Brüer Tidman and Charlotte Wych: The kitchen table, tea and old sugar

Great Yarmouth Library Gallery, Tolhouse St NR30 2SH29 November to 10 December

Brüer Tidman (above) watches friend Colin Self (right) open the Private View

We are blessed in Norfolk with an ever-increasing inventory of spaces in which to encounter artwork. Unlike large museums, however, many of these other smaller galleries and related spaces have such a rapid turn-around of exhibitions, with ever more artists clamoring for wall space and attention, that they are only around for a couple of weeks or so. A consequence is that there are some exhibitions that have sadly come and gone almost before they can be registered, visited, reflected on and absorbed, but this spectacular exhibition is still on until 10th December, so please do try and catch it before it vanishes for ever!

Brüer beside his painting, Mother and Son Debating Religion and Art, Just as the Carer Arrives with the Answers: Tea and Biscuits.

The painter Brüer Tidman had an unusually close and loving relationship with his mother, Charlotte, constructed around a bond of complicity forged when they fled together, and forever, when he was about nine or ten, from his father. This bond continued to tighten throughout their subsequent lives, ending finally with her death two years ago at the age of 98 (on the same day as the show ends), a death the exact moment of which Brüer inadvertently missed, to his frustration and sorrow. The mother as artist’s muse is not a common one in Western art, which makes this emotional, loving and cathartic exhibition all the more important. From his early exquisite pencil drawings of her, usually around the kitchen table, the artist has documented and explored their relationship in a way that has few precedents.

After her death, working out aspects of his emotional and loving attachment and loss has produced a completely different set of large-scale images that together form a powerful and resonant circle around the enclosed room in the Library where they have been beautifully hung. These are no longer direct, observational and figurative works, but heart-wrenching screams of paint that at the same time have a calm and reflective beauty that begins to make some sense of an order after death, a resolution of pain and loss, with their warm tones and repeated abstracted shapes, of open mouths, cold white feet, clasped hands, attendants and the shadow of the artist. This room gave me the same sense of seriousness and depth as the hang of Poussin’s Seven Sacraments in their special room in the Scottish National Gallery. One is appropriately of Extreme Unction.

When she was already in her 80s, Brüer gave his mother the materials to try her hand at painting (do we believe in a genetic component of artistic talent?) and some of the resultant dazzling flower paintings, on their matt-black ground, and all done at the same old kitchen table, are also on show in a long, glittering line. The two of them exhibited together once before, four years before Charlotte died, but this is a very different show. This deftly-hung show is really Brüer’s and there will not be many exhibitions you will ever go to that will move you in such a powerful way, or allow you to ponder, witness and engage with so closely such an unusual and powerful bond between a mother and her son.

My only sadness was that the catalogue is rather woeful, with image scale and placement issues, eccentric typography and, most irritatingly of all, no titles, sizes or artist credits for any of the images reproduced. This outstanding show deserved a real document of record.

Exhibition of Norwich School Painters for Mandell's 50th anniversary

Rare chance to view private Norwich School Paintings as Mandell’s marks 50 years

An important collection of Norwich School of Painters is going on public display for the first time ever in November, as Mandell’s Gallery celebrates its Golden anniversary. The paintings, more than 50, are from the private collection of Norwich Art devotee Geoffrey Allen, founder of the Elm Hill, Norwich, gallery. It’s been run by his son John and now grand-daughter Rachel (28) is taking over.

“Father had a fascination for Norwich School landscapes that just ran away with him. He was such an avid collector it became a passion,” recalled John. “He probably had 200 paintings hung in the family home, three deep with frames touching each other. There were still more stored in the loft.”

John Allen and Rachel Allen of Mandell’s Galley, Norwich

Today, Mandell’s is known for being much more eclectic, reflecting the taste and style of the following generations of art enthusiasts – John with his preference for contemporary art and Rachel whose eye is drawn to shapes and colours and abstract works.

“My grandfather very much admired traditional art though he would have been very pleased to see the gallery grow and develop,” added Rachel.

John commented: “Yes, he would be pleased if somewhat puzzled – and, at the same time, I suspect, quietly humbled. The range of artists and styles of work at Mandell’s has broadened and is more diverse.”

Now John and Rachel are delighted to have the opportunity to pay tribute to Geoffrey’s pursuit of the Norwich School. Geoffrey died in 2005.

