In
The Frame: London
By Will Teather
Green Pebble April/May 2010 issue
The Real and The Imagined
W
ith the East of England bordering London, we are host to many artists who have established themselves in the city’s international art scene whilst continuing to live and exhibit locally. Over the centuries, many East Anglian artists’ fame has spread beyond the region’s boarders, such as John Sell Cotman, Sir Alfred Munnings, Thomas Gainsborough through to more recent figures such as the pop artist Colin Self and the late visionary painter, Mary Newcomb. In fact, the more you look, the more you find, as I have discovered during my recent trips to London’s galleries.
Lizzie Riches at the Portal Gallery
Amongst the assortment of beautiful curiosities in Lizzie Riches’s last solo show at The Portal Gallery in Marylebone, I was immediately drawn to a work whose title seems to sum up something of the Suffolk based artist’s preoccupations: The Real and The Imagined.
Whilst representational painting might be described as an illusion in itself, The Real and The Imagined plays upon this notion wonderfully with its interlocking layers of artifice. Not only is each twin an imitation of the other one, the dolls and paper portraits offer us further steps down the rabbit hole.
The theatricality of the figures’ clothing adds to this sense of spectacle, as does the background which is, on closer inspection, more of a ‘backdrop.’ Always the magpie, Riches finds her source material from some surprising locations – the skirts are based on some Japanese silk that she picked up in a textiles shop, whilst the jackets from this seemingly bygone scene were originally spied out in TK Maxx.
Whilst her visual trickery provides the bite of the image, Riches’s paintings are full of humanity, reflecting her love of the portrait artist Anthony Van Dyck. They unravel with a strong sense of narrative and, whilst the artist sees each work as an open book, she cannot help but attach her own interpretation to them as they develop. She points out the fact that the doll seems more important to one twin than the other, and wonders what this says about their relationship.
It is this orchestrated sense of story, alongside the potential for rationalizing the painting’s strangeness into the near believable, that brings her work closer to magical realism in spirit than the liberalized chaos of surrealism.
The painting is highly finished in its execution, enhancing the sense of illusion and the illustrative qualities that one associates with storytelling. Oil paint is her preferred medium for this approach, finding it far more ‘forgiving’ than acrylic for instance, and enabling her to exploit the smooth qualities of wet into wet blending. Despite the detail of her work, she is able to work relatively quickly, largely thanks to using Winsor and Newton’s Liquin medium in her glazes, with the addition of turps for thinner layers. She is clearly a big fan of Liquin’s qualities; it not only improves flow and transparency but often increases the drying time of oil paint to under a day, instead of taking weeks or even months. The medium also helps ‘lose’ the brushwork, as does the fine weave of the linen canvas, less hairy and coarse than cotton duck. She sands between most layers, whilst being careful to keep something of the support’s tooth, so that the brush strokes keep an even consistency as they spread into the tiny ‘reservoirs’ of the weave.
The results, I hope you agree, are as refined as the process and reveal a well respected artist who doesn’t rest on her laurels. For those who want to find her paintings without making a trip to the capital, Riches is also represented by Bungay’s Cork Brick Gallery.
Brian Whelan at Pitzhanger Manor Gallery Brian Whelan brands himself as London-Irish although, in fact, he has been based in East Anglia for over 20 years. When one encounters the artist and his work though, his heterogeneous identity becomes easier to understand. Whelan was born in London to Irish emigrants and his work continues to draw heavily upon his childhood experiences. Furthermore, his work has found strong support within the Irish community of London, leading to a solo exhibition at London City Hall to coincide with St Patrick’s Day 2007 and, more recently, his curating a group exhibition of London-Irish artists at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing, the London borough where his artistic studies began. So it comes as no surprise that Whelan describes the issues within his work as inextricably linked to his origins:
‘I was struck by the themes that London-Irish artists of my generation shared. It isn’t that they are Irish themes exactly, but they are certainly not part of any English tradition that I have ever heard of. And there is something really interesting happening when we all paint pubs and churches…. pop concerts, football matches, buses, trains and boats.’
Whelan seems to be describing ‘the experience of the immigrant,’ of how the everyday can be observed as both familiar and exotic. Whelan’s particular fascination with buses, evident in his painting City of the Red Bus, might be explained by his father working for London Transport and the bus acting as a sort of ‘crèche’ for much of his childhood. Looking at Whelan’s work in terms of post-modernist preoccupations with the merging of different discourses, there is a curios mix of low and high culture in his work. Beer mats feature within his images, alongside toffee wrappers reinvented as guilding, whilst the sacred themes of the church are boldly depicted in marker pen and acrylic paint. The flattened perspective of his work and deliberately naive depiction of subject matter is both reminiscent of folk art and comic books, whilst also reinventing mediaeval religious paintings from the churches of East Anglia. As Whelan’s biography states: It is the vestiges of an art form that resonate with his Irish Catholic roots, back to a time when there was one church and from its painted walls great stories were told.’
For those wanting to see these stories closer to home, Whelan’s work can often be found on display at the Crome Gallery in Norwich.
Will Teather lectures on drawing at Norwich University College of the Arts and is a trustee of the Anteros Art Foundation. For more details about the artist please visit Will Teather's website. For details about the artists mentioned in this article, visit Lizzie Riches and Brian Whelan.
Subscribe to Green Pebble Magazine
and have the latest issues delivered
straight to your door!
