Vacation (2005)
Rita Dove
I love the hour before takeoff, that stretch of no time, no home but the gray vinyl seats linked like unfolding paper dolls. Soon we shall be summoned to the gate, soon enough there’ll be the clumsy procedure of row numbers and perforated stubs—but for now I can look at these ragtag nuclear families with their cooing and bickering or the heeled bachelorette trying to ignore a baby’s wail and the baby’s exhausted mother waiting to be called up early while the athlete, one monstrous hand asleep on his duffel bag, listens, perched like a seal trained for the plunge. Even the lone executive who has wandered this far into summer with his lasered itinerary, briefcase knocking his knees—even he has worked for the pleasure of bearing no more than a scrap of himself into this hall. He’ll dine out, she’ll sleep late, they’ll let the sun burn them happy all morning —a little hope, a little whimsy before the loudspeaker blurts and we leap up to become Flight 828, now boarding at Gate 17.
Reprinted with permission of the author
HEATHER V. MCLEOD
Clouded Vision (2022), Oil on canvas; 30 x 30.5 cm
We are a bit jealous of Heather’s recent travels: she spent the spring on a residency in Rome, and is now spending the summer on Nantucket, teaching and painting. As Heather herself says, “each painting is a journey elsewhere. They lead with a hint of humor and a bit of satire.”
“The most important places on a map are the places we haven't been yet”
Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars
JEREMY DICKINSON
Visitor parking at Spiral Jetty (2020)
Oil on canvas; 25 x 90 cm
Jeremy Dickinson is best known for painting meticulous arrangements of the miniature automobiles - cars, trucks and buses – mostly from his own personal childhood collection. More recently, confined to home during the pandemic, he took inspiration from the ubiquitous imagery of Google Earth, flitting virtually from derelict yard to random lots across the world. Hovering between abstraction and realism and clearly referencing the thorny issues of human interaction with the landscape, these paintings revel in the colour and random arrangements that are to be found across the earth.
The found is more powerful than the made.
Graham Rich
GRAHAM RICH
The Black Log Book (2002)
Marine paint on found object; 38.5 x 48 cm
Graham Rich’s works range from large scale installations to small, constructed scenes, formed from the remnants of boats or other objects he has found walking or sailing along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall.
It is strange how a discarded object, which customarily one might be largely oblivious to, is, when appropriated by an artist, suddenly made the focus of active attention, demands closer examination. His interventions are a metaphysical, even totemic, expression of our relationship with the sea. Often dwarfed against a backdrop of sea-worn paint and the scars left by maritime use or the interaction of sea and coast itself, his motifs of small jibbed sailing boats serve as symbols of hope and struggle against tribulation.
We had a vacation house on Lake McClintick for ten years and had spent at least a month there every summer.
Crimson Ramblers of the World, Farewell
Jessamyn West 1970
VERONICA BAILEY
Crimson Ramblers of the World, Farewell, Jessamyn West, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich Inc., New York 1970 (2003)
Framed archival C-type print; 84.1 x 59.4 cm
Edition of 5
From the 2 Willow Road series; other sizes available
2 Willow Road
2 Willow Road is one of three three-storey conjoined concrete houses, built in 1939 at the bottom of a hill beside Hampstead Heath in London. It was designed and lived in by the acclaimed Hungarian architect, Ernö Goldfinger (1902–1987), with his artist wife, Ursula Blackwell (1909–1991), and their three children. It was the first building of Modern architecture that the National Trust acquired. The works of art in the house are from the couple’s friendships with artists such as Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Eileen Agar, Roland Penrose and his wife, the model and photographer, Lee Miller.
2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the first exhibition mounted of Veronica Bailey’s seminal series, 2 Willow Road. With these images of the edges of books to be found in the library of Goldfinger and Blackwell’s home, Bailey provides an alternate, delineated portrait of two driven individuals with interconnecting careers in architecture and the visual arts. The relationship was in no small part founded upon absorbing, challenging and liberating ideas from disciplines ranging from anthropology to literature, politics and sociology and these books both inadvertently serve as a reflection of the social and aesthetic values of their milieu while manifesting a contemporary formal abstraction that transcends period. 2 Willow Road won the Jerwood Photography Award for 2003.
MAGNUS PETERSSON
Harvest Moon (2022)
Watercolour; 28 x 24 cm
Petersson takes his inspiration from his immediate surroundings, living as he does for much of the year amid the vast forests that swathe Sweden. He also has a summer house on the southern Swedish coast and his work beautifully evokes both landscapes across all the seasons. As you might expect, light - and sometimes the lack of it - suffuse his paintings. Although largely - though not exclusively - expressed through the medium of watercolour, his work can clearly be seen as following in the rich tradition of Scandinavian artists - and perhaps most akin to the great Harald Sohlberg - in celebrating the inimitable landscape that surrounds him.
We often look, we don’t always see.