“From November 5 to 26 we are devoting our Contemporary Gallery at Mandell’s to the Geoffrey Allen Collection. These are the family’s personal Norwich School paintings so they aren’t for sale,” said Rachel. “Though for enthusiasts, our Window Gallery will have some Norwich School work for sale.”

The Norwich School Paintings on display include works by such artists as Thomas Lound, Henry Bright, Miles Edmund Cotman, John Joseph Cotman, John Thirtle, Eloise Harriet Stannard, Alfred Stannard and James Stark.

Mandell’s 50 Anniversary Celebration: The Geoffrey Allen Collection
Norwich School of Painters
Private View Saturday 05 November 2016 12 noon-4 pm
Exhibition Monday 7 November to Saturday 26 November Mon-Sat 10 am-4 pm

Barbara Hepworth sculpture gets its plaque

It is some time now since NCAS trustee and sculptor, Derek Morris, designed and made this proper bronze plaque to go with Norwich City's wonderful Barbara Hepworth sculpture, Sea Form (Atlantic), 1964, that sits opposite the Playhouse on St George's Street, Norwich. The unlabelled work was neither well understood nor appreciated and its complex patina was getting eroded by boisterous children. The new plaque (below), paid for by NCAS, has finally been installed by the Council to our great delight! Definitely worth a detour!

Publication of new book, ncas Sixty Years On

To coincide with the launch of the exhibition NCAS Sixty Years On: Treasures from the Castle's Collection in the Timothy Gurney Gallery, NCAS has published an updated and fully illustrated book covering the history and activity of the society. Building on the original book written by Robert Short for our 50th anniversary, it has been brought up to date by Keith Roberts and is now fully illustrated in colour. It is given free to all new joining NCAS members and can also be bought from the Castle bookshop, priced at £4.

The book can also be downloaded here

Julia Cameron wins the NCAS prize

The NCAS prizewinner at our biennial open exhibition at the Forum, nca16, is Julia Cameron. Her prize, a years supply of wine, was presented at the private view by Adam Edwards representing our sponsor, Naked Wines (below). The selectors were impressed with her collection of quiet, elegiac landscape photographs of the Edge in Great Yarmouth.

Trophies: James Webster at Fairhurst Gallery, Norwich

24th June – 3rd September 2016

This review is really about Trophies, a stunning new exhibition in the city, but it is also partly about the gallery that hosts it, so let me start there first. Tucked down a tiny passage off Bedford Street, called Websdales Court, the gallery has in fact been there for many years, when it was run, as many will remember, by the legendary Timothy ‘Tizzie’ Fairhurst. The gallery was started in 1949 by his father, Joseph Fairhurst, a painter and member of the Norwich Twenty Group. It was his Flint House Gallery, back then in Elm Hill, that hosted the very first meeting of the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society just over 60 years ago. More recently, in Bedford Street, the Fiarhurst Gallery has passed to a wonderful and dynamic young couple Dulcie and Tom Humphrey, who together with their outstandingly capable framer, Sophie Barrett, now run a specialist framing and restoration service upstairs, in a vast heaven of glorious and seductive ‘stuff’ that one would yearn to work in, as well as a dynamic and adventurous contemporary gallery downstairs, overseen by Dulcie. This is just the sort of initiative that Norwich, already edging towards city of art status, deserves. Recent exhibitions have been intelligently curated and brilliantly hung and promoted, and have included a sensible blend of local artists (Brüer Tidman, Joceline Wickham and Polly Cruse, Malca Schotten, Greg Barnes) as well as some from outside the County, a very healthy sign.

Upstairs at Fairhurst

Which brings me to James Webster. I may be getting long in the tooth, but I have just looked carefully at all the work in the British Art Show 8 that is all over Norwich at the moment, and I have to say that I find Webster’s work more interesting and more engaging than that of any of the 40+ young artists chosen to represent the best in Britain. How odd is that? Well, not very, actually, as even a brief visit to this current exhibition will confirm. Webster grew up in Norfolk, went to school in Norwich, and now works in Suffolk. But he trained in Florence and this has given him a breadth of experience in history, ceramics and anatomy that permeates his work here. Trophies has deep roots in childhood obsessions with bones and slaughter houses. Working from real skulls, this has emerged as a series of eight animal skulls and their vertebrae first made in terracotta 20% larger than life-size. Horse, tiger, stork and rhino. Dissected into parts, moulds are made and then casts produced in porcelain, which are assembled and fired. Now back to life-size, parts like teeth are glazed and colour is supplied with iron oxides before the final firing. Gold leaf is then applied to the areas that would be lit by a strong overhead light. Finally these remarkable structures are intuitively balanced or mounted just so on their gorgeously-patinated, custom-made concrete plinths, each in turn standing on a perfectly-proportioned, dark mild-steel base. The skull ensemble is arranged dramatically spotlit as an avenue, four on each side, in the black curtained gallery, now entered by a black arch.

