Artist Biographies
Arun Chatterjee (born 1971)
Born in Darbhanga, India, Chatterjee took his BFA the College of Fine Arts at Patna University. Under scholarship he then moved to Bejing in China where he obtained his MFA at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Bejing. Subsequent funding enabled Chatterjee to complete a residency programme in Tokyo, Japan.
The work on display at Art 18/21 is part of the series Expressions the title of Chatterjee's first solo show which opens at the Jehingir Gallery in Mumbai, India, May 7 – 11.
In Expressions Chatterjee portrays experiences, both his and others observed, through facial forms focused on expression. He explains,
"The source of the eye is the fish eye which is rooted in the Indian folk arts of Madhubani where the fish is is associated with 'auspiciousness' and 'hope'. The two parts of the eye are both Indian and Chinese, the pupil is like China the country which although large is focused inwards, self scrutinising. By contrast, the outer field is Indian in aspect always looking outwards. However, like vision itself there is a fantastic infusion of both aspects which can be observed in the eyes".
Arun Chatterjee 2008
Lorraine Cooke
Born 1980, Norwich.
Lorraine graduated from Norwich school of art and design in 2003 with a BA Hons in Fine art and has developed her career as a professional artist and curator exhibiting both locally and nationally. Lorraine is currently working part time at Art1821 and will be exhibiting her paintings with Art1821 in a dual show with nationally established artist Roderick Newlands (details of the forthcoming show will be posted on the exhibitions listing.)
Shortly after graduating Lorraine was short listed for the Babylon Gallery Award for an emerging artist and was also selected to exhibit at the Royale Academy Summer show, Fringe of East International. In 2006 Lorraine was selected for the 2nd Open Competition Exhibition at Byard Art Gallery in Cambridge, selected by the former Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. Lorraine was one of four artists selected nationally to take part in the AA2A Artist residency scheme at NUCA (October 08- March 09) and was the winner of the AA2A 2009 national public voting competition for the AA2A Artist of the Year 09. In 2009 Lorraine curated an exhibition at the Mandell’s Gallery in Elm Hill, Norwich, which showcased her work alongside fellow NUCA AA2A resident artists and Norwich based artist Roderick Newlands.
Lorraine’s work is essentially concerned with the exploration of landscape and inscape drawing upon the history of landscape genre in painting and is an attempt to rationalize the landscape in which she finds herself. She references 'landscape' in the broadest sense of the word, not excluding the landscape of the mind. Works often emerge as psychological morphologies incorporating organic forms and complex layering of space.
Alec Cumming
Alec Cumming
The works of one of East Anglia’s most promising young artists, Alec Cumming, immediately offers the viewer a series of surprising productions, of luscious and textured oil on canvas, incorporating both the vitality of youth and yielding the promise of what is still to come.
Cumming’s paintings dally with the beginnings of abstraction. Bold forms produced from layer over layer of gestures and marks, hint at things that have been seen, accumulated by way of a sketch, a photograph and objects, brought back to the studio, to spill out onto the canvases in a free but considered manner. Cummings constantly develops and toys with the spaces he is working on and the tools he uses; pallet knifes, brushes and oils, the artist relishing the surfaces of the canvas that flex with the marks that he makes.
Growing up in the Norfolk countryside it is no wonder that Cumming’s earlier works feature large horizontal formats, open spaces and landscape representations, the images formed from the naturally tentative applications of paint. A number of trips to differing landscapes, to Dartmouth, St Ives and the Lake District appear to have brought into focus Cumming’s visual vocabulary, in particular his understanding of the possibilities offered by the depth of the paint he builds up.
This change in his work also corresponds with his move to the city and daily encounters with the more confined urban spaces which demand a different kind of engagement from the artist in the process of looking. With vigour and inventiveness Cummings hoards images and makes relationships between things seen. From these daily wanderings he covers the canvas with layer upon layer of marks, adjusting, looking, taking off, adding on and looking again until the surface can give no more and the work is, for the time being, finished.
Together with his developed sense of form, Cummings economises his palette, which as his work progresses, becomes sparer in range but with an enhanced clarity in the harmony of colours. But as with all artists, often what is to hand and available becomes necessarily important and the colours that are ‘in stock’ are made to work.
This paring down of colours combines with Cumming’s developed use of over-marks, a device that attracts the gaze and pulls the composition together: a series of black lines scoring the canvas, the drip of paint down the image, or the final trace of a mark that hangs across the top.
Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979)
Delaunay, a Ukrainian-French artist along with her husband Robert Delaunay and others cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design.
