Pendour Culture Archives -

INTO THE LABYRINTH

This is a written response to Steve Joy‘s solo exhibition ‘American Sublime’ at Garden of the Zodiac Gallery, Omaha, NE USA.

The exhibition began on 3rd October 2024 and closed 1st December 2024.

A m e r I c a n

S U B L I M E

I

Carlo Scarpa’s ‘Olivetti Showroom’ in Venice provided welcome shelter for artist Steve Joy as the chilly afternoon rain began to fall. Reflecting the mechanical components of a typewriter, the building’s architectural voids of empty space cocooned Steve’s latest idea – the concept of a new painting.

Angles, atriums, passageways and mezzanines all replete with Scarpa’s signature detailing aided the conception of Steve’s silver hued ‘An Afternoon in Venice, (Olivetti)’. The rhythmic form of the painting’s cubist, sculptural in-out pattern is reminiscent of urban infrastructure. The grooves of the work echo the voids of Scarpa’s design, like the notches of a key, complementary to a lock of the unknown and the unfamiliar.

Shining. Like the weak sunlight trapped within Saint Mark’s Square, raindrops glittering beneath the watchful gaze of Venice’s winged lion.

Meanwhile, the essence of the wild hills and towering castellos further south in Umbria are captured rather serenely in the painting ‘Architecture of Silence (Umbria)’. Radiant stripes and a regal section of magenta become harmonic stanzas to the silvery sections and earth-hued bronzes characterising this stately piece.

We may think of Medieval Icons, simply displayed in the soft hush of Perugia Museum. Aged and cracked. The Medici realm transposed to the time and place of another. The settings of Judea, Gethsemane and Galilee transferred to the manicured pastures of Medieval Italy. In a similar fashion, Steve’s painting transports the emboldened palettes of saints’ robes to a time and place both current and new, past and familiar to retell miraculous stories of Byzantine origin.

The horizontal bands of two-toned marble forming the flying buttresses and architectural supports of the Duoma di Siena find their own contemporary inversion in the stripes of the sunken section in Steve’s ‘Architecture of Silence (Umbria)’. Magnificent medieval architecture is reimagined in oil and gold leaf. This painting is a fitting if somewhat nostalgic response to Steve’s time living in Italy during the late 1980s, admiring the ambitious abstract painters of America from afar.

Located in a quiet, still corner at the back of Garden of the Zodiac Gallery a delicate piece fashioned from three shallow boxes – once lens cases of an unknown optician – floats on the wall as though a pale, soft cloud. Wisps of aqua intersperse the veils of porcelain white and brushed lettering of ‘St Francis of Assisi’, the title of the work. As fresh as a marble altar piece gleaming in a cavernous Basilica, this painting recalls the snowy white feathers of a dove, once preached to by Saint Francis himself.

Italian influences find a new sense of being in Omaha, a city which lies on the same latitude as Rome.

II

‘American Sublime’ may refer to the work of the Hudson Valley School. Painters such as Jasper Francis Copsey (1823 – 1900) and Stanford Robinson Gifford (1823 – 80) created large scale, panoramic landscape paintings to capture the seemingly boundless opportunities of ‘The New World’.

Stretching back to the British tradition of Romantic landscape painting as established by Constable and Turner amongst others, the ‘American Sublime’ not only rendered the grandeur of the native American landscape but suggested a sense of continuity. Principles of European visual culture from the ‘Old World’ could be linked to the frontiers of the ‘New’.

A once ‘unknown’ continent could be depicted so as to feel familiar by employing techniques of classical landscape painting. The use of exquisite luminosity and elegant graduations in light and tone recalled the Arcadian paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600 – 1682). Explorers and god-fearing settlers of this immense new continent could be depicted in paintings of the ‘American Sublime’ as though the heroic Grecian gods of a century before.

America’s pristine views and immense wilderness also enabled painters to blend notions of time with landscape. Past and present could stretch both forwards and backwards in such works, connecting Europe of the ‘past’ to ‘The New World’ of the ‘future’. Expressing national and cultural identity, ‘American Sublime’ paintings ensured self-preservation and engaged strong emotions. Spirituality was seen as enshrined within the natural world, reaching out beyond the seemingly ceaseless horizons to the west.

Described by Immanuel Kant as a ‘sort of tranquility tinged with terror,’ the concept of the ‘American Sublime’ finds contemporary relevance in Steve’s large scale paintings ‘Tlön’, ‘Orbis Tertius’ and ’Garden of Forking Paths’.

Whilst these paintings are titled after the short stories, the ‘Ficciones’, of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) in ‘Labyrinths’, their scale, sense of past merging with present and veil of otherworldliness are akin to the ‘American Sublime’.

III

In ‘Orbis Tertius’, the largest painting in the exhibition, horizontal bands of gold rest along the top of the focal, grid-like structure on canvas. More stripes lead downwards along the the left side of the work, collaborating with those above as though the trunk and overhanging branch of an ancient tree, its bark smoothed and golden in the glimmer of sunset.

Leaning a-symmetrically – simultaneously part of the painting yet also framing ‘Orbis Tertius’ – these zips of gold echo compositional techniques utilised by 19th century ‘American Sublime’ painters.

Literally and figuratively framing the canvas, these stripes of gold border the painterly layers like a crest, or illuminated lettering surrounding a Book of Hours. Steve’s use of gold leaf and varnish is technically inspired by Byzantine Icon paintings.

Glowing, as if to denote sunrise or clouds parting during the hour of sun down, ‘Orbis Tertius’ merges the Eastern shores of the ancient Byzantine world with the historical and ideological frontier of the west.

The central canvas section of the painting unfolds before our eyes, as though a creased map from Lewis’ and Clark’s expedition. Bars of soft blue and deep gold rise and fall. Offering no clear route, are these blocks of colour sign posts as to the way, or obstacles along a mysterious pathway? Mirrored and mazed, our eyes follow these ‘corridors of time’, these ladders and angular roads that fork and split.

A labyrinth of paint. A labyrinth of Time. Sometimes pushed into the background, like the wispy forms of a medieval church mural surrounded by tromp l’oeil, these markings converse with one another. These sensitively painted layers – sometimes rubbed away and brushed over – recall the speckled and fragmented remains of a medieval fresco buried beneath centuries of plaster.

‘Orbis Tertius’ shares its title with that of the ‘provisional title’ of an encyclopaedia. This encyclopaedia details the ‘splendid history’ of an illusionary world – the fabled planet of Tlön – as told in the short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ by Borges.

Translated into English, this encyclopaedia was originally written in one of the invented languages of the planet Tlön. In Borges’ short story we as readers are informed by the narrator that the extraordinary undertaking of creating a fabled planet with its own rules, laws, literature and languages took a secret society of intellectuals many years to achieve.

Steve presents us with a possible visualisation of this peculiar encyclopaedia and all its contents in the form of a magnificent abstract painting. We wonder within this subliminal landscape, in the artist’s labyrinth. Like the narrator in ‘The Library of Babylon’ or the dreamer who is a fragment of a dream in ‘The Circular Ruins’ we are caught within the weaving, winding trails of Borges’ imaginings.

Steve’s ‘Orbis Tertius’ is simultaneously an alphabet, a mathematical equation of endless variables and a depiction of an illusionary place, symbolising its history and philosophy. An imagined past of a distant dream merges with the nodes of the present moment. Although features such as a frame bare resemblance to an overhanging tree, the zig-zag contours a maze or the grid of a map, we instead find ourselves within a labyrinth of the sublime.

IV

The calming palette of ‘Tlön’ draws any passer-by in to the gallery from the passageway outside. Minimal and mediative, there is a clear link to the soothing vision of Agnes Martin. Another grid-like form, akin to mysterious runes plotted upon a piece of fabric, inhabit this pink blushed realm. In a similar fashion to Steve’s ‘Orbis Tertius’ painting, oblong marks of gold, white and bronze this time formulate an angular path spreading outwards from the centre of the pink plane. Once again, these markings and pathways control the eye’s route of passage across the lullabying field of pink.

Even the subtle pencil lines echo the early works of Larry Poons. This alternative network is a fainter though no less significant matrix contributing to the overall web of meaning and the labyrinth’s gravity.

A striped edge of white and gold on the left side of the painting becomes a sort of gauge, of distance or time perhaps, or both, or neither, or some other qualifying measurement of Tlön’s being. A striped blind or a curtain pulled away to reveal a portal to another world. This two-tone measuring device offers a sense of proportion to the other linear forms of the work.

Reflecting the tension and complexity of a narrative by Borges, we come to accept the hidden meaning of Steve’s painting.

The existence of the planet of Tlön is justified by Borges in his short story. Through the discovery of a strange compass, books and a bizarre dense metal cone, the world of Tlön is subtly inserted into our ‘own’ world within the story’s narrative. In the same way Steve’s painting radiates an otherworldly energy into ours’.

Could Steve’s painting be a epilogue to Borges’ narrative, a further piece of evidence proving the existence of the apparently illusionary planet of Tlön?