This powerful juxtaposition of what look like at first like real bones, or indeed ancient fossils, with gold leaf, and their formal presentation in a dark chapel or tomb-like setting, conjure up many thoughts and resonances. Guardians or Icons or Memorials? The sun-like gold on ancient Egyptian tomb figures, hints at rituals of the dead, funerary rites and our veneration for lost beings. So are these skulls of animals or of gods, clearly revered here on their spotlit plinths? The delicate bone-like porcelain, that is also so strong as a material, hints at the strength of our commonality with the animal kingdom, from which we evolved so relatively recently. This complex, unified display of work gives us pause for thought; about who we are, how we came to be, what we value in life and in death, and that is what art should do. So, congratulations to James Webster, his agent Jonathan Kugel and to Fairhurst for so brilliantly housing it all!

Annual Art Prize at NUA

Saskia Jonquil with her work after the prize giving

Each year ncas awards a £500 prize to the best work by a fine art student in the degree show at Norwich University of the Arts . This year it was another tough decision for the ncas trustees on the judging panel. Having fairly unanimously chosen a shortlist of six, it was harder for the full group then to reach a final decision on the winner. But in the end we have chosen Saskia Jonquil and her set of four sculptures entitled Dirt Candy I – IV. Her cast bronze works of bio-organic forms, metamorphosed into sexually-resonant, imaginary constructions particularly attracted us, as did the immaculate, welded steels mountings. The runner-up was Ellie Davison-Archer, whose delicious and meticulous graphite studies of the minutiae of natural-history objects also charmed us. Brenda Ferris, the chair of ncas, awarded Saskia her prize in an informal ceremony at NUA just before the degree show opened on the 31st May, and she thanked Joseph Wang who had organized this year's prize process but who could not be at the ceremony.

Audrey Pilkington exhibition at Skippings Gallery in Great Yarmouth

Skippings Gallery has been enjoying immense success with two highly-attended exhibitions since its re-launch in January 2016. The third exhibition of the year, running from Saturday April 9th to Saturday May 7th, will showcase the joyful, imaginative art of Audrey Pilkington who passed away in 2015.

Audrey was born in 1922 and attended the Lancaster School of Art, Storey Institute, aged 17 years old, where she was strongly influenced by the teacher, artist and poet, Ronald Grimshaw. She continued her studies at the Slade during the War years, meeting an interesting range of artists including the Vorticist, William Roberts.

Audrey’s early career evolved to include teaching, drawing for Vogue as well as illustration. It was later, whilst working at the King Alfred School in Germany that her painting career flourished with lively paintings in gouache and oils inspired by the enchanting Schleswig-Holstein lake country. She also began experimenting with collage, a technique she continued to explore throughout her career and which can be discerned in many aspects of her painting method. During this period, her work was exhibited in Hamburg to critical acclaim.

Audrey later exhibited widely in East Anglia, with solo shows in London, Italy and Switzerland, and most recently at the Cut in Halesworth in 2007.

The exhibition at Skippings Gallery will offer visitors an insight into the multifaceted nature of Audrey’s highly original and expressive work.

John Kiki at the Merchant House Gallery

In the intervening three years since I first wrote about it in 2013, the ambitious white walls of The Merchant House Gallery, in Lowestoft, have supported a host of local talent. So far, the gallery’s interest has been focused on the Yarmouth Five, whose real talent in depth is hauling the art scene on the East Anglian Coast firmly into the limelight. The current show of John Kiki’s recent paintings is no exception. Kiki, I am told, is perhaps more of an acquired taste than his other Yarmouth colleagues, but I for one have the flavour inextricably now on the end of my tongue.