During the 1920s, Delaunay focused upon bringing this new artistic lyricism into the world of high fashion, transforming fabrics for fashion into a moveable visual feast. In the 1930s she returned to a renewed focus on painting, joining the Abstraction-Creation group in seeking to create an art based upon non-representational elements which were often geometrical and focused on colour as central to painting. After her husband's death in 1941 she continued to work as a painter and designer and turned to printmaking. In 1963 she donated 58 of her own works and 40 of her husband's to the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris and became the first woman ever to be exhibited at the Louvre during her lifetime. Since her death, her importance in the development of abstract art can be seen in the number of major retrospectives and publications on her work.
Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993)
Dame Elisabeth Frink was born in Thurlow, Suffolk, in 1930. She studied at Guildford School of Art (1947-49) and Chelsea School of Art, London (1949-53) under Bernard Meadows and Willi Soukop. She taught at Chelsea School of Art (1953-61), St Martin's School of Art (1954-62) and was visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art (1965-67).
Men, dogs, horses and birds were constant subject-matter throughout Frink's career. She modelled, cast in plaster and then carved the plaster, much as Henry Moore had done, to achieve a tougher surface when the plaster was cast in bronze. Unlike Moore, however, she rarely worked with the female form: "I have focused on the male because to me he is a subtle combination of sensuality and strength with vulnerability", (Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture, Harpvale, 1984).
Frink's drawing and graphic work followed the same themes as her 3-dimensional work, executed with a similar economy of means and feeling for surface texture.
As one of Britain's leading sculptors, Frink was awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Surrey (1977), Open University (1983), University of Warwick (1983), University of Cambridge (1988), University of Exeter (1988), University of Oxford (1989) and University of Keele (1989).
Frink received official recognition for her work, being awarded the CBE in 1969 and in 1982 she was created Dame of the British Empire
Reginald William Gammon (1894-1997)
Gammon was born the son of a local builder in the village of Petersfield, Hampshire, in January 1894. In 1911 he became apprenticed to a black-and-white illustrator, Frank Patterson. Gammon's talent was spotted by the art establishment and he was offered a place at the Slade but declined, as Art school in central London would have been purgatory for such an outdoors-loving young man. Instead he chose the precarious life of a freelance illustrator and writer, specialising in country topics.
Following the Second World War, Gammon moved to the Black Mountains in South Wales, where he set himself up as a hill farmer in the Llanthony valley. Gammon happily scratched a meagre living from his 40-acre farm for 20 years. This period was of lasting value to him as an artist. Now he got to grips with the harsher realities of the land and its people. He kept up his painting and it was during the final Llanthony years that he made the momentous change to oils. At last he could follow the trail blazed by his heroes Rouault, Bonnard, Chagall and, above all, Gauguin.
He moved to Somerset but his increasingly sure, colour-charged landscapes were not of the Somerset levels which surrounded him. Instead he painted Brittany, remote Scotland, wild Ireland, and the Welsh hills . . . romantic but unsentimental landscapes dominated by peasant figures working the land. He exchanged his illustrative disciplines in perspective and in colour for a wholly Expressionist view. Donkeys were blue. Calves became bright green. Red was ever-present . . . it was his favourite colour.
Gammon's close association with the Royal West of England Academy was formalised by his election as a full member in 1966. He had a healthy distrust of popularity, but his reputation grew and in 1986, the year after an outstanding retrospective at the RWA, came his first London one-man show, at the New Grafton Gallery. The reviews were excellent and four one-man exhibitions at the New Grafton followed, before a 100th birthday retrospective at the RWA.
William Hogarth (1697 - 1764)
Hogarth was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from excellent realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”. Much of his work, though at times vicious, poked fun at contemporary politics and customs. Illustrations in such style are often referred to as Hogarthian.
John Hoyland RA (born 1934)
An English born painter and printmaker, Hoyland trained at Sheffield College of Art from 1950 and the Royal Academy Schools from 1956. Under the influence of Nicholas de Staël he began to paint Sheffield landscapes and abstractions from still-life subjects. His devotion to colour began with experiments at a Scarborough summer school in 1957. At the Situation exhibitions of 1960–61 he showed some of his earliest fully abstract paintings in which he used bands of colour to explore perceptual effects such as the relationship of image to background or to create the illusion of buckling the picture-plane. This geometric character soon gave way to sinuous lines enclosing discs of colour, and eventually to a freer and more fluid application of paint.
Hoyland's paintings were included in the successful exhibition The New Generation in 1964. Travelling to New York, Hoyland met and visited the studios of Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and Rothko. He also met the critic Clement Greenberg and the young painters Greenberg was championing at the time: Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski.