We are transported to a curious dimension where what is real and what is unreal; what is fact and fiction; what has been painted and what has been rubbed away from the surface of the canvas all congruously exist. We fall into and through these many layers of meaning and circumstance as if in a sci-fi film. Our fall is cushioned only by the very existence of this painted labyrinth.

The work’s complementary accents become more than a mere visualisation of an illusionary place. They become the exact and yet approximate world of Tlön itself. A world which exists only in the existence of another. A fictitious labyrinth within a work of fiction. Or a painting within a gallery.

Borges’ Tlön gradually becomes the world and the world gradually becomes the fabled planet of Tlön. As such, we approach Steve’s painting with a sense of the Sublime. In the calm tranquility of acceptance and the metaphysical terror of intrusion from an otherworldly dimension, we receive Steve’s pink-hued painting as a portrayal of the ‘New World’ of our contemporary – and possibility even illusionary – age.

V

Curves and angles perform a choreographed dance both ascending and descending along the central axis of the painting ‘Garden of Forking Paths’. Lines and parabolas echo the brick archways of the Gallery space.

Steve began this painting following a trip to the railroad town of McCook in western Nebraska. The influence of the region’s green corn fields is evident in the soft toned palette and columnar format of the work, reflecting the rows and rows of vertically growing stalks in the American Midwest. A landscape of the Sublime.

Reflecting the mechanics of an unknown object, such as the ribbons of an Olivetti typewriter, the work even calls to mind the pillars and archways of a viaduct. The engineering wonders of the railway swiftly and radically transformed American life. A more connected and accessible ‘New World’ is perhaps represented by the columns and curves of a railroad swooping across a vast plain, possibly symbolised in the green backdrop of the painting. Echoing established conformities of the ‘American Sublime’ and the influence of earlier artists such as Claude Lorrain, the constructed yet fragmented feel of Steve’s painting may even recall the ancient Roman Aqueducts found across Italy and the rest of Europe.

Dappled, like soft rays floating in through a stained glass window, the overall feel of the piece is delicate and mysterious. Gold lines frame the left side of the work; this is repeated on the right, though no enclosure is constructed. The lines are left open as though an entry way on an architectural plan. These partial borders, reflected in the painting ‘Orbis Tertius’ almost enable ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ to take on the form of a modernist style window. A window of a Scarpa design, overlooking a garden home to paths that twist and fork.

Borges’ short story The Garden of Forking Paths tells of a secret agent’s last hours as he fulfils an assassination mission. Full of suspense and drama, the short story plays out almost like a thriller, the hunter becoming the hunted.

The narrator discovers his target, Albert, lives in a Garden constructed by his own ancestor, Ts’ui Pên. Albert reveals Ts’ui Pên’s perplexing compositions – a circular book and maze. Yet the twist in this story is that the book and the maze are one and the same. The first page of the book is the same as the last page, making Ts’ui Pên’s book as chaotic and complicated as a maze. This incomplete but not false image of the universe is imagined and visualised by Steve in this painting.

The diverting lines and painted lanes of Steve’s ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ take on a more complex meaning. Each mark may represent a divulging future, a universe splitting at a particular time as a choice is made or an event occurs. Therefore, it is a painting representing variations of shifting timelines. Yet, here, as with Ts’ui Pên’s circular book, the forking paths represent the idea that every single option in a given moment occurs, leading to the generation of new paths that fork themselves. . .

Within this sublime view – whether from a window, or the pages of a circular book – is a lost maze of time. Rivers, provinces and kingdoms may be discovered within this painted velvet. Flooded, washed away and rebuilt, great landscapes of continents and sublime mountain ranges within gardens all reside within this painted construction. An infinite labyrinth engineered to spread between the future and past, reaching beyond the stars. A universe within a maze within a garden.

Just how the answer to Ts’ui Pên’s perplexing compositions are revealed in Borges’ short story in the danger of a secret mission, Steve presents us with an idea of sublime grandeur. We are presented with the very notion of something being beyond our control. Across centuries and centuries events only happen in the present moment, just as ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ finds itself inside a gallery with a garden – the Garden of the Zodiac Gallery.

Pendour Picks

Heath Hearn : ‘By This River’

Solo exhibition at the Russell Gallery, Putney

Healing Artworks of the April Sampson Cancer Centre

Pendour Culture, Linda Bell

Zamas Hotel, Tulum

Pendour Wanderlust

Instagram

09 - 10 - 2409 - 10 - 24

‘ ATCG ‘ – Artistry, Time, Colour, Gold

‘ATCG’ is a four part piece of writing about the work of abstract painter Steve Joy. Linda Bell was invited to share her thoughts on Steve’s work as part of the ‘Seasons’ exhibition at Maple Street Construct in Omaha, Nebraska USA.

The four sections of ‘ATCG’ represent the four Seasons, the four points of the compass and the four base pairs of DNA.

The exhibition at Maple Street Construct will continue until 1st December 2024.

- A -

A r t i s t r y

The life of an artist can often be a convoluted one. We need only to look upon Zola’s novel ‘L’Oeuvre’ (The Masterpiece) to appreciate the sacrifice and devotion required to satisfy the muse. That, and to scale the lofty heights of the seemingly ungraspable realisation of artistic vision.

From serving in Britain’s Royal Air Force, flying from far-flung locations, such as Addu Atoll in the Maldives, Singapore and Cyprus, to competing at the Common Wealth Games as a track cyclist, the life lived by that of abstract painter Steve Joy has involved many chapters.

Whilst on leave in Amsterdam, Steve experienced an exhibition of Barnett Newman’s striped paintings. This in part inspired Steve to become an artist and to follow in the footsteps of those such as Agnes Martin, with her delicate colour palette, sense of divine simplicity and steadfast approach to artistry.

Despite the risks associated with being an artist: financial insecurity, intermittent recognition within the artworld itself, the notion of existing at the very edge of society and orbiting its endless margins, Steve embarked on seven years of intense study. From the UK’s Cardiff, Exeter and Chelsea Schools of Art to receiving a Cheltenham Scholarship, Steve was awarded a Monbusho Fellowship and exchanged stable representation with the Lisson Gallery for an opportunity to study in Kyoto, Japan.

Early exhibitions saw Steve display his Sunstone paintings alongside work by Andy Goldsworthy at the Serpentine Gallery in London. However, the fashion for minimal painting encouraged Steve to forge an alternative path. A path leading to deep investigation of visual culture from the past to imbue his work with layers of contemporary and historical references.

A sort of Grand Tour entailed. Steve lived in Italy; Bruges, Barcelona as well as Scandinavia where he taught as a professor and department head in both Trondheim and Bergen Academies of Arts, and then as a Professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Caen, France.

Each location offered Steve the opportunity to experience the great art and architecture of the Byzantine Age and Medieval Realms – windows into a pre-renaissance world – in person. Regular exhibitions at Galerie Storrer in Zurich along with Museum shows in Norway ensured Steve continued to develop his work within the shifting frameworks of contemporary cultural perspectives throughout these many relocations.

Arriving in the United States to be a Guest Curator at the Bemis provided Steve with the support and patronage to further his practice, with time also spent in New York through association with Ruth Siegal Gallery.

For the last 20 years or so, Steve has been based in Omaha, his Icon-inspired paintings well known throughout the mid-west and beyond, featuring in Collections such as the NYC Public Library, the Phillip Shrager Collection, the United States National Collection in Washington D.C., the Joslyn Museum,the Orpheum Opera House and HDR.

With the major retrospective exhibition ‘Uncreated Light’ hosted at the Joslyn Museum in 2008 and a 10 year survey organised at Sioux City Art Centre in 2018, Steve has also exhibited at the Willa Catha Foundation and the Art Bank in McCook. ‘Seasons’ is his second show here at Maple Street Construct.

Creativity is innovation and Steve has always been pushing the boundaries of what a painting is and should be. And to that end what it means to be an artist during the Anthropocene and the age of A.I. Steve’s abstract works trace their origins back towards the crux of ancient civilisations, exploring the value of our human history and fulfilling the artist’s responsibility: to invite us to look afresh and discover a deeper meaning to the stories of the past.

- t -

T I M E

An insect crawls across the expanse of a shiny green leaf.

Someone leaps into the inky waters of a lake.

Sheaves of golden grains whisper, dancing in the breeze.

A grey pebble swoops down the side of a cliff to rest upon a ledge for a million years.

Four seasons. Four compass points. Four classical elements. Four base pairs of DNA. Across four decades Steve has practiced and taught the alchemy of Art.

Each of the four different coloured panels of ‘The Seasons’ not only represent the quarterly changes punctuating the annual climatic cycle, but may embody four different places in which the artist has lived and worked. Distinct locations may be suggested by the tones of soft green, warm yellow ochre, cool slate and thunderstorm blue hue. Heading East, from the American Midwest to the UK, on to Norway and south towards the Mediterranean, each coloured panel suggests the passing of time as defined by different geographical regions.

