I’ve just had an interview with Robert Priseman for his site. I’m feeling very honoured and rather privileged. As it happens the interviews he has collated feature many fine painters so I’m thinking I’m rather fortunate to be included.
Hortus Conclusus Scetis #4, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cms. 2024
As it happens this coincides with the first of my new body of work – Hortus Fabulus – leaving the studio to go to Assembly (see my last post). The painting is shown above and – in what I think is a first for Contemporary British Painting group – online for prospective purchasers!
As always working out what is (and isn’t) ready to go is causing me some issues…but the studio has rather a lot ‘on the go’!
Another work is going out of the studio…a rather rare event nowadays…the text introducing the show is:
Assembly is a compelling & timely exhibition curated to reflect a new geography of contemporary art practice as artists shift their focus away from the capital. Members of the artist-led group Contemporary British Painting come together from across the UK & Ireland with invited artists from Rye & the surrounding counties. Rye is uniquely situated at the mid-point of the creative artery that extends along the South Coast from Brighton to Margate linking important public art institutions, independent, & artist-led venues. Assembly creates a platform for engagement & dialogue with an exciting range of artists whose energy, & significant & diverse histories of making, animate this exhibition.
I’m in a good (and large!) company of: Susan Absolon, David Ainley, Hermione Allsopp, Iain Andrews, Amanda Ansell, Tom Banks, Karl Bielik, Claudia Böse, Day Bowman, Marius von Brasch, Julian Brown, Lesley Bunch, Matthew Burrows, Ruth Calland, Simon Carter, Jules Clarke, Susan Collis, Deb Covell, Lucy Cox, Gordon Dalton, Pen Dalton, Angelina Davis, Jeff Dellow, Lisa Denyer, Natalie Dowse, Nathan Eastwood, Geraint Evans, Ros Faram, The Baron Gilvan, Susan Gunn, Susie Hamilton, Alex Hanna, Marcus Harvey, Jeb Haward, Vincent Hawkins, Roland Hicks, Suzanne Holtom, Marguerite Horner, Dan Howard-Birt, Barbara Howey, Phil Illingworth, Linda Ingham, Rich Jellyman, Patrick Jones, Peter Jones, Ansel Krut, Bryan Lavelle, Andrew Litten, David Lock, Juliette Losq, Paula MacArthur, David Manley, Enzo Marra, Gavin Maughfling, Donna Mclean, Monica Metsers, Nicholas Middleton, Ruth Murray, Paul Newman, Stephen Newton, Sikelela Owen, Nicholas Pace, Kim L Pace, Joe Packer, Eugene Palmer, Stephen Palmer, Aimée Parrott, Mandy Payne, Barbara Pierson, Ruth Philo, Alison Pilkington, Narbi Price, Freya Purdue, Alessandro Raho, Richard Mark Rawlins, Tobit Roche, Greg Rook, Katherine Russell, Boo Saville, Maggie Scott, Clare Shoosmith, Stephen Snoddy, David Sullivan, Geraldine Swayne, Harvey Taylor, Sally Taylor, Molly Thomson, Ehryn Torrell, Casper White, Joanna Whittle, Sean Williams, Sharon Wylde, and Caroline Yates – phew!
I shan’t be at the Opening as I’m travelling home from Cornwall that day but hope to be at the Finissage on 18 May…pop along and say hello! I am exhibiting one of my new oils on canvas from the Hortus Fabulis series.
I’ve long since realised that few visitors to this page read much of the text…so I’ll cut to the chase first and then come back to it further on! Get in touch withTOM HILL and get a copy of The Cobbler’s Children Were the Worst Shod and make a donation to the BHF. Now read on…
Print 3 from OUT OF THE WOODS – A PAINTER’S VIEW My submission for the Masters in Photography at De Montfort University 2010
Well yes…usually I reserve commentary just to Painting. But the exception proves the rule. And so it is that I’m posting, just the once, some of the many ‘snaps’ I’ve taken over the past 50 plus years. I’ve never claimed to be a photographer, despite a decade or so back being awarded a Masters degree in the medium. Oddly enough the two years on that course was populated by Visiting Lecturers, quite a few of whom told us they had started out as Fine Art students! Nonetheless photography has simply been for me most of the time a tool rather than a medium for personal expression.