Elements from these American developments, especially post-painterly abstraction, feature prominently in subsequent canvases by Hoyland such as 1.11.68 (1968; London, Tate) in the use of staining techniques and acrylic paint, the interaction of unmixed colours, and an emphasis on the material weight of paint. Despite these influences, however, Hoyland came to reject the American tendency to reductivism, concentrating in later paintings on the approach exemplified by Hofmann and de Staël, with varied and tactile paint surfaces and a disposition of blocks of different colours to create sensations of advancing and receding space. From the late 1960s Hoyland applied these methods to screen prints, lithographs and later to etchings and monotypes.
Lincoln Pugh Jenkins (1906 - 1968)
Lincoln Pugh Jenkins
Lincoln Jenkins was born in Presteigne, North Wales. He studied at Leister College of Art 1918 – 1923 before joining the staff of Birmingham School of Art, where he taught among others subjects life drawing and painting.
In 1939 he was appointed to the staff of Harrogate School of Art, becoming its Principle a year later. He remained there until his retirement in 1961.
Exhibitions: Jenkins was a regular at the Royal Academy, Royal Society of Birmingham Artists, and Royal Cambrian Academy; he also held several solo exhibitions in London and the provinces. His work has also been seen at the City Art Galleries of Leeds, York, Wakefield and Bradford.
Museums: Examples of his work can be found in the permanent collections of many museums and art galleries including the Tate Gallery.
Literature: David Buckham: Artists in Britain since 1945
Provenance: Bonhams. Knightsbridge
Bhagwan Kapoor (born 1935)
Born in 1935 in India, Kapoor was educated at the J.J School of Art and Design in Mumbai. He then moved to Paris where he studied under a French Government Scholarship at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts.
Kapoor’s style combines decorative and folk idioms in a modern style. References are made to modernity during this formative period in the history of the sub-continent. He now lives and works in New York.
Fernand Leger (1881-1955)
Léger became a student at the École des Arts Décortifs, Paris in 1903. His early work was influenced by Impressionism but a new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907. In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met members of the avant-garde; Archipenko, Lipchitz, Chagall, and Robert Delaunay. In his major painting of this period Nudes in the Forest (1909-10), Léger displayed a personal form of Cubism which his critics called "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms unlike the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.
In 1910 he joined with several other artists including Delaunay, Jacques Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, and Marie Laurencin to form an offshoot of the Cubist movement, the Puteaux Group - also known as Section d'Or (The Golden Section). Léger was influenced during this time by Italian Futurism, and until 1914 his paintings became increasingly abstract. The vocabulary of tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colours plus green, black and white.
During the Second World War, Leger lived in the USA where he taught at Yale, returning to Paris in 1945, where he opened an academy. His large paintings celebrating the people (featuring acrobats, cyclists and builders) thickly contoured and painted in clear, flat colours, reflected his political interest in the working class, and his attempt to create accessible art. In 1950 he founded a ceramics studio at Biot, which, in 1957 became the Léger Museum. Léger was one of the giants of 20th c French painting, whose influence has been almost as great as his reputation.
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)
LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1928, and attended Syracuse University. After serving in the Korean War as a graphic artist, he moved, in 1953, to New York, where he worked as a draftsman for the architect I. M. Pei. LeWitt had his first solo exhibition at the Daniels Gallery, New York, in 1965, and the following year Dwan Gallery, New York, mounted the first in a series of solo exhibitions. He participated, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, in several significant group exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art, including "Primary Structures," at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966, and "When Attitude Becomes Form," at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. His renowned text "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" was published in 1967.
Major retrospectives of his works were organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1978, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 2000.
"Drawing Series..." a presentation of LeWitt's early wall drawings was installed at Dia:Beacon in 2006.
Peter Max (born 1937)
Peter Max has been a major force in the American art scene for over four generations. Max is in the collections of world leaders including five American presidents, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. His work is held in major private collections worldwide. Max has had over forty museum shows internationally, and hundreds of gallery shows worldwide. His works appear in the collections of many prominent museums worldwide, including the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Mortimer Menpes (1855-1938)
Australian born artist, Mortimer Menpes, arrived in London in 1875. Together with Walter Sickert, Menpes was tutored and influenced by James McNeill Whistler, the American born artist whose controversial work rocked late-19th-century London sensibilities. Menpes first came into contact with Whistler just after the latter had returned from Venice. During the 1880's Menpes shared a flat with Whistler at Cheyene Walk in London where Whistler taught him the art of etching. At the outbreak of the Boer War in 1900 Menpes was sent as a war artist to South Africa. In 1902 he travelled widely around the East including China, Burma, India and Egypt where the images for these dry-point etchings were made. Consistently of high quality Menpes’ gritty realism and precise view points both separate and draw the viewer to the scenes he depicts.
