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Women Talking: Paintings by Janet Lynch and poetry by Ellen Phethean

Women Talking

13th Sept to 5th Oct    1 1.00 4.00pm.

Private view 4 pm Tuesday Sept 24th

The private view to which all are invited will take the form of a public discussion between Ellen and myself about all the important things in life, love, art, creativity and trying to juggle it all. Ellen will read some of her poetry, and tea will be served (and I hope cake).

Poet Ellen Phethean chose some of my paintings as a starting point for poems which now appear in her book ‘Woman Talking’. Some of the paintings were done many years ago. Most have never been seen outside the studio. We put a show together before lockdown which was to go to Newcastle where Ellen lives. It had to be cancelled but this new show, with some extra paintings added, has been created, curated by Miranda Leonard of Restless Gallery.

For more information: www.janetlynch.com

Image: The Fisherman’s Wife

From the Tremenheere website www.tremenheere.co.uk:

‘…Ellen is a life-long writer with a distinct voice. In her recent book Portrait of the Quince as an Older Woman, Ellen wrote about her life in a world made alien with loss and absence. She acknowledges aging but also the pleasure of grandchildren and the recompenses of writing. Her poems explore the older woman’s place in contemporary culture. Shedding the Niceties published last year is reviewed as a collection of ’rambunctious poems that insist on finding their own way home in the dark’.

Janet Lynch, now 84, is a painter whose work is full of life that genuinely springs forth from her brush, this current way of working represents a new way of approaching her creativity.

These two artists have much to discuss through their correspondence of paintings and poems…

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Spring Cannot Be Cancelled

NSA member Mike Newton’s exhibition Spring Cannot Be Cancelled is currently showing at the Borlase Smart Room, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives.

Here he explains the genesis and development of the project:

“But you knew there would always be the spring…”

Ernest Hemingway

 

This series of paintings was undertaken as a response to a series of poems by Mike Stevens loosely based on the theme of Spring. My task was to work outside of my comfort zone (Portraits) and draw inspiration from the poems to come up with a body of work that was still recognisable as my own. The title for the resulting series of paintings comes from David Hockney’s book describing his work completed during the COVID lockdown. Chosen firstly because one of the breakthrough paintings was prompted by a poem written by Mike during lockdown and secondly it seemed for a few weeks that we wouldn’t have a venue to show the work in Spring.

 

To create my selective responses to a different subject, not just in terms of aesthetics but also feelings, I started by sketching ideas on paper in pencil and then in paint. For imagery I have drawn heavily on the work of others not as copy of the artists’ original but endeavouring to achieve a deepening of meaning through a creative conversation between the poetry and the original paintings, and my own re-workings of them both.

 

The show runs until Sunday 19th May and there is Private View and reading on Friday 17th May 7-9pm

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Katrina Naomi Poetry Reading

It’s been great having the involvement and insight of an artist from another discipline working with us on ‘Where the line Breaks’, our Spring show at Tremenheere. Award winning poet Katrina Naomi suggested the title for the show and curated it alongside the NSA’s Catherine Harvey Jefferson and Carlos Zapata. On Sunday afternoon, Katrina read the poem commissioned by the NSA in response to the show. After her talk about the process of writing it and some questions and discussion, the audience asked her to read the poem a second time, to great applause. The poem is called ‘The Golden Mbira, Or How to Really Look.’  It’s beautiful and thought provoking and the event was a lovely ending to Katrina’s collaboration with us. A video of Katrina’s reading will go on the NSA website in due course, but copies of it are available to read at the gallery. It’s a great show and it closes this Sunday 21st April. Don’t miss it

 

The Golden Mbira, Or How to Really Look

This place is changed

irrevocably, having taken on colour, brag & quirk

from a quicken of kerbs to a flurry of fields

something dirty made to shine

 

A gappy marriage of earth & air

 

We keep to boundaries

so much of our lives but I met a Celtic poet

who used 12 years to write

his Gaellic-Gallic-English mash-up of Sweeney.

 

Here, on a white wall, that same dedication, dare I say

obsession – as in words, as in art –

in the searching, the searching, in the whirring

of wire into gold, noting dates, lanes, time

This artist has been searching for two years

so far, offering a reminder to really look

 

Poets talk of looking aslant –

I consider how the artist Julia sees a dead cartridge

next to a bird

A musicality of form

even if birds no longer sing

let us believe

a woodpecker once made love to a buzzard

 

Poets might do well to write in art’s texture

that ability to recognise an individual

feather – to know the shaft of a hen pheasant

I long for specificity

as I long fervently for warplanes to stop

Such a failure in our inabilities

 

The gold keys bristle in empathy

try to take to the skies on a promise, a message, a promise

Their musicality cannot yet be played

though thumbs thrust to the mbira

 

We’re at the edge

each feather a lost shoe

in our wandering

Let us return to the oaky nest

where all birds are lovers

where an oak pretends to die

 

Others are not so fortunate

 

I’ve heard swallowing oak leaves

can extend a life –

a certain bitterness, guaranteed

 

What is it we might look for

in our long or short lives?

I stumble over dull metaphors

It’s good to see the humble

gleam from streets & hedges

in our rural/urban construct

How we wish for one but live in the other

 

I would like to be still

yet keep searching

 

Some things – such as love & compassion –

are hard to locate

Harder still, it seems, is peace

 

 

Katrina Naomi

 

 

 

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Mike Newton in The Living and the Dead

NSA member Mike Newton is taking part in a special exhibition at the St Ives School of Painting. The Living and the Dead is a collaboration between painter Mike Newton, poet Mike Stevens and sound artist Christian Guerrini, all living and working in St Ives. The exhibition features Mike Newton’s portraits of six Romantic poets and Mike Steven’s poetry based on redacted words from the same poets together with further portraits and original poems by Newton and Stevens . The private view on Friday 30th December 6.30 – 9pm will include a reading of the poems by Mike Stevens with sounds by Christian Guerrini and a Q&A session giving the background to the genesis of the project. Limited seating  and drinks are provided. The show runs from 27th December to 2nd January at the Borlase Smart Room, St Ives School of Painting, Back Road West, St Ives.

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Janet Lynch in The Geronimo Hot Springs Motel Exhibition

NSA member Janet Lynch is currently exhibiting work at Livingstone St Ives gallery in St Ives. Entitled The Geronimo Hot Springs Motel, the show runs from 4th to 20th November and includes paintings and poetry.

Janet’s work continues to evolve in unexpected ways but this figurative exhibition which shows work created over many years confirms that at the heart of most paintings there is a constant referral to ‘relationship’. These relationships are indicated metaphorically, the other being represented by a formalised depiction of an animal, often dogs or horses, occasionally birds or other creatures. Sometimes these relationships are pleasant as with Woman with a Red Horse, or disturbing such as the dog in Birth. In one of the earliest pictures painted there is definitely an inferred sexual implication.

Woman with a Red Horse

 

Birth

“I love travel, and when I am away from the studio often find myself writing a few lines as a substitute for painting I suppose. The title of this exhibition was taken from one of these little poems – The Geronimo Hot Springs Motel, a small book of which is available to buy at the gallery.  As with the paintings these personal poems are all the distillation of personal experience.”
Livingstone St Ives, 71–73 Fore Street, St. Ives, Cornwall, TR26 1HW. More examples of work in the exhibition can be seen on the Livingstone St Ives website
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