That said I’ve exhibited a few photographs over the years, either inserted into multimedia pieces or just occasionally (and almost exclusively) outside the UK. The most substantive show – Fotografische Werk – was one I organised at Harrington Mill (where I rented a studio for several years). Besides myself I showed work by Eva Bergenwall (a marvellous painter from Sweden), Anibal Lemos (a leading photographer from Portugal I met whilst he was a PG and then PhD candidate at Derby), Adela Miencilova from Czechia (a fellow student at De Montfort on the Masters course) and Eric Tistounet (who I came across the Web and turned out to be a big shot, no really a big shot UN guy, French but resident in Geneva). It’s worth repeating here (see below) the Intro panel I made for this exhibition. Little did I know how much self-harm we would do only a few years later – bloody Brexit!
Walking The Windy City, a banner work for Art on Armitage Chicago 2011
A student work, part performance documentation – couldn’t do it now…Health & Safety gone mad!
My early encounter with Photography came through the fantastic Darkroom at Falmouth School of Art, perched in the Attic of the old Kerris Vean building. John Wilkinson who ran it was incredibly generous and indulgent of us and let us play about, learning a little about the processes along the way. My experiments with multiple exposures and overlaying of negs and so on got me into the medium and encouraged me to see it as a valuable part of the tyro artist’s armoury.
SeaSides, one of the composite photos of seaweed made in the first week of my Diploma course at Falmouth – never figured a way to translate it onto canvas…
All the above comments bring me to the purpose of this post. A shameless plug for my friend and ex-colleague Tom Hill. A year or so back Tom posted 365 images with short texts online and has now produced a fantastic book collating forty of them (the ones that got the best feedback apparently though I recall plenty of others that were just as good). Although Tom is wizard at all the technical stuff I’ve no idea about and has a great eye for an image he also happens to be a really good writer(amongst other talents and vices!). The combination is compelling and the book a beauty. Get a copy and donate to the British Heart Foundation, a cause that both he and I have a reason to care greatly about.
Stroll On, a show I curated at Harrington Mill on the topic of walking with work by (far left) Ingrid Newton (a fellow student on my MA course) and (far right) Glen Stoker (from Airspace in Stoke) with my postcards and photo collages in between from the series Ex Terra Opes.
Below the text referred to above…
FOTOGRAFISCHE
This exhibition began life as the first of five group shows in the 2013 programme at Harrington Mill Studios, an artists studio collective in Long Eaton, near Nottingham in the Midlands of the United Kingdom. In these exhibitions I chose to place an aspect of my working practice into the wider context of activity in that medium or discipline. In thinking of my photographic pieces I was struck by the fact of most of them only being exhibited outside of the UK – most of them in other various parts of Europe.
The European dimension seemed important back in the winter when I began planning…now it seems to be everywhere. Indeed the whole European project is on fire, not only here in the UK (where it seems to have become quite unhinged) but across the continent as a whole. By bringing together artists from far flung parts of it I hoped to show a certain kind of solidarity, a sense of camaraderie and collective aspiration that had, one believed, become a solid and enduring feature of current art activity. Now maybe we cannot be so sure, and it’s not too fanciful to see this show as a defiant gesture, a stubborn refusal to accept a gathering orthodoxy.
We forget how far we’ve come – when I first took work to Germany back in the late 1970s we filled out nine separate pieces of triplicate paperwork and had the consignment custom sealed four times! Now I simply load up the boot and turn on the ignition – and needn’t stop till I reach Stockholm, Porto or Prague. That’s the practical aspect but it’s the connectivity and shared interests and aspirations that I find most inspirational. In my adult lifetime I have been privileged to experience and understand how much we have in common with one another right across our continent and to share ideas about art and life with people that a generation or two ago most likely I would never have met.
And yet, there are questions a plenty in the work on show about where Europe is and what it means to be a part of it. This is a group only in the sense that I am connected, in one way or another, to each of the participants. But all the work shown here has, I think, shared particularities. Firstly there is a definite and abiding passion for individuality, our own place in time and space, and secondly oblique references abound to environment concerns. Other than that I leave you to decide on meanings.