Jeffrey Blondes
JEFFREY BLONDES
Summer Solstice: 24 Hours x 60 Minutes (2008)
Archival pigment print on 315 g Rag (Bergger Fine Art Paper); 100cm x 140 cm
Originally a landscape painter, Blondes’ last 18 years have been devoted to making high definition films ranging in length (to date) from 9 to 104 hours. As a painter, he had always worked en plein air in direct confrontation with his subject landscape, completely engaged with the details - the way the wind blows, the texture of the bark of a tree, or the space between its branches - while simultaneously recording the nuances and shifts of colour and light. His films act as a catalyst for the viewer, providing a way ‘in’ to this state of seeing. And the prints such as this are simply another way of looking; a single frame is taken from each minute of the film, so each strip of 60 frames equates to an hour of real time.
STEVE McPHERSON Composites Possessions III 2021
81 individual sculptures assembled from monofilaments, rope filament, marine plastic, and wood all found on the UK coast, 1994-2021. On primed Aluminium Composite; 102 x 102 x 7 cm
Walnut stained wood box frame, UV conservation glass
The small sculptures that make up the collection of the works title ‘Composites Possessions’, have been created as amuletic objects from the detritus of our contemporary coastal environment. As McPherson notes, “they continue my ideas of artefacts for a fictional future anthropological museum.” Nylon filaments and wood found on the shore have been combined and bound together. They now form tokens of protective power that could have once adorned the bodies of their fictional future creators.
SUE BRYAN
Land and Sky iv (2021)
Charcoal and acrylic on wood; 20.3 x 25.4 cm
As an Irish artist who has lived in New York for many years, Bryan’s practice relies on memories of wild, wet landscapes. Photographs may provide a trigger, but thereafter those memories intuitively drive a work forward, the specifics abandoned as the composition develops. Working largely in charcoal and pencil on modest-sized boards, the surfaces are built up over many hours, washes added and burnished. What emerges is instantly recognisable but yet it somehow re-asserts our connectedness to the landscape and urges us to “pay attention”.
There’s an escape involved in the practice of painting and I think the most successful pieces are when I get lost in the process, stop thinking and explore… There’s a feel to the place I’m trying to reach; sometimes I can connect this to the memory of a particular place, but often this occurs to me after the painting is finished… On the best days a painting becomes a sort of meditative space where the landscape takes shape in an intuitive way.
Gill Rocca
GILL ROCCA
Figment LIII 2023
Oil on birch ply; 55.5 cm diameter
HUGH HAMSHAW THOMAS
Wilderness, Emerald (2021)
Archival pigment print; 73 x 53 cm/160 x 120 cm Editions of 5 and 1 respectively
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), considered the father of landscape architecture in the United States, was heavily influenced by his studies of British gardens and landscapes and especially the British landscape architect Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865).
From April to October 1850, Olmsted travelled to Great Britain to study agricultural practices, but also visited museums and, through family connections, grand country houses. He was deeply moved by the beauty of England’s rural landscapes, publishing a book, “Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England” before embarking upon one of his most notable projects, Central Park in New York City. He returned to England in 1859 – part reward and part banishment by the commissioners of Central Park – concluding after his tour which included visits to gardens on the Continent, “all in imitation of nature, is to this day the peculiar art of England.”
In his Emerald Necklace Project, British artist Hugh Hamshaw Thomas takes Olmsted’s approach in reverse; inspired by his own walking tours of Olmsted’s now mature manipulations of nature in Boston, a linear chain of parks named the Emerald Necklace. As Olmsted choreographed bucolic retreats from banal urban strips of land, Hamshaw Thomas’ digitally manipulated photographs play with and reconfigure ideas of the historical and pictorial. With a colour palette inspired by the period, this body of photographic work is realised in four colour tints: Emerald, Pigeon Blood Ruby, Porcelain Blue and Antique Silver.
JENNY POCKLEY
London Eye – Blue (2019)
Oil on aluminium, 40 x 50 cm
Pockley is perhaps best known for her monumental cityscapes, where the structures and shapes of urban sprawl are seen in diffused or minimal light and soft shadow often through the hazy quality of twilight or from an unusual viewpoint. Her paintings are generic attempts at rendering the sublime, the ethereal, by means of thin layers of oil paint emanating from perfect surfaces, endowing them with an intrinsic luminosity.
Every canvas is a journey all its own.
Helen Frankenthaler
EMILY ALLCHURCH (front cover)
In the words of the Financial Times’ photography critic, Francis Hodgson, Emily Allchurch “has made herself a specialist in a kind of extreme collage.” Her starting point may be an old master painting by Bruegel, one of Piranesi’s prints of imaginary prisons or one of Hiroshige’s sublime Views of Edo. Using often hundreds of photographs, always taken herself in appropriate, yet present-day urban environments, she digitally recreates these masterpieces. However her seamless collages are never slavish copies; that is not the intention. Rather Allchurch reasserts, sometimes even subverts, contemporary life and culture by means of its re-evaluation through the template of past masters. Using lightboxes as a tool for their display suffuses the colour and heightens their immediacy.
All of the works can all be viewed online at Artsy: https://www.artsy.net/show/gbs-fine-art-vacation
Autumn programme at GBS Fine Art
The British Art Fair
Stand 52
Saatchi Gallery
London, SW3 4RW
28th September – 1st October 2023
Jeffrey Blondes Solo Show
1st Floor
13 Sadler Street
Wells
Somerset BA5 2RR
13th October – December 2nd 2023
Giles Baker-Smith & Tracey Grace GBS Fine Art
