‘Every moment is a metamorphosis’ Sarah Stokes at the Cristus Summer Exhibition

Seeking the essence of the English seaside for our forthcoming Summer Exhibition, we found ourselves in the Whitstable studio of Sarah Stokes, a self-taught artist of infectious enthusiasm and natural talent. Inside the creative space, her art adorns every wall. It’s clear at once that her style is unique and yet present in all her paintings. The colours are those of the sea: pale greens, greys and blues with vibrant darts and impasto swirls. Abstract imaginings from the artist, yet from our shared world.

All around, the surfaces are covered in the stuff of painting: pots and canvas and items specific to the individual artist, like a favourite sponge or stick or bubble-wrap daub. While outside, just yards from the shingle beach, is the inspiration behind the work: the North Sea. As muses go, this capricious stretch of coastline is not for everyone. Cold mostly, and briny, and inspite of its recent gentrification into a gallery town, still retaining its honest nautical air.

For Sarah, the ever-changing light and scene are key to her art:  ‘Every moment is a metamorphosis!’ she declares… ‘The paintings seem to form storytelling ’scapes so each viewer can form their own unique connection’.  So, no in-depth analysis required from this reviewer. Come judge for yourself at the Cristus Gallery Summer Exhibition, from June 4th.

The Cristus Summer Exhibition

The 2009 Summer Exhibition opens on Thursday, June 4th, 2009. We are featuring several artists who are new to the gallery including Sarah Stokes, Jessica Stride and Tracey Pryke.

There is a Private Viewing for Newsletter subscribers and other friends(Invitation Only) on Saturday May 30th, 2009. If you would like to join us in appreciating great art and a glass of wine, we are issuing invitations to the next 50 people who join our mailing list. Join the mailing list here.

New Acquisitions - Heather Townshend Prints

Cristus has acquired a stunning collection of Heather Townshend prints. They cover a range of subjects from compositions with pure light (’Daybreak’, ‘Sunset’ and ‘Dark Light’) to abstracted natural and industrial landscapes. The collage shows the first tranche of prints. We will post a second tranche later as well as more detail on each of the prints. Over the next two weeks or so we will be posting them for sale our UK Shop site. See Heather Townshend Abstracts.

Folkestone Collection at the Grand

The Folkestone Collection exhibition at the Grand Hotel, on the Leas, Folkestone, is an excellent and surprising example of the treasures held by many a provincial town’s art vaults.

We get Victor Pasmore, Peter Blake, Fred Cuming and Carel Weight. A mind altering, transcendental woodcut from Monica Poole, and an early 1970’s view of modern art that is all that modernism should be – hopeful for the future , vibrant, colourful and yet systematic and full of skill and craftsmanship.

The most significant thing we get though is a mighty blow for the print against the painting. Although there are some excellent paintings to be seen, it is the prints which really caught my attention.

Peter Blake’s prints – illustrations of scenes from Alice Through The Looking Glass - are like a distillation of everything good in 1970s England. I was transported into Blake’s world, which sat so beautifully with Lewis Carroll’s. I’m no Blake expert, but these seem his best works.

Weight’s massive painting of The Poet is a thing to behold. It is a game played with perspective, colour and juxtaposition of forms. I wouldn’t be surprised if it overtly refers to the poetry of its subject.

Victor Pasmore’s abstract print is a masterpiece. It has the sureness of composition and colour of his best work.

Everyone will have their favourites from this exhibition. To happen upon it is like rolling back a mossy boulder to reveal caverns of shimmering stalagmites. As someone who believes in the transformative power of art, I can say no more than that I came away inspired, resolving to apply the same levels of care, creativity and intelligence on show at the Grand to my own work.

The pieces might have been exhibited more accessibly. The tea rooms are a nice enough setting, but many of the prints are best appreciated at very close quarters, and not across a dining table.

This exhibition is highly recommended. Hurry, it runs until 5th May, 2009.

Tate Modern: Rodchenko and Popova

In early twentieth century Russia, two great histories intersected. Revolutionaries tried to reinvent society and what it could be. Artists redefined not only what art would look like, but its purpose and role, which until then had been to decorate the living rooms of the bourgeoisie.

Into this larger-than-life, wide-screen epic, the figures of Rodchenko and Popova enter stage left. One expects their work at Tate Modern to be on the grand scale, overwhelming in the way that something like, say, Picasso’s Guernica or Rothko’s “Colour as Subject” canvases are; which is to say, somehow beyond the normal scale of things, emerging as mythic emblems or spiritual experience from far beyond the everyday.

