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Rachael Reeves Exhibition, Jupiter Gallery

Rachael Reeves is showing her work at Jupiter Show Case, 3 Chywoone Hill, Newlyn. Most of the work on display is from the past year.

‘This past year has given me space to focus on my painting, I have yearned for this for some time, having restrictions of movement and time away from the usual demands of life enabled me to look to what I had around me. I appreciated the space I inhabited and began to look at it from a fresh perspective. I became interested in manipulating the space and forms and found that the paintings began to imbue a sense of displacement, disorientation and fragmentation. I was feeling on the one hand a sense of peace and joy and on the other a sense of dissociation and dread. Much of my work over the past has had echoes of dystopia and melancholia but the last thing I wanted to create were those types of images. In fact if anything I was drawn to spaces and forms that were more uplifting and enticing.’

The show is open from Sunday 16th May – Friday 21st May 10 – 4 pm with guest jeweller Claire Stockings-Baker. (Rachael will be in the gallery on Sun 16th, Wed 19th and Thurs 20th)

 

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A Life Being Ken Turner

Congratulations to NSA member Ken Turner on the publication of his book A Life Being Ken Turner.

The book, with over 100 pages of paintings in colour, describes his life as a painter from 1944 to 2020. Ken summarises it as follows:

The book traces my journey through many approaches to art from early watercolours to the later acrylics. Three London solo exhibitions (1964 -66), taught me to escape from the artworld and I started Action Space to bring art to the community as Social Sculpture. Then to angles, triangles, the abstract, and experiments in performance. The importance of my work today is focussed on dangers to the existence of our planet due to climate change. Also, the corruption of consciousness in terms of art becoming entertainment and stock exchange systems.  

   

Gilgamesh searching for everlasting life

Bomb Blast


The book can be purchased online here

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Yolande Armstrong Featured in RWA Gallery Tour

Congratulations to NSA member Yolande Armstrong whose painting Big Aunty Minnie and Friend has been featured in an online tour of the Winterstoke Gallery in the current Royal West of England Academy Open. You can read the feature here.  In the interview, Yolande explains the background to the painting…..

She describes Minnie as quite a powerful woman, especially for her time. She had no children, survived three husbands, ran her own business, bought her own house and travelled a lot in the fifties, all of which was somewhat unusual for the period. Armstrong sees her as a matriarchal figure, having a high degree of autonomy in her community. However, it was Minnie’s big personality and presence, not her history, that really drew the artist’s eye. The idea of a free spirit.

Yolande Armstrong, Big Auntie Minnie and Friend, acrylic on paper 60cm x 80cm

The RWA Open is still currently closed to the public due to lockdown restrictions but is due to re-open on 17th May.  The exhibition can be viewed online

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Tony Giles in West Cornwall

Penlee House Gallery and Museum in Penzance is currently showing an exhibition of paintings by former NSA member Tony Giles. Although the museum is closed at the moment due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, the exhibition is set to run until the 28th April, 2021 so perhaps there will be a chance to visit if the lockdown rules are eased. You can read about the show here

NSA member Tim Ridley has a special affinity with Tony Giles’ work and has written a review on his website.

Paintings, I always feel, should speak for themselves and bear viewing without the backup of statements and blurb. Tony Giles’s work does just that, I was taken in and charmed from the off. The bold reds of Penzance station 1989 pulled me in and then the language of simple train forms led me towards the sea and the horizon where a ship sits expectantly. A heads up that Tony was ‘into’ trains pervades, wrapped up in a naive painting style which celebrates the joy of Penzance in all it’s weird and wonderful grit and beauty.

Tony Giles in West Cornwall, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, until 28th April 2021. The exhibition Newlyn  School Interiors is also on show until 17th April 2021

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Sanguine Exhibition | Paula Whitbread-Roberts

NSA Member Paula Whitbread-Roberts‘ current exhibition of paintings Sanguine is available to view online as the proposed opening at the Jupiter Gallery in Newlyn has been postponed for the second time due to lockdown restrictions.

The majority of the work has been produced since the first lockdown and represents her immediate environment, early morning and evening walks around the lake and quiet moments of contemplation in her garden. Paula explains about the thought processes behind her work:

My paintings invariably have a narrative and reflect my thought processes at any given time. The images within the paintings evolve from personal experiences, observations, many hours of wakefulness spent reading, walking, swimming in the sea and pools and are very much interpretations of my imagination..