‘The Seasons’ can be interpreted as a record of the artists’ own movements through Time and Space, across Oceans and Continents, a transnational appeal from a lifetime of travel and search. Yet these records, akin to layers of rock strata, equally exist in the present moment and reach back through Time to the once-present ‘Now’.

Like a quartet of Neolithic stelae – inscribed with hand carved messages and whittled down over centuries to smooth, even frail flatness – or mysterious Celtic standing stones indicating the passage of the firmament’s astral beings – the harmonious composition of four panels gives the impression of musical notes set to the grid-like lines of a stave.

Interspersed with the promise of a golden half-silence, a bass drone, or a spinal chord of gold – a connective hinge of threaded light – these gaps, or margins, offer a rhythmic pattern. A bridge between different shades of verses. As regularly spaced as a metronome’s even swing, these golden sections traverse the close distance between these separate components marking time and space.

With our ability to see only the effects of time, such as cracks gathering in the varnish of a thirteenth century Icon painting, could Steve’s ‘The Seasons’ be a way to visualise what we cannot see – the ‘Fourth Dimension’ of Time?

Steve’s signature stripes and squares are reduced to singular blocks of colour, the underlayers of Cubism, or the rules of a coded pattern. A pattern reflecting the structure of DNA as its spiral unwinds for the process of Transcription. Each of the four coloured panels could be considered as representing one of the base pairs of DNA:

– Adenine, frequently represented as ‘A’;

– Thymine or ‘T’ which pairs with A;

– Cytosine, coded as ‘C’ which can form hydrogen bonds with

– ‘G’ or Guanine.

With our contemporary sense of strict order, pixelated imagery and streamed sound, the painting rests like a representation of an unravelled strand of DNA – life’s, and Time’s – rulebook. We are invited by Steve to look and to consider the complex marvel of our own essence.

Meanwhile, The three smaller panels of gold act like the structural phosphate sugar bonds between the base pairs of DNA. Like the rabbit-skin glue of a portrait; the Punctun notes of a Gregorian Chant Notation, or a quantum time-space equation, these clasps of gold fuse the four separate entities together and create meaning within the entropic ether. Sense is drawn from chaos, and truth plucked from the void.

Steve reveals a process of divine geometry, but is it enough to carry the poetry of the passing of Time and the changing Seasons?

In Borges’ short story ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, the imagined country of Uqbar has a history of legends which tell of Tlon, an imagined planet where no sense of past, present or future exists. Only the ‘now’ can be perceived. Books, a compass, coins and a dense metal cone inexplicably materialise in the ‘real’ world of the story’s narrative having broken through from the imaginary planet. The ‘real’ world of the story gradually becomes Tlon itself. Steve’s painting ‘Uqbar’ offers a plausible impression of this fictional country. Just as the strange artefacts from Tlon transcend Time and travel from an imagined past to a pre-conceived future, Steve’s painting of ‘Uqbar’ echoes Borge’s fictitious sense of Timelessness and paradoxically becomes Time itself.

- C -

C o l o u r

Neither stone, nor quite marble, pollen, foliage or rainstorm in tone, the canvas panels of ‘The Seasons’ become foundations, perfectly proportioned rectangles of pure, almost uniform colour inviting us to enter a trance-like state.

Waterbound Blue, Stonebound Grey,

Earthbound Green, Lightbound Yellow.

A colour symbiosis is attained, striking a cool and harmonious neutrality. Steve takes his cue from the early abstract paintings of Brice Marden. We think of Marden’s planes of meditative shades in works such as ‘Nebraska’, Steve’s own expansive investigations into colour a search for meaning from tonality. As such, the very colours of ‘The Seasons’ become a sort of homage, a tribute to the feel and spiritual quality of Marden’s vision.

Even Marden’s technique has been revisited by Steve. A little melted wax was stirred into the wet paint before being brushed and smoothed. See how the wax pools across the surface?

Like the resistance of a drum skin, yet restrained in richness. Evoking the light and classical radiance of a Grecian reverie.

The serenity of the colours in ‘The Seasons’ are contrasted by the tension evoked in the painting ‘Uqbar.’

A field of brown velvet – neither buffalo hide nor cavernous lair – recedes into the background as mysterious and brooding as the aura of an Aztec burial ground or a sacrificial Mayan Temple. You can see the beads of Terpinol, like summer’s dew, its humid breath resting on buds and leaves, or rain spots quivering on a mammal’s fur.

The curves and layered lines of bitumen, copper and silver hover ghost-like, as the gestures of a secret language – perhaps one such as exists in Borges fanciful ‘Tlon’…. Yet this is no random arrangement. Each coloured mark is carefully considered, the tones of brass and reflective shine restrained for an almost hypnotic effect. We may think of the narrator of Borges’ short story: perplexed and even a little disorientated by the discovery of coins, a compass and a metal cone from a so called ‘imaginary’ place.

And that little spot of red!

A reminder of JMW Turner’s antics at the 1832 RA Summer Exhibition. So as not to be ‘upstaged’ by Constable’s scarlet flecked bridge scene, Turner astonished the crowds by adding a bright red buoy to his fresh-toned Helvoetsluys Seascape, entirely altering the work’s perspective. This little daub of red jolts the rich shades of Steve’s picture into focus.

The sumptuous regal red and dazzling gold of ‘Cope Robe (Perugia)’ find their origins in a priest’s vestment Steve saw in an exhibition of sacred textiles in Bern, Switzerland.

Commissioned for St Margaret Mary’s Church in Omaha, the richly textured application of red paint – with a hint of magenta – shimmers like silk. The memory of seeing a religious artefact of the sixteenth Century is transposed into a contemporary work of symbolic spirituality. From the colour of roses, of love, to the shade of blood and sacrifice, the colour red perhaps owes its longstanding appeal in works of art to the early hunter gatherers. From the ceiling of the Red Horses and parietal boars and bison which roam the Cave complex of Altamira in Spain (dating from C. 34,000 BC) to the red rock carvings of Alta in the far north of Norway (created c. 5000 BC) the colour red can be associated with the earliest forms of image making.

In the wittily titled ‘Barbara Hepworth’s Cimabue’ a frame of pastel pink surrounds an ambiguous form as though a slide enveloping a scientific specimen.

When based in Italy, Steve lived not far from Assisi, its Basilica walls adorned with Medieval frescoes by Cimabue and Giotto. Whilst Steve’s pink-burst enclosure calls to mind the crenelated turrets of Giotto’s pink infused castellos and buildings, it also makes reference to Cimabue’s remarkable fresco ‘The Crucifixion of St Paul.’ Depicting the Saint’s upside-down fate, the colours of this fresco in Assisi have faded and disintegrated over the centuries to reveal areas of bare pink-hued plaster beneath.

Steve has inverted Cimabue’s topsy-turvey crucifixion scene so that the cross shape represents a golden plinth, holding up the central canvas insert.

Imbuing the quiet stillness of a Dutch still-life painting, a mysterious form rests in the middle of Steve’s work as though a tactile object laid upon a pink tablecloth. Spilling out around the central motif, Matisse-like, this pink table setting swerves the rules of perspective, the pink expanse stretching back so as to be absorbed by the wall behind. Orange streaks (Schnabel-esque) appear like patterns in the fabric. A painting such as Matisse’s ‘Still Life with Pink Tablecloth’ (1924-5) is brought to mind, the patterns of the cloth even echoing Giotto’s turreted forms in the Assisi frescoes.

Meanwhile, coiling, fossil like, the central form in Steve’s painting can be viewed as an ode to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth; a post-war pioneer of Abstraction, based in St Ives, Cornwall, not far from Steve’s birthplace. Whilst the enigmatic form recalls shells or bones, the ink lines of tension are borrowed from the sculptural forms of Hepworth herself.

Steve’s layers of thin bronze paint echo Cimabue’s ageing frescos; you can see the canvas beneath – like a tear in the fabric of a pink patterned tablecloth.

The force of abstraction bursts through the stucco-like backdrop of pink as through a seismic tremor. We first meet Cimabue in Vasari’s ‘Life of the Painters’ (1550) at a time when all of Italy trembled from earthquakes, just as its historic pink toned buildings have been shaken in more recent years.

Medieval frescoes meet 1920s Provence meets post-war St Ives, meets contemporary Omaha in a pink paradise.

- G -

G O L D

The two mirrored motifs of gold in ‘Cope Robe (Perugia)’ float like hieroglyphics on an ancient Egyptian tablet. Angular with curving bases, the forms appear almost archaic in character, like the cheek guards of a Roman Centurion’s helmet, or the metal remains of a Viking’s shield, exposed in red earth during an archaeological excavation. Symbolic in stature, the two separate forms could even be the insignia of a secret society. There is a suggestion that these two halves of gold are reaching out towards one another, stretching to try and touch; an embrace across a red divide of Time. But could these forms, in their armour-like stance also be seen as majestic wings?

The golden wings of Icharus perhaps?