John Midgley
Raw, heavy and gestural, John Midgley's collage works, at first appear to be in complete contrast with the work made from the 1970's to present, where Midgley produced banners for Trade Unions and other progressive movements. But although different in fabric, all the work bears the presence of an artist whose strong beliefs are carried through into the pieces with honest rigour and passion.
Large, elaborate and traditionally designed, carrying instantly recognisable motifs and images the Banners, made from cloth, were often carried in protest and made reference to specific histories.
Conversely Midgley's collage constructions are heavy and solid in their making. Celebrating the freedom of abstraction, the work nods towards lurking traces of images and objects found, brought back and re-made. Through the processes of making,the collages express Midgley's urge to produce work freely and without the constriction of the earlier commissions.
Henry Moore
Henry Moore was the most celebrated sculptor of his time, and the second part of his career, in particular, demonstrated that Modernist sculpture was, after all, surprisingly adaptable to official needs. In this sense, Moore was the contemporary equivalent of the great Neo Classical sculptors such as Canova and Thorwaldsen.
Tathagata Mukherjee
Mukherjee’s bold and demanding canvases delve into and question human nature. His series ‘Lifestyles’ is a social commentary, a sequence of works that probe into games people play out particularly thorough social class structures.
Popular comic book imagery portray people with demonic, mischievous mask-like faces. The bold and powerful colours informing the artist’s brush-work.
According to Mukherjee, “ The figures I draw or paint are often comical, marked by an outburst of laughter; but the spirit underneath is sorrow, a sort of mute anguish. The world is perceived as a stage and the figures in my work are the villains in the drama, who exhibit the show of hypocrisy by wielding their daggers, with ‘innocent’ smiles on their faces. I seek to hit the practitioners of affectation. In this play my work takes on an apparent comedy with a hidden tone of tragedy”.
Mukherjee’s latest works from his Lifestyle series can be viewed at the Art 18/21 stand A03, Hall A at the India Art Summit, 2009 – see news page for details
Mary Newcomb (1922- 2008)
Mary Newcomb, displayed an affinity with English folk art and a grasp of natural science that was anything but naive. Newcomb’s work came to be collected by the stars of a cosmopolitan world, including film directors, television personalities, business magnates. She was born Mary Slatford at Harrow-on-the-Hill, but she developed a passion for the English countryside while growing up in Wiltshire. Next to nature, art really was her mainspring and, in 1945, she volunteered as a student helper in the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre being set up by bird painter Eric Ennion on the Suffolk-Essex border. Lodging in Willy Lott's Cottage, overlooking a favourite scene of Constable, she learned the art of observation and of taking copious notes and sketches to keep an image fresh in the mind's eye. On marrying trainee farmer Godfrey Newcomb, they lived on small farms in the Waveney valley where a fledgling painter would find everything she needed for her art. With a dozen solo exhibitions at Crane Kalman from 1970, and further shows across Europe and in America, the Newcomb name was firmly on the map. There were purchases by numerous public galleries including the Tate and in 1996, a splendid monograph by Christopher Andreae, recently republished. Her art lay in the rhythms of nature and the rituals of rural life - in her chickens, guinea fowl and, best of all, sheep, in village fetes and country shows, or in incidents glimpsed as she travelled on the bus, or walked or bicycled. Her canvas ranged from the tiniest insects to the night sky. Lyrical titles could underline the poetry of the pictures. She made a key point about the ways in which everything can connect within the harmony of the universe. Acclaimed by fellow artists from Ben Nicholson to Mary Fedden, she was also admired by numerous writers. JG Farrell ended his novel The Singapore Grip by detailing her paintings on the wall above him as he wrote.
Roderick Newlands
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Roderick Newlands graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1978, Roderick was tutored by John Barnicoat, John Bellany, Peter Blake, Sandra Blow, Alan Davie, Peter De Francia, Anthony Green, Roberto Matta and Robert Motherwell to name just a few. In 1979 Roderick was awarded a Fellowship to Cheltenham college of Art. Roderick has exhibited both nationally and internationally and has exhibited at the Royal Academy and Royal Scottish Academy summer exhibitions on a number of occasions. Roderick has won two major awards from the Royal Scottish Academy,an Imperial College purchase prize and a major Eastern Arts Award. He has been based in Norfolk since 1980 lecturing at both Yarmouth and Norwich Schools of Art. He was course leader of the Foundation Studies Department at Norwich School of Art and Design between 1993 and 2006.