Kiki has patiently described several times in the past his antipathy to the significance of ‘subject matter’ in his work, saying it is not of ‘primary concern for me’. Instead he places his own emphasis on experimentation, process and freshness in the creation of his work, all of which is both apparent and true. But most artists are unreliable narrators, and I want to describe what I see in his recent work in addition to all this activity. Kiki comes from a large Mediterranean family, but for a long time now has been embedded, along with his studio, in the seedy, energetic and glittery cradle of Great Yarmouth. It seems clear to me that these two visual and mythic places account, at least in part, for much of the imagery that emerges through his spontaneous working methods. The twin poles of Greek Mythology and Seaside Mythology infect and inflect his imagination in a way that cannot be erased. Repeating motifs of horses, riders, centaurs, goddesses, dances, graces, performers and dance macabre all belong just as much in the bustle of the fairground and the seafront as in the ancient myths. And added to this rich source material in his subconscious are the core figurative concerns of western art, the nude, the artist and model and the portrait. His are contemporary interpretations, yes, but they also plunder work from the giants of the past, from Picasso, with his lovers, dancers and guitarists, and particualrly Velasquez, whose infantas, the children of Iberian monarchs, occur repeatedly as motifs.

How do these varied references appear on his canvases? Very rapidly is the first thing to say, and he is indeed a remarkably prolific artist. Acrylic, squeezed directly from a bottle, is used to draw freely and fast, directly onto the surface, creating a determinedly two-dimensional image that then mysteriously morphs over time, losing bits there, acquiring bits here, often physically cut and pasted from one image to another. Streaks, splashes, areas and edges of colour are included and layers and texture emerge from the process, as pattern, balance, composition and look are reworked towards a satisfactory synthesis. It then receives a title! The final work, despite its figurative basis, has a flat abstract quality and a colour balance that powerfully underpin the joyous and fun figures cavorting on top. ‘Painter’s paintings’ they certainly are, but they are also accessible and gorgeous for the rest of us too.

John Kiki trained at Camberwell in the early 60s, under Auerbach and other well-known colleagues, before moving to the Royal Academy School, where he began to develop the distinctive style that is still evolving. He has exhibited widely, including in New York, Barbican, Haywood Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Germany, Zagreb and Zurich, but has exhibited locally too at many venues. One of his best works, the large Nessus and the Ladies, riffing on the myth of the Centaur, Heracles and his wife Deianeira, was purchased in 2007 for the Castle Museum Collection from the major show he had there that year. Now is a good time to catch up with what he is up to now; make a trip to Lowestoft this week!

At the Merchant House Gallery, 102 High Street, Lowestoft, NR32 1XW

12 March - 2 April and from 9 - 30 April 2016. Open: Tue and Thur-Sat 11am - 4pm.

Derek Morris at The Cut

Derek Morris: Drawing, Light and Colour: A Miscellany Exhibition at The Cut, Halesworth
Tuesday 16 February – Saturday 19 March

Selwyn Taylor reports:

As you ascend the stairs and enter the upper gallery of The Cut in Halesworth, you are immediately confronted by the massive Victorian wrought-iron roof-trusses. Being in such close proximity to the architectural fabric of the building, it takes a few seconds to refocus your view through the large geometric shapes towards the equally, but smaller scale, geometric wall sculptures of Derek Morris.

As you walk down the long gallery you could, if you’re lucky as I was, be greeted by wonderful low, winter sunshine flooding through the tiny grain store window; echoes of the building's past, and grain being left to dry naturally.

The structure of the 19th-century maltings requires the visitor to peer through one space to view another. This process has a natural empathy with the viewing of Derek’s work; both require the viewer to focus on a more distant point. The negative spaces created by the strongly drawn forms rely on light and reflection and are often influenced by the simplicity of Romanesque and Modernist architecture.

The whole back wall of the gallery is dedicated to the intricate 3-D abstract constructions, some containing vibrant colours, others using sheets of light to render the different surfaces. Derek’s consummate craftmanship is very evident, whether he is using metal, wood, plastic, ceramic or handmade paper and board. Industrial laser cutting is often used to provide the precision demanded within his work.

Once the immediate impact of each work has had time to be absorbed, these beautifully crafted pieces deserve closer examination. Take time to observe the subtlety of one plane being rotated against another by just a few degrees, the nuanced shifts in perspective, the tensions created between the different materials, colours and layering of his work.

There is a wonderful diverse range of work on show, both 2D and 3D, all representative of the European Modernist tradition of Constructed Art.

There is a noticeable and very beautiful synergy between the gallery space and Derek’s work. I felt energised after seeing this show, and I urge you to pay The New Cut a visit to see for yourselves.