As in Ovid’s own words of ‘Metamorphosis,’ these heraldic components of gold, shimmering behind layers of varnish, morph into the wings of Daedalus’ invention. Fashioned from feathers and wax, Daedalus devised one pair for himself and one for his son Icharus so that they could fly away to escape captivity.

Consequently, the ink lines in the centre of the pink hued Cimabue painting take on a different role. Daedalus’ creations were supposedly so life-like that they invariably came to life and had to be tied down – the ink lines of ‘Barabara Hepworth’s Cimabue’ could now be seen as lines of entrapment, rather like Gulliver, pinned down by the people of Lulliput. We notice how the abstract form in the centre of Steve’s pink field is so full of life that it has come alive….. And wait, those same diagonal lines appear like tethers, crossing the gold patina of these winged forms too!

Joni Mitchell’s reference to ‘Icarus ascending’ in ‘Amelia’, conjures Icarus’ tragic fall into the depths of the Sea after flying too close to the Sun and joins Cope Robe Perugia in retelling a Greek myth in a contemporary way. Tragedy, desire and hubris are explored through the language of American Abstraction as the soft glow of Byzantium gold embeds another layer of meaning into the work.

Considering Steve’s frequent use of wax in his Icon inspired paintings and in those such as ‘The Seasons’ – not forgetting his own frequent travels – could these even be the wings of the artist himself?

Steve’s own means of escape not to the Sun, or to the blue of the Icarian Sea, or even to the pull of the equator, but an escape from the everyday to discover a new sense of elevated spirituality? The wax of Daedalus’ wings is transformed into gold, into the golden radiance of the Sun itself.

Steve’s use of Japanese gold leaf suspended in time under layers of honey-like varnish does not replace Nature or the Spiritual with the gilded decoration of lavish excess. The material splendour of Steve’s paintings is more akin to the vibrant veils of the Northern Lights, the golden shades of untarnished brilliance – the gold of the night’s sky.

The painted surface is imbued with Nature and Spirituality, the enchanting appeal of the mysterious and the sacred. An access point, a window or a portal to a place of transformation is offered. Whether to the Elysian Fields of the Greek gods, the Vikings’ Valhalla, or the uncreated light of our own dreams and searching, the impossibility of the architecture of flight is tethered and presented to us in the form of a memory of a golden robe.

One of my paintings is also exhibited in ‘Seasons’.

You can view more of my work here.

pENDOUR PICKS

Healing Artworks of the April Sampson Cancer Centre

Pendour Culture – Linda Bell

Heath Hern : ‘By This River’

Solo Exhibition, The Russell Gallery, Putney

Pendour Culture – Linda Bell

Juntar Muntar

Wanderlust – Linda Bell

Instagram

06 - 08 - 2406 - 08 - 24

HEALING ARTWORKS OF THE APRIL SAMPSON CANCER CENTRE

A NEW APPROACH

What do we think of when we consider the healing power of hospitals?

We may reflect on the care and comfort offered by doctors, the attentive nurses and helpful staff; their understanding and expertise as we place our trust in their hands.

But what about the hospital environment itself? The very walls and windows, corridors and waiting rooms where treatment is administered and the path to recovery and healing begins?

What if the very setting of a hospital could help facilitate the all too often long and challenging journey along that path? What if art and a connection with Nature – aids to contemplation of the miraculous and the invisible – could be instrumental supports along the path to healing?

In Lincoln Nebraska, the April Sampson Cancer Centre recently opened its doors, welcoming patients and their loved ones to an innovative setting, quite unlike any other. All treatment stages from diagnosis to rehabilitation are streamlined and personalised, consolidated under one roof as opposed to fragmented across numerous separate facilities. The Centre’s integration of the Healing Arts and multi-disciplinary approach ensures for enhanced wellbeing and moments of sensitive, spiritual awakening.

The 140,000 square foot facility, which has been named after April Sampson, a local entrepreneur who lost her life to cancer, is built on 28 acres to the south of Lincoln gifted by her family. Offering cutting edge technology and highly advanced treatment options, the Centre also provides patients and their families with support to navigate all that cancer care involves from the meditation and multi-faith chapel to the café, spa and rehabilitation therapy studio.

Led by Doctor Mark Stevas, a Radiologist and Oncology specialist from Lincoln, the project took over six years to come to fruition. A keen guitar player, Dr Stevas has produced several films for Pallidocs demonstrating the importance of the Healing Arts for the personal wellbeing of those who are receiving end of life care in their fight against cancer.

THE SETTING

The Centre’s low-lying, sweeping silhouette follows the typography of the local landscape. Whilst the entrance façade blends in with the gentle rolling hills of the surrounding geography, the inside boasts expansive walls of glass, across two storeys in some places. This maximises the panoramic views of the Nebraskan sky and Great Plains. The site’s pond, meadow glades and forest groves integrate with the inside, providing a deep visual connection with Nature. Geese, ducks, birds and the occasional cow inhabit this seasonally changing picture plane.

Ballinger’s eloquent architecture is reminiscent of Le Corbusier. An emphasised overhang not only shades treatment rooms from bright sunlight but offers a sophisticated and contemporary feel. Met with views of the tranquil scenery even from the entrance foyer, a splice of skylights running along a seam in the ceiling draws attention to the grand descending staircase and vistas beyond. ‘There is a crack in everything’ and this symbolic fissure certainly allows the light in.

Designed from the perspective with the patients’ and care providers’ needs in mind, many areas are bathed in natural sunlight whilst the flowing, almost ‘open plan’ feel means that navigating between the designated areas elevates the patient experience.

THE ART OF GENEROSITY

With artworks by over 16 artists spread throughout the Centre – there is yet more to come as the Healing Gardens with sculptures are developed – the generosity of local donors and sponsors is evident. Whilst many donated artworks have been acquired on a commission basis and carefully curated, other pieces have been bequeathed by the artists themselves, all serving to create a unique and moving setting. Colour, texture, materiality and visual sublimity coalesce to provide inspiration and positivity for the hospital’s staff and strength, contemplation and hope to patients and their loved ones.

GREAT MINIATURES

The delicate and extraordinary detailed graphite drawings of Lincoln-based Francisco Souto grace the walls of the waiting room area. His ‘Poetics of Recognition’ respond to the experience of living in the middle of the Great Plains. The vastness of sky and distant horizon are captured and become intimate; the individual trees, grain silos and barns are rendered with enticing detail from restrained observation. Framed within stripes of colourful air-brushed precision, the minute scale of Souto’s ‘Great Plainscapes’ humbly embed themselves within the mind’s eye, furthering the Centre’s connection to the surrounding environment.

CORNFIELDS AND CANVAS

Souto’s ‘Poetics of Recognition’ are accompanied in the entrance area by Omaha artist Thomas Prinz’s ‘Platte River Valley.’ Soothing stripes of yellow and blue are based on photographs of nearby cornfields. Fields of colour and texture are segmented with crisp outlines and dividing passages. The artist has fused photographs of the region’s landscape with the aesthetic appeal of the edges of paintings layered up one on top of another. Sculpturally stacked, the canvas flanks reveal the accidental: the unexpected overspills, barely-there details and drips of the painting process. Digitalised and colour edited, the images have been torn by hand into delicate strips. These ribbons of colour have been collaged and composed in a vertical arrangement in an all-over mode, the original images fragmented and reassembled, made anew in to a hybrid state.

Overlapped and layered, the hidden and the concealed is only glimpsed through the bars of the foreground, what is ‘seen’ and effectively ‘unseen’ recedes and emerges, the bands of lemon yellow interspersed with white and orange against the watery blue.

Reminiscent of SMPTE colour test patterns, once used for adjusting the focus, tuning, shading and curvature of an analogue picture – Tom’s bands of colour perhaps share an affinity with the reassurance of such organised structure, yet seek to reflect the essence and spirit of place. Softening and welcoming, the work provides a therapeutic quality, almost meditative in aura.

WRINKLED MIRROR

Upon reaching the twist of the great descending staircase on route to the rehabilitation area, one is not only met with the impressive views of the Midwestern landscape, but a horizontal band of crumpled, shining silver, split into three separate panels almost floating across the entire span of the wall.

Although at first glance this may appear to be a fragment of an Apollo spacecraft, it is in fact a ‘Wrinkled Mirror,’ the sleek, incidental work of Christopher Prinz. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Chris’ oeuvre ranges from furniture to chandeliers and can be found in major fashion house showrooms, his luxury-meets-semi-industrial-style favoured by the likes of Louis Vuitton.

A spider’s web of criss-crossing fold lines force the sheet of aluminium away from the 2D flatness of a traditional wall piece and into the 3D realms of the sculptural and the physical. Lunar-like, the piece has an otherworldly, dreamscape presence, the wrinkles formed from the smoothness of the metal like crinkles in newly washed sheets or the creases of unmade bed linens. The silvery shade of raw, untreated aluminium takes on a moon like quality, heightening an aesthetic similarity to DuPont’s Kapton Foil.