Roderick’s painting concerns have evolved from a long term interest in ‘Abstract Surrealism.’ The ambiguous nature of the imagery is evocative of organic, mechanical and architectural forms existing in “an other” space. Roderick believes that there are pivotal life experiences which root themselves in our psyche and play a major role (on a subliminal/ subconscious level) in our image making processes and choice of visual vehicle. Roderick sites memories and experiences of his childhood, assisting his father (agricultural engineer) mending “monstrous mechanical contraptions” situated in a dark barn with only a hand held lamp for source of light. Later experiences of the oil industries intrusion upon the Scottish landscape and culture had a great psychological influence in the development of his work.
Ernst Nicol b.1953
Art 18/21 were proud to present ‘Conundrum’, a solo show of recent works by Norwich based Printmaker Ernst Nicol, long time exhibiter of the Norwich Print Fair and much respected and admired Print technician at NUCA
Conundrum: (September- October 09) The show presented a wide selection of Nicol’s intensely atmospheric Etchings and Engravings, meticulously etched and printed by Nicol himself. Nicol’s background in etching and engraving goes back 30 years, tutored by the likes of Norman Ackroyd, Leonard Marchant and Keith Howard. As a result Nicol’s current work is undoubtedly executed with masterful skill, knowledge and expertise in the mediums of intaglio printmaking.
Nicol’s imagery attempts to ‘freeze’ a fraction of time in which light reveals a detailed glimpse of the whole, which offers the audience an entrance to fantastical portals of uninhabited environments. We are confronted with mind warping labyrinths riddled in timeless decay, sublime, isolated architectural spaces caught by transient shafts of light, and a glimpse of the solitary creatures that dwell in these long forgotten environments.
Conundrum promises to be a mesmeric exhibition, filled with mysterious worlds, pictorial puzzles and an insight into the alchemical processes and results of traditional and modern intaglio printmaking.
Grace Pailthorpe (1883 - 1971)
Pailthorpe was the prominent female painter of the British surrealists.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Italian etcher, archaeologist and architect. He was born in Venice and was active in Rome from 1740. He was famous for his poetic views of Rome and also his fantastic imaginary interiors.
Frank Pond
Frank Pond creates. Whether it is music or an artwork, his fingers and hands, his arms and body move and make. Born to two professional musicians in Norwich in the 1920's, Pond has always felt different, influenced by and free to explore creative space "Frank Pond is one of those still waters that run deep. Quiet and softly spoken, he is nobody's idea of a revolutionary. His painting on the other hand, is as rough and aggressive as one gets. His preference is for two approaches of the late Fifties. The first is the 'drip and splatter' technique, where surfaces are built up almost by accident. The idea is to free the creative process from irrelevant controls. The second approach is what used to be called 'art brut.' Derived from the drawing of children, the insane and rough graffiti, it keeps some sort of reference to the figure and objects while concentrating on the paintwork. Pond plays with it mercilessly."
David Roberts RA (1776-1864)
In the late 18th century romantic notions of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and Lord Byron’s travels, memorialized in his poetry, produced a fascination for the Near East. It was the appetite of the Victorian book-buying public for views of the mysterious east, still relatively unseen by western eyes, that was to set Scottish artist David Roberts on the course that would determine his longevity.
Louis Hague, promoter of the new illustration technique of lithography, oversaw the publication in six extraordinary books in which all 248 lithographs were hand-finished. The first three volumes depicted Egypt and Nubia and the second three, the Holy Land. The set which was sold by subscription was an immediate success. Roberts was admitted to the Royal Academy and he continued to travel and paint until his death in 1864.
After more than 150 years his paintings are still the most sought after illustrations of Egypt and the Holy Land.
Luigi Rossini (1790-1857)
Luigi Rossini was a great Italian artist of the 19th century. Born in Ravenna in 1790, Rossini graduated as an artist from the Academy of Bologna. He began working in Bologna, where he studied with Antonio Giuseppe Basoli (1744-1843), and at the same time he took an interest in attending architectural lectures, thanks to which he won a prize in 1813 which led him to Rome. Rossini studied in Rome between 1817 - 1824, where he engraved many large plates of ancient architecture of that city. The richly stimulating artistic ambience of Rome enabled him to compose his main work in etchings, revising Piranesi's tradition of the depiction of views into his own eighteenth century manner, and his first Vedute was published in 1814.