During strange times and unusual circumstances, we are forced to think deeply about life, with perhaps melancholy thoughts sometimes beginning to emerge. A true sense of perspective simmers just beneath the surface of the mind or maybe thoughts are extruded from deep within the psyche…

You can take a virtual tour of the exhibition in her home gallery here.

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Janet Lynch – article in The Jackdaw Magazine

 

 

NSA Member Janet Lynch has just had a feature published in the latest issue of The Jackdaw magazine. In it she writes compellingly of her experience exhibiting her anti-war paintings in an exhibition accompanying a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral in 1987 and of the powerful responses her work evoked. You can read the article here

 

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NSA Members in RWA Open

NSA members Yolande Armstrong, Ingrid Newton, Gareth Edwards and Peter Ward are very pleased to have had work selected for this year’s Royal West of England Academy Open in Bristol. Unfortunately, the show has been postponed because of Coronavirus restrictions… not once, but twice now! However they have just announced that they are now selling on-line, and might be open later in December, but will (almost) definitely be open from January 2nd to March 7th 2021. To view the online catalogue click here

Yolande Armstrong, Big Auntie Minnie and Friend, acrylic on paper 60cm x 80cm

 

Ingrid Newton, Love in the Time of Corona 2, Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 10cm x10cm

 

Gareth Edwards, Autumn, oil on canvas 105cm x 100cm

 

Pete Ward, Godhevyans a Gwir Statys / Suffering in Real Estate, Cornish earth pigments on salvaged board, 53cm x 92cm

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VOLT New work by Tim Ridley, exhibition at Daisy Lang

Member Tim Ridley will be exhibiting new work, paintings and assemblage, at Daisy Lang, Old Bakehouse Lane, Chapel St, Penzance from the 15th of December 2020 to the 2nd of Jan 2021.

For opening times and details Here

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Isolation Windows Book – Catherine Knight

 

NSA Member Catherine Knight has just published a book of her recent Isolation Windows project. Here she explains how the project came about…..

 

“During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I collected images of people’s windows in isolation. Using social media and connections with friends and friends of friends, I managed to collect images from across the globe. 

In the short amount of time that I carved out to paint in, I made small gouache paintings from the photos. It gave me a rhythm and project in this topsy- turvy time. It allowed me to visit other people’s houses, other countries, other continents, albeit in my imagination, and ponder our shared global experience.

The project is continuing during the second lockdown, so if you want to get involved send me a photo of your window, including the frame.”

Isolation Windows book brings together 81 of Catherine Knight’s Isolation Window paintings made between March and July of 2020. With an introductory essay by Lizzie Lloyd and 82 full colour illustrations of the gouache paintings this makes a beautiful and timely art book.
 
Dimensions: 297 x 211 x 8mm
Colourplan 350gsm cover, 170gsm silk dust jacket and 150gsm silk coated pages
“This act of shared imagining is timely, offering sensations of closeness with friends and strangers alike. Though actual human figures never find their way into her paintings explicitly, they are ever-present by implication, through traces of everyday actions: the top of a chair tucked under a table, a towel drying on a railing, a window left ajar, a curtain hurriedly not-quite-drawn. These domestic objects and adornings become proxies for the absent humans; the scenes as a whole, like still-life glimpses into the lives of others.” 
 
Extract from essay “A view of one’s own” by Lizzie Lloyd, 2020
Book is available to buy  catherineknight.bigcartel.com
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Pat Wilson Smith – about the confined human figure

Deposition is a tondo, one of a series of work about the confined human figure that I began in November 2019.

At the time I was preoccupied with expressing my feelings about the challenges of ageing, which were overwhelming me.

We were unaware of the escalating Coronavirus epidemic in China.

As it later turned out, these paintings were strangely prescient, speaking of enforced constraint and the vulnerability of the human body.

Patricia Wilson Smith

 

Deposition Patrica Wilson-Smith

 

Deposition 

1200mm dia

Acrylic and oil on board

Currently on show at Edge of Dark till November 1st, 2020

 

 

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