Celebrated for its thermal protection qualities, Kapton Foil has been an essential ingredient for space exploration since the Apollo 11 Missions. Utilised in the thermal shielding of astronauts’ space suits, the durability of Kapton Foil has been integral to survival in the harsh conditions of outer Space. With an ability to withstand temperatures from -269°C (-452°F) to 400°C (752°F), the aluminumized polyimide has enabled exploration into unchartered territories. ‘Wrinkled Mirror’ therefore encourages patients to consider their own personal journey into the unknown and the uncertain from a new perspective; an exploration into their own vast sense of being so as to find a way to sustain the difficulties of a diagnosis.

We fight the irresistible urge to touch Chris’ handiwork. To push out all of the folds and smooth them flat, as though the artwork were a larger-than-life piece of tinfoil, characterised with ghostly traces of former crumpling, just as a Medieval fresco is veined by scattered surface cracks.

In the same way that crinkly space blankets are used to retain heat in athlete’s bodies we perhaps re-imagine the work as a sort of protective blanket; it seems desirable to wrap up, shelter and comfort all who pass through the Centre for treatment in a blanket formed from a flattened, as-yet-uncreated version of ‘Wrinkled Mirror.’

Not only protecting Space explorers from the extremes of heat, Kapton Foil maximises radiation reflection, meaning Chris’ artwork holds a specific poignancy as a work of art commissioned for and installed within an oncology setting.

The silver front and gold backing of Kapton Foil which coats Space capsules usually disintegrates upon re-entry to the Earth’s orbit. Small fragments are collected by recovery crew as momentous, souvenirs as reminders of human ingenuity and bravery. ‘Wrinkled Mirror’ perhaps shares an affinity with this and the desire to cling on to what has saved and protected life out in the unknown.

Split into three smaller sections, the folds have been painstakingly mirrored across the divide. A single wrinkle can be followed from the left panel on to the central one, just as a crease on the far right panel can be traced back to the central section. Endless reflections bounce off from this multi-faceted surface. From the water ripples skimming the silvery lake opposite to the red glow of the Exit signs above, Chris’s Mirror provides a unique reflection of the April Sampson Centre’s interior and surroundings.

Whilst the piece both reflects and generates a fragmented version of the landscape view, the piece is a landscape within itself. The bent and creased sections form valleys and troughs, mountain peaks and cirques, in which the mind can hike and wander, as if in a mountain range or maze. A connection, perhaps, to the artist’s own enjoyment of the outdoors and sense of adventure.

As we study these gorges and crevasses, our own reflections are also captured in this lunar-esque landscape. A little like a Francis Bacon portrait, our faces and bodies appear repeated and contoured. The crinkles and creases of ‘Wrinkled Mirror,’ may even be related to the complex, symbolic patterns of unearthed Bronze Age burial or ritual mirrors, such as the Desborough and Portesham Mirrors (c. 50BCE, 1ADE). Prized for their reflective qualities at a time when only water revealed a glimpse of what one looked like, it is thought that such hand-held mirrors enabled communication with the deceased and offered connection between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Chris’ contemporary ‘Wrinkled Mirror’ therefore provides an opportunity to look beyond the Self to Space exploration, human ingenuity and spiritual rituals of the past. The infinite reflections offered by this Mirror invite viewers to look afresh at a certain situation – to see what is beyond the wrinkled crumples on the surface – and find deeper meaning from a new perspective.

Earthline

The majestic red and gold glow of Steve Joy’s ‘Earthline’ has a magnetic presence. Installed along the main corridor stretching between treatment zones, the opulent and powerful palette attracts our gaze. Cloaked in gold and silver leaf veiled behind layers of shellac varnish, the physicality of the artwork enables viewers to enter an ethereal place.

Reaching backwards through the centuries, to the time of Byzantine principles of image making, ‘Earthline’ takes its lead from the sacred function of Medieval Icon painting and the pre-invention of perspective prior to the Renaissance.

‘Earthline’ offers a contemporary interpretation on the sacred art form of early Icon paintings. Marrying traditional, sustainable materials such as wood, gold leaf, beeswax, inks and shellac varnishes with visual concepts of the contemporary age, Steve’s painting is a feast for the eyes and a tonic for the heart. Repeated colours and gloss-like textures provide moments for the eye to linger and get lost in.

We may think of stories such as the Icon of Panagia Hozoviotissa. Invasions in the Middle East in the eighth century meant
that this precious Icon had to be saved by being floated out in an unmanned boat into the unknown waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The Icon eventually made landfall on the Greek Island of Amorgos, where a Monastery, dating from the eleventh century, has been carved into a cave on a precarious cliff face in recognition of the Icon’s new beginning in a new place. Steve’s ‘Earthline’ recalls the divine mystery of such events.

The artist masterfully fuses Religious Eastern European visual culture with the full force of ambitious American Abstraction. The ‘human’ scale of a traditional Icon painting has evolved and developed into the proportions of an entire church nave whilst the Byzantine resemblance of saints has been purified through abstraction into blocks of colour and texture. The individual identities of saints are transposed into universally aesthetic bands of gold and mineral based paint. Squares and stripes of earthy, terrain-hued browns bleed into the reds of roses and papal garments to accompany the golden light of the eastern Byzantine sunrise.

Falling almost like a curtain, a drape with an architectural nature, the painting offers a diffused, comforting glow, like a candle on a banquet table and even at nighttime gives out light. Through contemplative looking and thoughtful engagement, spiritual transformation is offered alongside an immense feeling of timelessness between past and present and East and (Mid)West.

Based between Omaha, Long Island and Plymouth UK, Steve Joy has exhibited his mesmerising paintings in notable museums and galleries throughout Europe and the USA. Worldwide travels to exotic, far-flung locations serving in the Royal Air Force and in search for inspiration as an artist influence the concept of many of Steve’s pieces.

Whilst the vertical pattern of ‘Earthline’ evokes the longitudinal lines of an Atlas, the modular composition of separate wooden panels is suggestive of an expanding horizon line, the span betwixt each module existing as though a gravitational force holds each section in place. The relationship between the ‘present’ and ‘absent’ areas of the painting become the solid columns and soaring archways of Gothic Cathedrals, inviting our consciousness to pass across a symbolic transept and to explore a new experience.

Strength and modernity are found in this vertical pattern. Whilst the tall red and gold stripes emerge like skyscrapers rising above a city skyline, the traditional boxy, red-brick architecture of the American Midwest is perhaps signified by the smaller segmented squares of honey, silver and flashes of cornfield green.

The ‘dropped’ section of stripes not only augment the uniformity of the painting’s base line but mean the work exceeds the usual boundaries of a rectangular painting. Behaving as a lower mordent in a musical phrase, this sudden yet necessary feature heightens the sculptural tonality of the piece, disrupting the painting’s horizon line.

Like a ‘call and response’ – a question called into the void answered after a slight pause with the clarity of ‘gold, red? – taupe – gold – red – gold,’ the work forms a secret code of communication. But how should we decipher such a code?

Viewed in its entirety across the corridor, ‘Earthline’ shares an affinity with the visualisation of DNA genetic code. Recalling the stripey pattern of a karyogram where G- and R- banding techniques enable specific genes on a chromosome to be mapped out and located, the pull between dark and light, earth and gold, presence and absence, form the base pairs of this work’s phenotype. Only this painted form of cytogenic mapping enables viewers to consider the miracle of DNA and our very existence in an emotional and universal way.

Just how a mutation along a the stripe of a particular gene sparks the process of biological evolution, Steve’s signature style of working is a unique specimen in the trajectory of painting; ‘Earthline’ therefore becomes a fitting work of art for a Healing and Recovery Centre.

ART ALCOVES

Dotted further along the central axis corridor are several ‘art alcoves’ where framed pieces by Tom Prinz and Mike Nesbit are displayed. Comfortable seating and living plants mean that these alcoves become quiet reflective spaces for introspection and contemplation, cocooned from the passing footfall of the Centre’s central hallway.

WEST MEETS MID-WEST

Based between Omaha and LA, Mike Nesbit is a co-founder of Maple Street Construct and pieces from his colourful series ‘Highland at Noon’ punctuate the walls of these restful alcove spaces with welcome pops of pure colour.

Echoing the energetic brushstrokes of action painting, bursts of sunshine yellow merge into hazes of cobalt blue as drifts of pink mingle with refreshing tones of turquoise as if engaged in a choreographed dance. Only unmixed, primary colours of each shade have been used based on the contrasting subtraction and addition properties of CYMK (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, Black) and RYB (Red, Yellow, Blue) colour systems.

Infused with touches of silver leaf, echoing the sheen of Chris’ ‘Wrinkled Mirror,’ the clouds of colour are interlaced with lattices of grid references. These stretch the length and breadth of the pieces and criss-cross the conceptual colour palette of the screen-printing process. Whilst these lines may appear to find their traces in the artist’s background as a qualified architect, they are in fact based on satellite images of LA and Omaha.

