocracy.

One early portrait which is commonly accepted as a masterpiece, and anticipates the artist’s later achievements, is the Portrait of William Wollaston. Gainsborough painted Wollaston towards the end of the artist’s time in Ipswich. According to the Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service, the painting shows ‘the development of Gainsborough’s style away from more wooden head and shoulder pose, to a three-quarter length where the sitter is slightly twisted in a rococo fashion started by Hogarth.’ The painting reveals ‘a more naturalistic pose and beautiful depiction of clothing which he was to develop in Bath.’

I was struck by how the paint-work is extremely detailed at points, like the music on his lap, whilst being very bold and loose in other parts, like the cloth. These decisions are well made and guide the eye, setting the pace for the viewer’s journey around the piece and telling something of the artist’s reading of the subject. There is also a pleasure in seeing the brushwork of the cloth unfurl into abstraction upon closer inspection; Gainsborough was certainly a clever illusionist. Maybe there is a hidden lineage here: in that the play between reality and illusion, between looseness and precision, so evident in the work of artists like Micallef, is also subtly hidden in the work of the past.

Michal Janowski at The Waterfront Gallery, University Campus Suffolk

Upon leaving the Wolsey I headed southbound for the waterfront, enjoying some more pop-art inspired work en-route at the Eyestorm Gallery. My final destination was intended to be the John Russell Gallery, but this was not to transpire since I had unwittingly timed my visit in the middle of their summer break. As I moped about the waterfront wondering where to head next, I stumbled upon a poster advertising a show of ‘International Young Art.’ This turned out to be at the Waterfront Building of University Campus Suffolk.

‘International’ is something of a buzzword in the artworld and in this case the exhibition title simply refers to artwork by overseas students and graduates from UCS. The work was displayed in a gallery space that forms part of the foyer of the Waterfront Building. Michal Janowski’s work stood out for both its distinctive sense of sparse composition with everything slightly off-kilter, and his confident use of expressionistic paint-work. The works of his on display were divided into figurative paintings that focused upon portraiture and a series of bare interior scenes with distorted perspectives.

Janowski, a recent graduate, regards himself as still finding his identity as an artist. Whilst his normal preoccupation is the figure, the rooms were a temporary change of direction and an attempt to create something that implies a human presence without the use of a figure. Both the empty spaces of these interiors and the introspective protagonists of his figurative works speak of alienation and existential angst, so it is unsurprising to find out that Janowski is a fan of what he describes as the ‘School of London’,’ meaning artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. There is definitely something of Freud and Auerbach about Janowski’s figurative works, with their thick impasto that seems to search out a sense of form through the build up of crude brushmarks. Equally the stark interiors seem reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s use of enclosed spaces. Janowski’s work develops largely instinctively, with a certain amount of playfulness in his media, using not just acrylic paint but coffee, collage and aerosol cans, also showing the influence of graffiti art that has swept through art education over recent times.

Putting my teaching hat on, I think Janowski would benefit from working with life-models outside the life-room. Working in a life-room with other students and artists imposes certain restrictions, since you tend not to decide the length of time, poses or context of an image. Self-portraits obviously solve some of these issues but they also have their own limitations. If he could convince his friends to sit still for a few hours, he could develop his understanding of the figure over extended sessions and play with his sense of composition through choosing poses that aid the sense of narrative that he seeks for his work. From my personal experience I have found that a surprisingly large number of people are willing to take time out to experience being turned into a piece of art. So, any volunteers?

Will Teather is Artist-in-Residence at Anteros Arts Centre and a short course tutor at Norwich University College of the Arts. Email Will Teather

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