'Still Life' - Gallery & Report at Creek Creative, Kent

Teddy Kempster

Each of the twelve Freedom in Painting workshops in Kent have explored a different aspect of painting. We have looked at 'Red', 'The Circle, 'LIbra (Balance)', 'The Diptych', 'The Space Between'. We have worked with the model on several occasions, there was a workshop that explored composition using the two lighthouses of Dungeness and recently we looked at the work of Richard Diebenkorn. 

This time, eleven artists from all over the country gathered together at Creek Creative Studios in Faversham to explore the important genre of Still Life. In advance, the artists were asked to look at the work of Morandi and William Scott and also to bring in one or two of their own favorite objects.

A talk on the history of the genre was followed by a loosening up, compositional drawing exercise. The artists were then split into three groups and each group was asked to arrange on their own table, by consensus, a still- life of six objects which they drew for the rest of the morning, conventionally and unconventionally!

After lunch, the painting session began, and without giving too much away, the still-life changed during the afternoon. 

Day 2 began with a challenging painting exercise and throughout the day, the artists pushed their paintings forwards, in the spirit of the words of Richard Diebenkorn:

'I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops'   

As always, the workshop ended with an invaluable group critique. Over the 2 days the artists gave their all - intellect, painting skills and instinct, and through their intensity of working produced an incredibly strong and varied set of paintings. 

Many thanks again to Anne and Simon at Creek Creative for promoting the course and helping set up the room.  

GALLERY

Griselda Mussett

Griselda Mussett

Hazel Crawford

Hazel Crawford

Jan Bunyan

Jan Bunyan

Jane Crane

Jane Crane

Kathleen Alberter

Kathleen Alberter

Margarita Hanlon

Margarita Hanlon

Nicola Waters

Nicola Waters

Jo Dunlop

Jo Dunlop

Philippa Langton

Philippa Langton

Robin Marks

Robin Marks

Teddy Kempster

Teddy Kempster

The next 'Freedom in Painting' workshop at Creek Creative will be:

'Looking at Lanyon'       Fri 31 March - Sat April 1 2017       £90

If you would like to book a place, email  ashleyhansonart@gmail.com

Upcoming Workshop in Kent: 'Still - Life' 21-22 October

This 2-day workshop at Creek Creative will tackle the enduring subject of the Still-Life but as always there will be twists and challenges along the way. 

I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops'  Richard Diebenkorn

In my own practice, 'Still-Life' is rare -  I was probably traumatised by having to paint my first ever still-life on my art college interview!  In the early nineties though I painted collections/arrangements of pebbles,stones and shells, fused with landscape. Appropriately, with the workshop in Faversham, these paintings from the early nineties, are about nearby Whitstable, a favourite place where I lived during my time at Canterbury College of Art. 

'Tankerton'  40x50cms

'Tankerton' depicts standing on 'The Street', the strange shingle strip that is revealed at low-tide, looking back towards a pink-beach and green slopes of Tankerton.  

'Whitstable'    120x60cms    oil on wood

Looking towards the Isle of Sheppey, carved out of the paint, my favourite objects grouped in the foreground. 

detail - 'Whitstable'

'Black-Beach'   80x80cms   oil on wood

I feel 'Black-Beach' is the most successful of the series, taking the ideas further and more spatially interesting, escaping the 'tabletop'. This painting won second prize in the Observer Hunting Art Prizes in 1993. I think there is a compliment about the painting here:

Brian Sewell writes in the Observer Magazine 10 Feb 1991:

Of Ashley Hanson’s ‘Black Beach’, winner of the second prize, one of the grander judges complained that the idiom eluded him and that in it he could see nothing better than the tarred surface of a London street – to which the response of the real grandee of the occasion, ‘It is a compliment to the painting that it leaves you critically disarmed’

'Pebble/Shell/Stone'  20x60cms  oil on wood

I remember sculptor John Gibbons liking these....

'Beach'  180x60cms  oil on paper

The 1st year painting that kept me in art-college, when i finally let go of photographic imagery. I think I have this rolled up somewhere- maybe... it's oil on paper!

'City of Glass 22 - (Cleave)' .......final thoughts....

This is a strange piece...I have been looking again at the paintings in isolation and have concluded that while working as a pair, they both work individually ... they were made that way.  I only put the paintings together when a friend took this photo and then I began to see them as a pair with a 'cleave' within each painting and also between them which I think adds an exciting additional dimension. As a pair the power of the face is diminished, both because of its smaller proportion within the whole but also because of the power of the divide between the two paintings.

The painting(s) have divided opinion and provoked thought, in particular the painting with the face. I had a great discussion with staff and students from Canterbury Christchurch University, exchanging ideas, analysis and possibilities for the piece. Even during our drawing session in Charlestown and in the pub after, the conversation continued so I guess the piece has had an impact which is no bad thing. 

There have been comments about whether the face works at all, whether it belongs, whether it is too strong, too graphic, too out of kilter with the rest of the series. Also how disturbing the face and the stare are. This is intentional: this is the face of Stillman, the man who locked up his 2 yr old son in a dark room for 9 years in a deranged experiment to discover the language of God.
  
So, to conclude, I think I can and shall, show the paintings individually or as a pair. This duality is delicious: after all in the novel, in his thesis* Stillman discusses the dual meaning of 'cleave', to both break apart and put together.

I have long been an admirer of Richard Diebenkorn and Mondrian and the 'City of Glass' series owes a debt to their work (not too much I hope!). Mondrian is hot news at the moment with two current shows. I have just read a  review of the Mondrian and His Studios at Tate Liverpool, where Waldemar Januszczak talks about the connections between Mondrian's abstraction and his membership of the cult of Theosophy, where universal order is explained 'as a balance between horizontal lines, representing the female force, and vertical lines representing the male force, enclosed in a circle'.

Fascinating stuff. There is also a 'Mondrian and Colour' exhibition on at Turner Contemporary in Margate which I'll have to check out when I'm down in Canterbury in a couple of weeks.

Open Studios has now finished and I'm back in the garage, now even smaller with the arrival of the new work. There are another couple of new paintings in the series, including a red study of Peter Stillman (the son), that I can't yet post having dropped my camera.  It's been a great 3 weeks at the Shire Hall Gallery in Bodmin - big thanks to Wendy and the team for letting me and Janie M McDonald take over the space and to all the visitors who came.

* P:43, 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster.

'City of Glass 21 - (Nowhere)'



'City of Glass 21- (Nowhere)'      160x100cms

'By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realised that he had no intention of ever leaving it again' 

The words of author/detective Daniel Quinn....*

Exploring blacks again- a rectangle of true/tube black in the bottom left corner- how to use colour to make it work...thoughts of Richard Diebenkorn's black/orange 'Ocean Park 133' and a black/orange Mark Surridge painting at his recent show at the Millenium Gallery...Manhattan fragmented, open, anonymous, nowhere, subjugated to the painting....

'Ocean Park 133'

It's Open Studios again at the Shire Hall Gallery in Bodmin, a fabulous space I'm sharing with Janie M McDonald. The dialogue has already begun.. Janie's loathing of the salmon pink led to the red found with an Alizarin glaze...I spent 3 hrs repainting the central green vertical with the difficult aim of getting a line with presence, a line that was straight but not perfect.....Denise saw the outline of a figure in the curves of the eastern shore...Quinn? Stillman?...the pursuer or the pursued?

Black is 'nowhere'

detail- COG 21

* P:4, 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster