John Piper’s Fawley VI also caught my eye at the London Art Fair for the reason, obvious to me, that I had spent much time in the second half of 2018 painting and re-painting a not dissimilar image:
Now I put them close together I can see that, of course, Piper’s is more sophisticated and subtle but nevertheless, given that I was completely unaware that he had painted Fawley VI, the similarities in the images are striking. I take it, from is title, that Piper was abstracting an image from a real scene whereas I was trying to paint an abstract from almost nothing – my image’s origins lay in the abstraction course I went to in Aldeburgh in May last year (see posts at the time).
I don’t normally show ‘bad’ art but I can’t resist showing, without comment or identification, this example, in my humble opinion, of an outstanding example of that genre:
The London Art Fair has now disappeared for another year; and so has my next international exhibition, this time at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. I just managed to catch ‘Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde’ before it closed. As it has now closed and photography was not in any case allowed, I cannot illustrate it but, as doubtless intended, it left a strong impression of just how many couples, albeit many of them fleetingly coupled, worked in Europe in and on the fringes of the Modernist movement either side of the mid-20th century. The exhibition was primarily of historical material – photographs, books, pamphlets and manuscripts such as letters – rather than great art as such: indeed, the only striking paintings I noticed were two by Kandinsky and in the section devoted to the Delauneys. Here was primary historical material of great value on an interesting aspect of twentieth century European art and culture; though I have to confess that much of the detail did not particularly engage me.
And now to a more modest and more engaging exhibition, this time back to The Cut at Halesworth. There I visited a three-man exhibition, showing for example works such as the one above: ‘Lapwings’ by James Faure Walker.
My main reason for visiting it, however, was because one of the three artists is John Crossley, here dipping his toes in, I think for the first time, the art scene in which he has chosen to live. He has, of course, greatly helped me this last year with constructive critiques, as outlined in several posts in 2018. I post this image of one of his paintings with apologies, for clearly it is defective; but the lighting is such at The Cut that it is almost impossible to record glazed paintings without picking up reflections. Try John’s own web-page to see the full glory of his colour.