In contrast to the cosmopolitan cityscape of LA, Omaha’s suburban identity in the centre of the United States features cornfields and greenery. Whilst the title of the series refers to Highland Park in LA, the time of 12 noon adds a narrative element of high sun, shadow lines and even human activity. The formal lines and shapes generated by the satellite images physically represent the similarities and differences of these two cities in the context of the twenty first century.

In the setting of the April Sampson Cancer Centre, the idea of place and time becomes both transcendental and pragmatic. Mike’s series of colourful works not only brighten and lift the mood of the Centre, but act as gateways and bridges from one time and place to the specific time, place and ambience of another.

GIOTTO BLUE

Upon exit of the main treatment area patients directly face one of the ‘art alcoves’, the B alcove for blue. Giotto blue.

Imbued with a chapel-like quality, Tom Prinz, Steve Joy and Mike Nesbit collaborated on the theme and final impression of this secluded space. Inspired by Giotto di Bondonne’s (1267 – 1337) frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, the use of blue and its psychological healing properties influenced the three artists’ holistic approach.

Built on a former Roman Amphitheatre, the ‘Giotto Chapel’ was commissioned by the Scrovegni family as an annex to their palace (destroyed 1827) for absolution from the sin of usury and still stands today. The brilliant blue interior was completed by Giotto and his assistants between 1303 and 1305. Depicting a cycle of 36 scenes from the life and passion of Christ and the virgin Mary, each spellbinding fresco is bordered by impressive imitation mosaic trompe-l’oeil. Completely covering the walls and extending up to the ceiling – a starry firmament of royal blue – the chapel is a testament to Giotto’s revolutionary painting style.

Floating angels are joined by the mother of Christ and hovering prophets in circular rondos to watch over the sophisticated chronicles of Giotto’s invention. High above in the lofty realms of the chapel’s barrel-vaulted ceiling, their haloes glint against the rich sky of ultramarine blue.

Just as Giotto’s illusionistic storytelling style – displaying previously unknown theatrical tension and skilful depiction of the infinite emotions expressed by Man – demonstrates how a celestial vision can be implanted into the earthly planes of the everyday, the artworks of the B Alcove form a portal, transporting viewers to an alternative time and place. An alternative time and place of abundant sustenance, empowerment and wisdom. A place outside of the challenges of the present moment.

Perhaps most closely aligned to the idea of the chapel’s overall structure and feel is Tom Prinz’s ‘Giotto’ inscribed print. Delicate shades of blue waft like uncatchable air, reminiscent in tone of fresh tempera soaking into wet plaster. Yet, this work of art is ink printed onto paper, a contemporary use of technology and materials, almost an extension to Giotto’s own ground breaking introduction of perspective and intricate details.

Tom’s incidental lines, vertical stripes and touches of yellow reflect how Giotto’s frescoes are full of subtle nuances and astounding detail. For example, even the delicate faces of women half-hidden behind wispy, see-through veils are masterfully rendered in Giotto’s creation. Within the blue haze of Tom’s artwork you can just spot the name ‘Giotto’ written in a fine script as a homage to the Medieval painter’s vision.

Tom picks up the thread – literally – of the materials rendered by Giotto: the robes replete with detailed cuffs and hems worn by the faithful; the soft-looking blankets covering seats and beds and even the fine threads spun by a young woman in the Annunciation Scene are all echoed in Tom’s use of physical white fibre, gracefully adding to the collaged texture of the piece in ‘running-stitches’. The painting sphere of the illusioned and the imagined has been physically pierced by the needle of the sewing machine, the artist’s framed artwork an extension to the impression of clothing and furnishings rendered in figurative painting.

A faint grid like format appears to offer an underlying structure to Tom’s piece. This has been achieved by superimposing a photographic image of an open spread of rectangular postal envelopes over the blue. The motif of the envelope conjures ideas of correspondence and communication. Echoing the borders surrounding each of Giotto’s 36 scenes, the edges of the envelopes enable the very structure of Tom’s piece to link back to the layout and compositional construction of Giotto’s masterpiece.

Giotto’s figures seem contained and compartmentalised within their allotted spaces acting out scenes of life, death, forgiveness and helplessness. However, in Tom’s case, the borders become paper-thin and barely-there, as though the characters of Giotto’s brush have been set free to allow for more spiritual emphasis on the colour blue.

Stretching downwards through the centre of Tom’s artwork is a band of a lighter blue, a Bluebeam behaving like a shaft of light silently sailing in through a clerestory window. Such windows are usually located high up within a church setting, towards the eaves to provide overhead ambient lighting without distraction of, or interference from, the everyday view outside. Shining in from the top of the artwork, the eye is drawn upwards as if one has suddenly been transported to the Arena Chapel itself, towards the magnificence of the star-studded grandeur of an ocean sky of lapis lazuli.

Once more valuable than gold, lapis lazuli was sourced in what is now Afghanistan to produce the powder for blue paint and could only be applied sparingly on artworks, except for the wealthiest of patrons – as was the case with the Scrovegni family! The blue of Steve Joy’s ‘Invocation for Blue (Giotto)’ recognises this historical fact.

Steve’s delicate shades of blue heighten, deepen and shimmer like a transparent, glassy topaz. Highlighted in synchronisation with the trajectory of the Nebraskan sun, his shades of blue provide a calm, zen like allure reflective of the sublime essence of the Midwestern sky itself, assisting to put patients and staff at ease.

Shaped a little like a Medieval altarpiece we can imagine Steve’s contemporary Icon-style painting installed within the Arena Chapel. The three vertical sections not only parallel the two side walls and central west wall, where Giotto’s ‘Last Judgement’ fresco takes centre stage, but the sacred geometry of The Three In One.

However, just as in Tom’s painting, there are no visualisations of suffering or the consequence of sin. These illusions are abandoned to favour the flatness of the picture plane and the materiality of the blue-bathed silver leaf. Whilst the darker stripes recall the columns of narrative scenes in the Arena Chapel, the blue glow perhaps reflects the blue light of our computers, tablets and digital devices. Steve himself has even suggested that the trifold arrangement of an ‘Invocation for Blue’ recalls the outline of TARS, the monolith like robot in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar (2014).

The little rectangle of gold attached to the upper right of the piece appears not as an appendage tacked on to a being of Artificial Intelligence, but as a direct connection to the golden haloes of Giotto’s fleeting, floating and playful angels. However, perhaps in this case, Steve’s artwork is not the domain of soft winged Gabriels and handsome Michaels – the angels of Medieval imagining – but the realm of the ‘terrifying’ and ‘terrible’ Angels of the contemporary age as portrayed by Rainer Maria Rilke in the Duino Elegies. As such, Steve’s piece strikes a chord with the idea of needing something that ‘enraptures, consoles and helps us’ through life. Not to explain or to justify the world, but to bring us closer to it through poetic metaphor, because as suggested by Rilke, humankind, like angles, are only visitors in this world.

Reflecting the subtle graduations of blue in Giotto’s frescoes, from the skirting up to the curving apex of the ceiling, Mike Nesbitt’s Giotto diptych takes it cue from an earlier piece the artist made in response to the expansive skies of Nebraska.

The two parts of Mike’s diptych are based on photographic close-ups of the ‘McCook Blues,’ a piece the artist previously installed in Norris Alley, McCook, in the west of Nebraska. This large-scale work of pre-cast concrete is coated in layers of custom blue and white coloured concrete. The marbling colours and raw textures of the work reflect the artist’s recollection of the Nebraskan landscape coated in white snow stretching out to the horizon where the sublime blue sky gathers.

Placed in the alley’s central spot, the ‘McCook Blues’ merges sky with landscape and vice versa. The recently re-invigorated alleyway is named in memory of Senator George W. Norris, a great supporter of innovative technologies. Mike’s piece is a fitting tribute to the senator’s thoughts about “what hope a simple cloud along the horizon could stir,” for Midwestern communities. Much of Mike’s practice is about bringing communities together and striving to bridge the gaps between the industrial, the disused and the rural through a soulful search of cultural placemaking.

The diptych in the B Alcove of the April Sampson Cancer Centre shows a section of the edge of the ‘McCook Blues’ with the Nebraskan sky above. A double entendre then, as the concrete itself has been inspired by the palette of the sky under which it sits. This duality is further heightened by the similarities the ‘McCook Blues’ shares with both contemporary billboards and the Standing Stones and stelae made by our ancient ancestors.

We see from this close-up image that the edge of the ‘McCook Blues’ is thick with crusted, coagulated concrete, like a thick shell of white lava, seemingly kissing the fabric of the sky. Mike has taken one pixel from the various shades of blue and edited the diptych so that the entire expanse of sky in each piece is a singular and specific shade of blue. A single moment of sky, an ecstasy of blue, captured, enlarged and repeated.

Calling to mind the visual impact of ‘International Klein Blue’, a shade invented by the French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962), Mike’s creative process finds a more subtle connection to Gustav Mahler’s thoughts about his Fourth symphony.

The tender delicacy and airy lightness of Mahler’s Fourth was inspired by Das Himmlische Leben or ‘Life in Heaven,’ a song the composer wrote based on a collection of German folk poetry. Mahler described the basic tone of the symphony as the ‘undifferentiated blue of the sky’ and claimed he had much trouble in capturing this compared to the sky’s changing and contrasting shades.