In some ways, neither Popova nor Rodchenko disappoint. We witness some of the very earliest realisations of art as design; of design as art; of the marriages and cross-breeding of architecture, theatre and book design and art in the service of politics. Some of the poster designs manage to capture the scope, ambition and sheer numbers involved in the Revolution and its aftermath. Not to mention that Popova’s work marked the emergence of women in the avant-garde.

And yet it is the tiny prosaic details underlying the poetry which capture the attention. Most memorably, there are the constant reminders of the materials on which both Popova and Rodchenko composed. The grain of plywood re-emerging slowly over the years, as the vibrancy of oils used to compose early geometric pieces fades away. Rough drawings on card, cardboard, scraps of paper, the fraying textiles of abstract collages. All turning to dust.

Even for intellectuals, life was hard in Revolutionary Russia. Perhaps it’s fanciful to imagine these great proponents of technology-as-art scrabbling around for something – anything – to paint on. And yet Liubov Popova’s life was short and painful. She took a year to recover from a bout of typhoid in 1919, but her husband did not. In 1924, she and her son succumbed to scarlet fever. She was thirty five years old. Vita brevis, ars slightly longa.

There is plenty to see at this exhibition. For me, the early non-objectivist painting experiments and the photography and advertising posters are the highlights. In the photographs, subjects seem to want to burst forth from the confines of the frame. In the posters, the dynamism and boldness feel like they are charged with some Revolutionary life force.

What did not work for me were the agitprop pieces, extolling the virtues of trade union membership, economic plans and the like. They left me cold not on political grounds, but on aesthetic ones. They are mirrored in tone, perhaps, by some of Rodchenko’s pronouncements writ large on the walls of the Tate. These are deadening, impenetrable, over-intellectualised statements of what (apparently) Rodchenko thought he was playing at. I came away with the feeling that he was setting up a barrier between himself and the world. Given the circumstances, perhaps it was best for a Russian artist (who was marginalised during the 1930s as Social Realism became dominant), to be on his guard. Aleksandr Rodchenko died in 1956.

David Townsend - Sandgate

The painting: “Sandgate” is a delightful view of Sandgate Village in Kent. The constructed yet organic procession of planes towards the top of the hill and the sky are strongly reminiscent of Cezanne’s Mont St. Victoire series, blending realism, a cubist perspective that leads us into the picture, and a striking interpretation of colour and space.

The artist: David Townsend is a Kent (UK) based artist who paints abstract and figurative works. David is currently exhibiting with the Cristus Gallery, Sandgate.

How to buy: Click on the image for more information. You can purchase the original directly from the gallery, or buy online if you would like a high quality reproduction on archival quality papers, canvas or stretched box canvas. A huge range of mounts and framing options is available. See all of David Townsend’s artwork for sale…

Folkestone Art Co-operative at The Grand

There could scarcely be a better place to view an exhibition of art than within the Palm Court of the genteel Grand Hotel, especially on a day when France revealed herself across the sparkling waters of the Channel. Such splendour, such gaiety, such temptation to take tea on the Leas, surely still the most elegant seaside promenade in the world.

Of Fontaine-Wolf’s paintings, ‘Tuscan Garden’ and ‘Sarah Reading’, the latter was the one that captivated. Until then, I confess that it was the architecture that held my attention, but the portrait of the young girl engrossed in fiction seemed both to stand out and belong. Yes, that’s it, it stood out because it belonged - stuck - defiantly - in that middle part of the twentieth century, between the Bloomsbury artists and Suez, or between the domestic servant and the hostess trolley. The world has changed, but The Grand, ‘Sarah Reading’ and Fontaine-Wolf it seems have not.

But despite this unease, I so admire the refinement of the painting. I am drawn into the intensity of the subject. Sarah is reading, and we are observing her. It is her space, all chintzy informality, beautifully observed in soft greys and apricots. Her cat elongates across the back of the chair, but she is rapt in concentration; and the immediate sense of calm repose is replaced by tension. It is the universal experience of the reader when the book takes hold. Yes, it’s been done many times before - and I especially recall Vanessa Bell’s ‘Interior with Artist’s Daughter’, but in The Grand’s imperial setting, I loved it.