His record of temples, public baths, basilicas and other monuments commemorate the strength and beauty of Roman masonry, and were accurate enough to be used by practising architects, as well as other serious students of classical antiquity. Indeed, several views recorded ancient monuments which would disappear within a short period, leaving only Rossini's records of the 19th century excavations
Safavid style
The Safavid School of miniature style painting originated in the Persian capital of Esfahan. The painters during this period were inclined towards naturalism and miniatures created under the Safavi School were not exclusively made for adorning and illustrating books. The Safavi style is softer in form than other contemporary styles. Themes depicted included life in the royal court and the associated landscapes.
William Scott (1913-1989)
Painter of Irish and Scottish descent. He completed his studies at Belfast College of Art and from 1931 to 1935 at the Royal Academy Schools in London. While serving in the army from 1942 to 1946 he made only a few watercolours of soldiers and the local landscape.
He returned to painting in earnest in 1946, concentrating on still-lifes of pots and saucepans, eggs, fishes and bottles on a bare kitchen table. He chose these objects simply because they provided contrasting shapes that he could arrange against simple backgrounds, often to elegant effect. By 1951 the forms had begun to take on a life of their own, sometimes as metaphors of erotic encounters between male and female. Some of his works of 1952–4 became completely abstract.This phase of Scott's work came to an end partly as a result of a visit in 1953 to the USA, where he met Pollock, Rothko and Kline. He felt that he belonged to the European tradition of Chardin, Cézanne and Bonnard, and this led to a gradual return to a more representational style. Gradually, however, he moved again towards abstraction.I
n the late 1960s he reintroduced objects such as frying pans and saucepans juxtaposed with purely abstract forms; the picture space was kept deliberately flat and the forms carefully spaced in floating rows. In both paintings and prints he sometimes produced variations of almost identical arrangements of forms in completely different colours, continuing to use still-life subjects as the starting-point for otherwise self-sufficient formal relationships
Peter Sek (born 1978)
A Ugandan born artist, Peter Sek now lives and works in the UK. He graduated from Machabeng Art College in 2001 and went on to have many successful exhibitions in Southern Africa before moving to the UK in 2003.
In 2006 he was artist-in-residence at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts throughout Black History Month. Whilst there, a series of paintings were commissioned including The Exhibition, portraying the Francis Bacon exhibition.
He works in various media on both large and small scale paintings, drawings and prints. In addition to these pieces he uses reclaimed materials to produce 3D work which include the musical masks displayed in the gallery.
Colin Self
b.1941
English draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor and painter. He studied first at Norwich Art School. In 1961 he entered the Slade School of Fine Arts in London.
In his time at the Slade School, he met fellow artists David Hockney, and Peter Blake, who greatly admired Self's paintings.
His style was extremely influential when he and others such as Warhol, Lichtenstein and Segal, were at the forefront of the ‘Pop Art’ movement.
Colin visited the United States and Canada with David Hockney in 1962 and 1965, and was soon exhibiting widely on the international arts circuit.
By 1964 he was showing at the cutting edge Robert Fraser Gallery, and by 1968 Colin Self was producing technically groundbreaking prints with Editions Alecto.
Today he remains one of Britain's leading painters, with a distinctive style and strong opinions about the Norfolk environment he lives in.
Andrew Shunney (born 1921)
Born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, Shunney studied at the Rhode Island School of Design until moving to New York where he worked with Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League. He first formulated his own style during summers visiting Cape Cod and Nantucket.
In 1946 Shunney travelled to Mexico where he worked with Diego Rivera who gave him “master criticism” because Rivera disliked the term pupil and wanted no disciples. After four years in Mexico Shunney went to Paris where he hoped to find a new, richer inspiration in the content of French Impressionism. During his time here he painted landscapes of Honfleur and Cannes and the streets of Paris. He progressed to painting seascapes, still lives of flowers, birds and gardens - subjects which still dominate his work. Before leaving France in 1950 he received an invitation to exhibit in the infamous Salon d’Automne.
François Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824)
Born in Belgium, Solvyns studied under A.B. Quartenmont at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp before leaving for Paris in 1778 where he was trained by the French Neo-classical painter, François-André Vincent. He worked as a marine painter until political unrest in Europe forced him to seek his fortune in India, arriving in Calcutta in 1791.
He began work in 1794 on 'A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos', which was published in Calcutta in 1796, and reprinted in 1799. He approached his task as an ethnographer, drawing his subjects from life and with more concern for accuracy than aesthetics. He portrayed servants, costumes, means of transportation (carts, palanquins and boats), modes of smoking, musical instruments and festivals.