Soaring above the solidity of the concrete, is Mike’s undifferentiated shade of blue a representation of Heaven then?

The desire for a singular shade of blue to sweep across the sky perhaps reflects how we wish to control a certain situation. As suggested by Rilke in the Duino Elegies, we can change the world by changing our sense of it.

Just as Rilke composed the Elegies in the north of Italy overlooking the soft blue waves of the Adriatic Sea, the controlled blue hues of the B Alcove draw us in to a celestial world, a heavenly mirage of its own making. As angels festoon the walls of the Chapel in Padua, their haloes still shining brightly against the mists of time and the dust of lapis lazuli, the artworks of Tom, Steve and Mike not only transport viewers to a time and place of another, but imbed a transient, ethereal moment into the very existence of the present. The invisible becomes spiritually visible, offering a new order of reality.

Like Rilke’s elegies and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the blue artworks of the B Alcove are evidence that we are not marooned in the contemporary world of the everyday or the difficulties associated with a cancer diagnosis, but surrounded by the miraculous, especially during the transformative process of healing.

PENDOUR PICKS

Heath Hearn : ‘By This River’

Solo Exhibition at the Russell Gallery, Putney, London

Hawa Mahal, Palace of the Winds

Linda Bell

Pendour Picks for Visiting Pushkar

Linda Bell

Instagram

25 - 02 - 2406 - 08 - 24

Heath Hearn : ‘By this River’

From the Tamar to the Thames

Flanked by a church at either end, the Putney Bridge offers open views of the ebb and flow of the river Thames; its mud larkers scouring the banks for history’s hidden gems; the back and forth motion of the coxes preparing for the Championship course and an array of different coloured boats in mooring, swaying in time to the gentle lull of the water. The towers, cranes and traffic of London seem to recede into the distance, replaced by views of open sky, clouds and passing aeroplanes – all reflected in the ripples of water below. It’s almost as though you’re not in the city at all.

Just a few strides from the Putney Embankment, situated not far from one of Alan Thornhill’s Sculpture Trail artworks, can be found The Russell Gallery with its expansive windows, piquing the gaze of all who pass by.

Established as a predominately figurative gallery specialising in Modern British Art (think tasteful naïve-style still lives and gorgeous, tactile hand-scale bronzes) the abstract paintings of renown Cornwall based artist Heath Hearn and his partner Katy Brown are frequently on view. Currently hosting ‘By this River’, an impressive solo exhibition of Heath’s captivating work, the gallery glows from within as the energy of the Tamar river is brought close to the tidal flow of the Thames.

Swathes of colour, from bright piping hot cadmiums to dusty buffs and effervescent pale blues exude a charming calm and vapourish essence. Stepping into the Gallery you are instantly drawn to the fresh palette enfolding, like a meandering river, around deeper rusts and steely English green-greys.

Working from a studio which was once the cricketers’ tea room on the Mt Edgecombe estate on the Rame peninsula in south east Cornwall, Heath has a vantage point overlooking the Tamar estuary. Caught at the mid-point where salty tides meet the Tamar’s rush of fresh, peat-rich water flowing for some 60 miles from the granite-stippled, fearn-filled, lichen-specked Bodmin Moor, the Riverine watercourse is captured in the feel and tone of the exhibited paintings.

The airy pink pastels of ‘Veiled Landscape’ coat the compositional forms in velvet. Evoking the early morning dew little clouds of vapour lift like a mist exhaled from the flowing river, seeping across the formal parklands of Mt Edgcumbe. The central area of ‘River Blossom’ – a blurred amass of white, a little like lamb’s wool – appears laden with water droplets, the delicate blooms of spring rendered as though they have been exposed to the river’s chilly flicks of spray.

In works such as ‘Port Wrinkle’ the central frenzy of white brushstrokes is reminiscent of the frothy white caps whipped up by the ferocious of waves – you can almost feel the sea-spray settling on your face. The trailing rush of deep warm blue elopes around a current of white in ‘Warm River Breeze’. Heat and humidity coalesce as the river breathes its summer course.

The sizzling hue of ‘Cadmium Watermark’, offers a heightened impression of the heat of summer, the lighter pink tones tumbling downwards almost like a waterfall nearer the source of the waterway. A fine delicate line folds upwards in contrast to the lighter tone spilling forth, resonating with Robert Motherwell’s (1915 – 1991) ‘Open’ series.

The diagonal line splitting the central rectangle in in ‘Shoreline (RD)’ along with the sloping interlocking forms of ‘Canal and Flyover (RD)’ pay homage to Richard Diebenkorn’s ‘Ocean Park Series’ of the 1960 and 70s. Heath imbues scenes of Cornish river life with the diffused, glowing light of California transposing a sense of glamour borrowed from mid-century Santa Monica. Heath revisits Diebenkorn’s balanced compositions to reimagine the Tamar under the spell of the tradition of colour field Abstract Expressionism. And in ‘Morning Light’ Diebenkorn’s cityline along the Pacific Ocean is almost transported across place and time to an English estuary on a slightly overcast day with added echoes of the St Ives School.

This play of dialogue and style continues in the piece ‘Locked Gate’. Whilst the title suggests closure and curiosity about a forbidden area, the soft watery feel of the layers of paint and central slant of blue convey delicacy and wonderment. Time is required to see, look and fully appreciate the seductive subtleties in Heath’s work.

Having been involved in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, painting scenes of interiors, landscapes and still life, Diebenkorn returned to Abstraction in the 1960s. Unafraid to fulfil his own creative impulses, Heath also switches with dexterous fluidity between Figuration and Abstraction, shifting masterfully between the extremities of these two ranges so as to distil and capture the essence of his subjects.

With somewhat ambiguous titles such as ‘Tacking the River’ and ‘Penninsula and Cove’ many of Heath’s quasi-figurative works offer poetic descriptions of the riverine view and waterside activity, rather than providing specific locations and explanations.

Several works in the show echo one another. We observe how the curious elliptical shapes in ‘3 Boats’ almost form a painting within a painting and appear again in ‘3 Boats and a Bridge,’ their long narrow forms encouraging us to look at this scene once more so as to observe something different at the water’s edge – such as the introduction of the bridge shape in the background. Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge spanning the Tamar is simplified, the symmetrically arched lenticular forms reimagined and translated into a symbol of a bridge, itself repeated in the eye-catching dart of canary yellow in ‘Water Under the Bridge’.

Gracing stage right in ‘Camping and Glamping,’ a quaint blue caravan makes a further entrance in ‘Camping and Glamping (in Plein Air).’ Both titles suggest that the camping and glamping is happening here and now; the Romance of the British holiday scene spilling out from the stately parkland of Mt Edgcumbe and combining with the London Arts Scene – from the banks of one river to another.

Heath’s honest and direct style is often linked to that of Ivor Hitchens (1893 – 1979) who fled Hampstead during the Blitz of the Second World War to the sanctity of a caravan pitched within 6-acres of woodland on Lavington Common, Surrey. Whilst the woodland provided much inspiration for Hitchens, we can almost imagine him feeling very much at home in Heath’s semi-abstract ‘Camping and Glamping’ caravan on the banks of the Tamar!

The thick blue brushstrokes worked into a grid-like pattern to denotate doors and windows contrast with the looser, more playful patches of colour reminiscent of the pools of yellow and purple in Hitchen’s own painting ‘Trees with Caravan.’ Yet in Heath’s painting, we are exposed to imaginary narratives of camping and Glamping (whatever the weather), rather than the holiday abodes acting as features within a landscape setting.

In ‘Shifting Sands’, which took centre stage upon an easel in the middle of The Russell Gallery on the day of my visit, the texture and application of paint echoes the very fluctuations in layers and levels of saturated sand falling and rising with the tidal surges at the river’s mouth. See that little seductive flash of yellow, to the right of the collapsing dune? Perhaps a child’s beach spade, or a glint of buried treasure?

As I break from my reverie on the banks of the Tamar and the coast of the Rame Peninsula to resume my route back across the Putney Bridge above the rushing rust-toned Thames below, I realise that in light of the current politicisation of the art world it has been restorative to see a London based gallery supporting an artist who has for the most part worked on the outside of the establishment. It is particularly refreshing to experience paintings conveying the joy and freedom of painting and the privilege of being alive and receptive to the beauty of light and nature and water. As much about the riverine environment and its many guises – industrial and pleasure based – this exhibition is a renewal of what painting has oftentimes been about, the very act of painting.

‘By This River’ continues at The Russell Gallery until the end of next weekend – be sure not to miss this tranquil daydream to Cornwall and a chance to purchase one of Heath’s expressive pieces on the banks of one river inspired by another!

