About Peter Symons - A Member of Group 7

Peter Symons

 I combine the use of landscape to express ideas about time and place with concepts of examining and using motif in the landscape to prompt memory or feelings of a place. 

I have started to take the motif out of its topographical landscape and combine it with colour, surface, texture and drawing, producing a personal account of place both real and imagined.  

This ambivalence and open-endedness invites the viewer to form their own personal associations. 

Ultimately, once the narrative has been confronted I want to be able to show the viewer paintings that are intended to be ‘beautiful’ with the subject matter always secondary in importance

Art historian, Dr. Pauline Rose, collaborated with  Peter on the publication 'Peter Symons Disonance', describes Peter's work as follows:

 "At first glance, Peter Symons' paintings may appear to sit unproblematically within a modern English landscape painting tradition, displaying familiar elements such as a lyrical handling of paint and colour.  However, the artist’s paintings are "prompted" by landscape rather than representative of specific locations."

www.petersymons.co.uk

About Ursula Leach - A Member of Group 7

Ursula Leach

I walk and draw in the landscape almost daily. I also take photographs with a digital camera which acts as a sketchbook.  Drawing seems to me the first step to really seeing and understanding the territory.

To start with I just respond to the subject but as the work progresses in the studio the ideas and meaning develop.  The work is, to some extent, about current agricultural practices, but primarily is about the formal issues of image making. Pictorial structure and the edge of the image offer exciting scope to explore the

space and scale in a landscape of huge fields.  Colour is used in a way that is not realistic but the sum of colours used is intended to evoke a parallel to the atmosphere of the subject. 

However different those colours are from reality.  Placing one colour against another I hope to produce the feeling I need to recreate the intensity of a visual experience. The construction and space within the image is manipulated away from literality to imply distance, height and mass.  

Areas are made huge as a corollary to industrial farming. 

Things placed on the edge of the image indicate possible side-lining, disappearance, fragmentation.  Large areas of one colour imply bareness, aridity, erosion.

The paintings lead to carborundum prints which may in turn develop into other ideas for paintings.

I am also interested in buildings on the land, structures whose uses are sometimes obscure.  In places they seem to grow out of the land and in others they sit on top of it.

A Crazed Window Washer! Yes I Am! Who's Asking?

Meet My New best Friends

I have been looking back at some of my first ever blogs. What I like about them are the pictures. There are some real gems. If you hadn't seen the gallery in its former life it was a dark, greasy tunnel. I kid you not. I have been wondering for a while about the prospect of putting all my blogs and pictures together to create a light hearted look at the whole business of starting an art gallery.

There really are so many pitfalls that could so easily be avoided that I virtually threw myself at. Would this information be useful to anybody? I have got a feeling it might be. If you are interested you can access the blog archive I have written nearly 700  now. I am positive there is more than enough substance in there for a book.

My working title could be 'The Revenge of The Window Smudgers'. If you are a long time reader of my blog you will know what that means.

I have to tell you about the thing that is plaguing my existence at the gallery. I thought the window smudgers were bad enough. That was until the 'loose paving slab muddy puddle making 5ft high mud squirts' entered my life. Oh I have now taken to having to clean the windows in the rain. The windows are being obscured by muddy splashes on a daily basis sometimes three times a day. It is beyond painful.
If you add to that the ever useful comments about 'you can come and do mine when you finished', 'you've missed a bit' from well meaning passers by.
People often say to me when they hear that I own an art gallery 'How glamorous!'. If they could see me in the rain scrubbing my mud splashed windows I'm not sure that glamorous is the word that would spring to mind.

I hope that you have been enjoying finding out about the artists involved in the Group 7 Exhibition. I think it is nice to get a feel for the artists as well as their work. It is a great show and you should definitely come and see it.

Remembering Sir Anthony Caro, Call Me Tony.

I have been very fortunate since opening the gallery, I have met people who have enriched my life and also supported me and my endeavours at the gallery. I have a lot to be grateful for, even if I bemoan the trivial annoyances I face in my blog.