The prints in themselves are of importance in a tradition reaching back to the early 17th century, and even earlier. As an artist, Solvyns provides a prototype for the genre of 'Company School' paintings of occupations, done by Indian artists for the British in the early 19th century.
Simeon Stafford
Stafford was born in Dukinfield (a small northern town bordering the Pennines). Stafford relocated to Cornwall in 1996. At the age of 14 Stafford met L.S Lowry who encouraged him to paint. Lowry became a family friend and remains a constant source of inspiration to Stafford. Simeon’s work is not ‘heavy,’ we see no dark overcast days, political content or deep soul searching angst. He says ‘we have enough that in the world of news today.’ No, Stafford’s world of pictorial imagery is a world of humour and fun, an essence of spontaneity that is joyfully translated to the viewer. Simeon Stafford is an observer of life, his paintings are crammed full of incidents and accidents, bustling scenes of human interaction, a happy dialogue of work and play. If his paintings are studied you will discover figures re-occurring, skipping Ruby with pig-tails, Eric and his tractor, Dot, the little girl cart-wheeling across the canvas (his aunt as a child) sometimes a man with red stripy trousers marching through a crowd, leading a small boy by the hand, (the artist with his son). These figures are bought to life and become characters’ to look out for. Locations become a fusion of the artist’s actual environment, subtly mixed with snippets of landmarks from his past, creating his distinctive style. Stafford’s subjects include docks and their workers, holiday seaside scenes and streets crammed with children playing. There is a nostalgic echo to these paintings that each and every one of us can identify with, an essence that captures the excitement and expectation, of any old day seen through a child’s eyes. These paintings nourish the child within us all. Simeon has had exhibitions throughout the country as well as Cornwall, in London he is represented by Oliver Contemporary. He has had paintings in the Royal Academy Summer Show and his work is in numerous private collections including Her Majesty The Queen and Tony Blair.
Ian Starsmore
Ian Starsmore describes his work:
The collection of prints, poems and constructions which became this installation grew from thinking about processes of transformation in narrative and art, and is loosely based on Scandinavian folk stories. I had become deeply affected by the tradition of a cappella from Scandinavia, particularly the work of the choir Vocal Group Ars Nova and the composer Per Norgaard. I loved the clarity and directness of the singing, the power of the stories, the mixing of tradition and modernity. All this somehow drove me to the heart of expression and my own personal language, which began to emerge in writing and making. The word poet means maker I believe and I am happy with this, the way that images are embedded in word, to become theatre or art, finding their own way to form. So this assemblage tells of journeys, adventures in art and affinities for certain places and encounters, particularly at the edges of things and events, the edges of the sea and of the natural world. I like the changes of scale and of material, from precious metal to abandoned wood, from printed image, the escalating or descending lines of a poem, to the three dimensions of our worldly space. I think of scaffolding, ladders ending in the sky, and of Wittgenstein and of Yeats. Where will they take us?
About the artist
Ian Starsmore studied art at Reading and Sussex Universities; has taught at several art schools in England, most significantly for him, at Leeds, and then at Norwich, where he was a Head of Department. He has work in private collections in the UK and abroad; has exhibited at the New York and London Print Fairs, and at the Oxford Book Fair. He has an interest in popular art and has organised a number of significant exhibitions, including a show of Fairground Art at the Whitechapel Gallery, and a touring Spitting Image exhibition, which had the honour, apparently, of being banned from the National Portrait Gallery after acceptance. He has worked with Walter Kershaw on murals in Norwich, one of which can be seen at Wensum Lodge, and has written about the work of many artists including Ana Maria Pacheco. He practises and sometimes plays jazz trumpet.
Jeremy Taylor
Jeremy Taylor is a Norwich based artist. He trained as an architect at the University of Cambridge and then studied the architecture of the USA. He worked in architectural practices in both Cambridge and London, later moving to undertake research at York. He has written and illustrated books and articles on architecture and architectural history; these have included studies on the design and visual qualities of modern spaces. In his paintings Jeremy Taylor uses contemporary architecture as a primary theme, exampling the design of recent Norwich buildings. From such material he sets out to explore and develop aspects of colour together with the structural form of buildings and spaces portrayed.
Feliks Topolski (1907-1989)
Feliks Topolski, was born in Warsaw in 1907. He studied art at the Warsaw Academy. Arriving in London, via Paris in 1935 to record George V's Silver Jubilee. He became a London figure and friend of George Bernard Shaw whom he painted often. As an official war artist, 1940-45, he produced a prolific record both on the home front and across three continents. After the war, he was invited to India by Nehru to record the end of British rule in India. His work then took him to China and Malaysia. Whilst in India he completed The East which is held in the National Collection of India in New Delhi.