Exhibition curated by David Manley * fotografische werk – german meaning ‘photographic factory’ The exhibition was first exhibited at the Harrington Mill Studios, an artists space set up by Jackie & Jem Burridge in 2008, in an old textiles factory in Long Eaton, Nottingham, UK
Broughton Astley, oil on canvas board, 30 x 40 cms. March 2024 from the Harborough leg (Pleasant Country Aspect) of the Heart of Rural England series
A week or two lost to a brain fog accompanied by a walking problem (dodgy left foot!) saw me go ‘missing in action’. Trying to get back on the path to glory!!
Kings Norton, oil on canvas board, 30 x 40 cms. March 2024 from the Harborough leg (Pleasant Country Aspect) of the Heart of Rural England series
Still pushing on with this series…of course I’ll need to get the walking sorted to get the project moving again…
Tusci (unfinished), oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cms. 2024 a new series of paintings based on observations of small enclosed gardens…
I pretty much gave up figuration after my ‘a’ level composition study and barring a couple years in the 80’s (don’t ask) never returned. Of course there’s no such thing as abstraction really but usually any referents are buried deep in my pictures. But of late there seems to be some hints creeping back in.
Frolesworth, oil on canvas board, 30 x 40 cms. March 2024 from the Harborough leg (Pleasant Country Aspect) of the Heart of Rural England series.
Regular readers – ok viewers then! – know I make little – what? pictures, sketches, doodles? call ’em what you want… And that these get worked on in the dark mornings of winter. There are several sizes, and this gallery is of the latest in the Festive Geo’s – mostly made around – yep you guessed – the festive season. Mind this latest batch stretch the point having been put to bed in the last few days (though at my age Christmas seems like only yesterday!),
Burton Overy, oil on canvas board, 30 x 40 cms. 2024
ok then…not so pleasant! But this is Burton Overy from my most recent collection of paintings in The Heart Of Rural England series (running for well over a decade now!). This group are of the locations in the Harborough district of Leicestershire that I’ve titled ‘Pleasant Country Aspect’ – a phrase from the 1974 handbook describing the authority. It uses as source images culled from the gargoyles on the church there and the, rather abject, parish noticeboard. Both widely jazzed up by yours truly! I’ve five of this group completed with seven more on the go – and another thirty one to be visited, snapped and envisioned before I can move onto Hinckley & Bosworth, and beyond that, Blaby and Oadby & Wigston. It’s going to be a close run thing as to whether (at current rate of progress) I’ll ever get it finished!
Like most painters there are paintings knocking around the studio that somehow have never been fully resolved, or don’t ‘fit’ into whatever ideas or notions are going through your head. Even someone like me who has consciously avoided a ‘style or consistency’ tends to group work into ‘sets’ of some sort. And these mostly coalesce into bodies of work.
Above the Old Master’s Orange Lake, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cms. 2007
But then there are the oddities that haven’t quite ‘made it’. The Old Master’s Story is one such. I do recollect sending a couple to a show at a nearby gallery (the Beetroot’ in Draycott – now sadly closed) back in the early part of the last decade but otherwise the five completed, and the several very definitely not so, have languished in various studio locations since at least the mid nauties.
It’s not the only such group. Cold North was a group of six panels I produced to accompany my Epidemic! series (and both shown in the Angear Centre at Nottingham University’s Lakeside Arts Centre back in 2013) and a few years on I started a series of companion panels Hot South. Both were ‘portraits for’ conceits – in the first case of fictional Nordic detectives (Wallender, Hole, Sejer, Knutas, Erlendur, Beck) and in the second a corresponding group of Italian’s in the same vein. But that group has only got as far as five ‘tecs’ (Ferrara, Montalbano,Brunetti, Guarnaccia & Zen).
Zen, acrylic on reconstituted paper/cardboard, 98 x 48 cms. 2022
Zen of course is Dibden’s Aurelio Zen who I sometimes imagine as Michael Kitchen (he narrates the audio book editions wonderfully) but the painting is as always very divergent from the perceived source! I chose the substrate to reflect something of the chaotic and dyspeptic nature of the character…and it seems that – for once – I may be on the money as the latest NYC show roundup on HyperAllergic suggests cardboard is ‘in’ currently!
I’m not sure how or if some of these groups of works will ever be fully realised or will see the light of day away from the studio…but you never know…
Plainly Painting - David Manley 