It has been a sad time of late, I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Sir Anthony Caro. He was such a gentleman, and a real artist of the people. He never treated people like they were beneath him. He believed in art and did his utmost to support it.

He and Sheila often popped in to the gallery when they were in Swanage. I was particularly pleased when he visited my exhibition in March this year. He said lots of very complimentary things about my work. A memory I'll treasure.

But the one memory that stands out was our first ever meeting.  I was mid hanging a new exhibition and up to my eyeballs with stuff everywhere. When a couple came to the door and started to come in. I apologised and explained that the gallery was closed.
Tony said ' I know but I'm Tony and this is Sheila and we've come to meet you and look at the gallery'.
I wish I had picture of my face as he then noting my blank expression he said 'I'm Anthony Caro and this is my wife Sheila Girling'. Seriously, you could have scraped me off the floor. Thankfully, they didn't hold my ignorance against me and I went on to show Sheila's work at the gallery.

They continued to support me and both submitted works for my Drawing Exhibition in April this year.

I feel honoured to have known him and I know his legacy will live on with his work. Not to mention his incredibly talented family.

Group 7 Exhibition Review By Artist Rod Hague

L’Artishe Gallery run by Sharon James, an experienced knowledgeable artist herself, is a well run professional gallery  showing a regular programme of high quality exhibitions.

The current exhibition by Group 7 running until November 9^th brings together extremely interesting work by this group of well established artists, all with their intrinsic merits. In my opinion of particular note is two monoprints   by  Martyn Brewster ,  ‘Heartsong’ No. 550 and  ‘Heartsong’No. 551,  with their use of vibrant colour giving a sense of grand space on a small scale. ‘Red Barn’ by Ursula Leach, an oil on canvas, utilises red, yellow and green to their full potential and Fran Donovan’s ‘Freezing Hill 1’ ,oil on canvas, is a fine example of her lively approach to abstract painting. ‘Red Tree’, a mixed media picture with its centralised image by Peter Symons is I feel successful due to the unity of colour. All the artists involved, ‘the magnificent seven’, have put together an exciting exhibition which should be viewed and enjoyed.

Rod Hague                   

About Bonnie Brown - A Member of Group 7

Bonnie Brown

With a definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, then the paintings are the written poem turned into a visual form. The motifs, colours, textures, sense and manipulation of space taking the form of the words, pulled together into a carefully considered composition where rhythms and balances are constantly reviewed until nothing more can be added or removed to achieve the desired transformation and translation of ideas.

“My intention is to create a luminous composition made up of the consonance of several colours to form a possible space for the spirit. The paintings are lyrical evocations of time and place, combining inner and outer worlds in a rich fabric of colour and spatial manipulations.”

The ideas are triggered by something seen, felt, touched, observed, a memory often on the edge of recognition. All familiar and individual, these often unrelated images are formed together into a new visual relationship on the canvas.

The paintings are mixed media and oils on canvas or paper. Working from sketchbooks and drawings the paintings are developed through a series of layered images in paint, colour, texture, frottage and monoprint. They are often explored through small series of varying scales following a particular concept or idea which may have originated from observational research, and take many months to resolve allowing for the continual reassessment of the surfaces and the source of the idea.

E bonniebrown68@hotmail.com

W www.bonniebrown.co.uk

About Brian Bishop - A Member of Group 7

Brian Bishop

“Art is that thing having to do only with itself”

My work is an attempt to explore images by removing the pictorial narrative and moving wholly into pictorial space, an area visited by, not only the painter but also the architect, sculptor, composer and dance choreographer.

These images are works that demonstrate the breadth of engagement with colour and structure that has occupied me for many years.

They are works of a non-figurative nature, they do not inform with text or images drawn from the world about us, so allow your imagination to explore and make a fresh interpretation in order to discover a world of colour and structure in the same way that you would listen to a piece of music.

Leaving any preconceptions behind, endeavour to approach these works with an open mind.

Brian Bishop A.R.C.A.

“Colours must have a mystical capacity for spiritual expression, without being tied to objects” – Johannes Itten.

E brianbishop68@hotmail.com

W www.brianbishop.info