On returning to Britain Topolski became a British subject in 1947 and shortly afterwards produced one of his major works for the Coronation of Elizabeth II, which now hangs in Buckingham Palace in a corridor leading to the State Rooms. He later spent time in America where amongst other commissions he produced images showing the U.S.A Presidential elections in Chicago and San Francisco, 1956. He returned to Britain, completing the Memoir of the Century, a 600 feet long mural on London’s South Bank.
Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988)
Julian Trevelyan was born in Surrey in 1910. A renowned artist and printmaker, he initially gained recognition for his 1930s Surrealist prints and later his rural and industrial landscapes.
It wasn’t until 1931 when he joined S.W.Hayter’s famous print workshop in Montparnasse, Paris, that Trevelyan had any formal training. Whilst under the guidance of Hayter, Trevelyan developed a keen understanding for printmaking and etching. During the early 1930s the artist worked alongside Ernst, Kokoschka, Miró, Masson and Picasso. In this period his work was experimental and he began to develop his own unique style, incorporating everyday objects and portraying them with dreamlike qualities.
In early 1934 Trevelyan returned to England but continued to rely on technical advice from Hayter. In 1935 he set up his etching studio at Durham Wharf in Hammersmith, where he remained until his death in 1988. It was here that he continued with the methods of etching learnt from Hayter, and developed a certain intimacy with the medium, constantly pushing it in new directions.
From 1955-63, Trevelyan worked at the Royal College of Art and became Head of the Etching Department. Because of his enthusiasm in his work and the desire to share it with others, Trevelyan was an influential teacher, his students include David Hockney, Ron Kitaj and Norman Ackroyd. He was an important leader of modern print techniques and is regarded as a silent driving force behind the etching revolution of the 1960s.
Mary Webb b. 1939
Mary Webb studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle in 1963, following with a Postgraduate course at Chelsea School of Art, London.Her concern is with colour and the emotional and spatial sensations it evokes, frequently linked to the memory of place.
Webb tends to work in series, using flat colour within a geometric, minimalist, square format. The paintings are oil on canvas, preliminary studies being in watercolour or collage, but she also makes screen prints.
Artist Statement: "A strong influence at the time of these first screen prints was Sofia Delaunay I had first met her in the early sixties when researching my thesis on her husband Robert. In the late sixties visited her regularly in her beautiful studio in the Rue St Simon in Paris, found the contact very inspirational, and it gave me the impetus and courage to start using colour in a very direct and simple way It was about making three or four colours work very hard together within an ordered format. By happy chance Mel Clark, a printer started teaching at Norwich School of Art, at this time and he suggested make these images into screen prints. The collaboration with Mel has gone on ever since, His affinity with the medium and insight into the needs of my work has been remarkable. At the time of these prints the equipment was less sophisticated, and the ink lies on the paper rather than in it, and the registration is not as it is today but the colour is spot on I have always mixed the colours for the prints myself."
Works in the collections of: Arts Council of England, Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Newcastle, Eastern, Lincolnshire & Northern Arts Associations, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Leicestershire &Suffolk Education Authorities, Eastern Counties Newspapers, Lucy &Henry Cohen Charitable Foundation, Credit Suisse First Boston Bank, Deutsche Bank, Sonia Delaunay Collection, Ernst & Young, Smith &Nephew PLC, Apax Partners, St Marys Hospital.
Larry Zox (1937-2006)
An American abstract painter, Zox was born in Iowa. Following his time at university he went on to study at the Des Moines Art Centre under the mentorship of George Grosz, a figurative artist who nevertheless encouraged the young abstract painter.
Zox moved to New York in 1958 and became part of the downtown art scene. He is one of the principal representatives of the generation of young painters following the era of the Abstract Expressionists. His earliest works, completed in 1959-62, were painted collages consisting of painted pieces of paper stapled onto joined sheets of plywood. Afterwards, he made pictures similar in appearance to the collages, but entirely painted and with straight as well as ragged edges. In the mid-60s, his large geometric paintings were appearing at prestigious galleries.
By 2005, (after his first New York solo show in more than two decades) his style had mellowed from the hard-edged geometry of the 1960s and 70s. His lines had become more fluid and his surfaces more painterly, but his concern with colour and shape remained unabated. His works conform to the modern idea that art must be done with fluidity, acceleration, and rapidity of execution.