You can view the e-book to the exhibition here:

Blurb Books

Heath Hearn’s website: Heath Hearn

The Russell Gallery Address:

12 Lower Richmond Road, Putney, London, SW15 1JP

Tel: 0208 780 5228

Email: ru************@ao*.com

Website: The Russell Gallery

PENDOUR PICKS

The Healing Artworks of the April Sampson Cancer Centre

Linda Bell, 06-08-24

Pendour Picks for Visiting Pushkar

Linda Bell

Instagram

11 - 02 - 2406 - 07 - 24

Who were the St Ives School Artists?

W

hat better way to kick-off our cultural section than with a review of ‘The St Ives Artists A Biography of Place and Time’ by Michael Bird?!

Pendour Cove, the inspiration behind one of Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures and the name of our blog is a beautiful scenic walk along the coastline from St Ives.

With detailed colour plate reproductions demonstrating the width and breadth of the artists’ individual styles, this new edition features photographs from the artists’ personal collections and excerpts from letters that have never been published before. All of this helps to shine a brighter light on what drew these artists to St Ives and the surrounding Penwith Moors.

Bird masterfully places us at the crux of what this biography of time and place is about from the very start of the Introduction. We join him sipping a cappuccino in the St Ives Tate cafe, overlooking the surfing activity on Porthmeor beach below. Having inconclusively searched for reasons why a ‘wonky’ nude by Roger Hilton is exhibited alongside a painting of a ship by Alfred Wallis, Bird goes on to conjure a fission in time and space where past meets present. Through the careful study of each of his chosen artists, Bird transports us from the Tate Museum’s gift shop offering mugs decorated with Wallis’ seascapes and Barbara Hepworth themed colouring in sheets for children to descriptions of POW camps, service duties in North Africa, rationing, the space race, beatniks, parenthood and 60s glamour.

With titles such as ‘Landscape with Wild Men’ and ‘Connecting Circles: a detour via Hampstead’ each chapter focuses on a different artist or theme whilst referencing painterly inspirations and forms. We learn how St Ives, although historically difficult to travel to by road was well connected and even cosmopolitan in feel due to its seafaring heritage. We flit from an account of the shipwreck of the Alba, which inspired one of Wallis’ works, to the Spanish Civil War and Picasso’s Guernica. Readers meet the young Terry Frost, catching the train to St Ives past the ruins of Birmingham, Exeter and Plymouth. Gabo’s description of Plymouth burning during the Blitz is interlaced with in-depth study of his constructivist concerns and Perspex maquettes. Bernard Leach’s role in the unfolding development is not overlooked, his Shirakaba expertise placing him as ‘Messenger from the East’, both in St Ives and later on at Dartington Hall in Devon, a further indication of St Ives’ status as a location of cultural fusion and of Bird’s own thorough lines of enquiry.

We learn of Peter Lanyon’s wild side antics, his personal mythology of landscape from his time spent up in the clouds; we read about Nicholson and Hepworth ‘Mondrianising’ their first home in Carbis Bay and christening their next ‘Sky-and-Cherries,’ an amusing take on the Cornish ‘Chy-an-Kerris’. Heron’s thoughts on Cornwall’s luminescent light are revealed and we share in Frost’s relief of the disguise provided by dust-coated overalls, enabling him to pose as a builder when strolling home through the narrow streets. We hang out with Trevor Bell and Bryan Wynter, whose name Bird explains was changed from Winterbottom, a charming photograph dated summer 1933 shows his family enjoying the prehistoric dolmens and wild nature of Lanyon Quoit.

Bird invites us in….

We feel a part of the excitement as the artists hang their 7 & 5 exhibitions and establish the Penrith Society of Arts in Cornwall in 1949. We seemingly float into the audience clapping in anticipation of Wallace Nichol’s Festival of Britain drama performed at the St Ives Guildhall. Such tales are brought back to life and into the present through Bird’s storytelling expertise, with each chapter progressing chronologically, almost mirroring the structure of separate Acts in a dramatic performance or play.

Many of these anecdotes come across as a little humorous perhaps, taking the form of urban legends about the mystique and mastery of the artists. But all of these stories do more than this; they help to focus on the artist’s identities and individual choices for being in St Ives. Through the retelling of such antics, Bird reveals the personalities of these artists beyond their practices whilst revealing a different St Ives to the one we think of today. We are drawn in to the drama and excitement of a St Ives bursting with community spirit, creative energy and ambition in the search for artistic excellence, caught on the tide between ‘ceaseless modernisation’ and Cornwall’s ‘ageless’ charm.

The timeless appeal of the Cornish coastal landscape is noted, Bird claiming its unchanging continuity reassured both artists and the public in the face of war. Projected as a quaint, unthreatening paradise, guidebooks of the time suggested that Cornwall was somewhat ‘sealed-off’ from the after-effects of war, even claiming it had retained a ‘Prehistoric’ identity. However, Bird’s descriptions of Cornwall’s industrial activities, from shipbuilding to mining and farming contradict this utopic mirage. Bird links the Levant Mine Disaster of 1919 by way of Lanyon’s 1950s paintings to disturbing photographic images of the Dauchau and Belson concentration camps. In doing so, Bird provides a record of local Cornish History as much as a timeline of world events, leaning on the artists to offer a summary of the cultural, political and even technological developments of the twentieth century. Even the invention of the washing machine is compared to Hilton’s thoughts about the necessity for an Abstract painting displayed in each and every home in the chapter ‘Spaced Out: Into the 1960s’.

We see the important contribution of female artists, especially in the later chapter ‘Home Ground: Women in St Ives.’ Bird goes on to focus on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sandra Blow as well as Hepworth, at one point listing all of the wives whose husbands are considered to be of the St Ives ‘School’. The women portrayed within these pages are more than supportive house wives – Bird demonstrates how many were artists in their own right, with exhibitions, contacts and collectors of their own. There is a suggestion that the location and energy of St Ives possibly contributed to their independent mindsets and ability to pursue the need to make art at a time when the ‘role’ of women in society was being reconsidered in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Bird expresses how there is a unique narrative and much legacy to consider before evaluating this band of artists as a school just because they happened to be in the same place at the same time. They did not always get on with one another. Bird demonstrates the friction between Lanyon, Nicholson and Heron by referencing magazine articles and suggests that their differences possibly reach an apex when one excludes the other from the excitement of Clement Greenberg’s and then Mark Rothko’s visits – which helped establish the ‘St Ives/New York art axis’. Time and time again, we observe how Bird’s delightfully detailed magnifying glass enlarges the dramas of the St Ives scene to scale up with social, cultural and political attitudes of the time.

The ‘newcomers’ from London were sometimes considered ‘unwelcomed cuckoos’ in Cornwall. If not born and bred in Cornwall, can Hepworth, Frost and Nicholson even be considered part of the ‘St Ives School’? Is it not these very artists that help to bring swathes of visitors to the seaside town every summer? Although such questions remain diplomatically unanswered by Bird, what is clear from his research is that had the artists not found freedom and safety in St Ives, this reactionary group would never have achieved such an immense contribution to the making art in the twentieth century.

A number of reviews have perhaps criticised Bird’s account, claiming it lacks essential inclusion of critical discourse. However, we find many inclusions of quotes by contemporary critics of the time, ranging from Berger to Songtag, highlighting how Bird has taken in different points of view and crafted his narrative of time and place based on established art historical and philosophical analysis.

What we do perhaps discover is that Bird only provides fairly brief descriptions of referenced artworks. Deeper consideration as to the process and significance of particular sculptures and paintings could have been further developed, but this this of course would greatly extend the length of the book!

Bird offers not so much a ‘critique’ on the artist’s oeuvres, nor discusses any individual painting or sculpture at great length to provide a new perspective, argument, or to push a series of thoughts into new territory, but positively provides us with all the information required for us to arrive at our own conclusions. It is only by connecting the individual accounts of these artists, their successes, failures, challenges and achievements in the framework of each other and historic contextualisation that the narrative of the St Ives ‘school’ is finally picked apart and considered as a narrative in its own right.

Perhaps it is fair to say that the artists Bird focuses on were bound together more by their experiences of a particular place and time, rather than their support and commitment to one another or even a single agreement of what it is to be an artist, or what in fact art is and could have been in the mid twentieth century.

In the final scenes we join Hilton and Heron in their cold damp cottages, as they write letters to each other. The very abrupt ending of this biography, with the sudden deaths of Wynter, Hilton and Hepworth within a short time of one another, combined with Lanyon’s tragic glider accident, possibly reflects the sudden ending of St Ives as a major player in the art world, as reflected in the title of this chapter, ‘Terrible Times Together: The Poetry of Departures’. The focus on Graham’s poetry at this point reminds us of the storytelling nature of these misty kingdoms of salty, damp cottages, mermaids and wild, windy moors.

Through his careful research, Bird leaves no pebble on this shoreline unturned in search for answers as to why this group of artists with seemingly little in common are classified as an established group. If you are at all a little curious as to why St Ives played such a major role in the development of mid-century British culture, or if you wish to make the most of your upcoming visit to St Ives, then this biography of time and place is an absolute must for you!!

And if you’ve already experienced the pleasure of reading this book, let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Instagram