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Artists & I L L U S T R A T O R S

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Exhibitions NOVEMBER’S BEST ART SHOWS

6 Artists

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THE EXPRESSIVE MARK 17 November to 2 April 2022 Abstract Expressionism was arguably the first artistic movement that shifted the focus of Western art from Europe to America. Nevertheless, post-war British artists still had a part to play in this new language of painting. Collecting key examples, The Expressive Mark will show how British painters such as Gillian Ayres [Distillation, left] and Roger Hilton were influenced by their peers across the Atlantic to develop their own vocabularies of mark-making techniques. The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, The University of Leeds. www.library.leeds.ac.uk

springboard to explore the artist’s final 12 years. Among more than 50 artworks on show will be mezzotint prints, watercolours and more full-scale oil paintings, as well as some of his famous plein air cloud studies. Royal Academy of Arts, London. www.royalacademy.org.uk

LATE CONSTABLE 30 October to 13 February 2022 John Constable’s seminal six-foot scenes of the River Stour are arguably the most iconic landscape paintings in British art. Yet this new survey uses the final offering in the series, 1825’s The Leaping Horse [above], as a

REFLECTIONS: THE LIGHT AND LIFE OF JOHN HENRY LORIMER 6 November to 20 March 2022 While Claude Monet and Edgar Degas were pushing the boundaries of painting in France, oft-forgotten contemporary John Henry Lorimer was quietly developing a more classical style back home in Edinburgh. Giving the Scottish artist the attention he deserves is this retrospective of oil paintings, watercolours and sketches, including The Flight of the Swallows [below]. Throughout Lorimer depicts elegant interiors and lightfilled landscapes with technical brilliance. City Art Centre, Edinburgh. www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk

SAINSBURY CENTRE © MARY WEBB

Dates may change due to Covid-19 restrictions Always check gallery websites beforehand

RHYTHM AND GEOMETRY: CONSTRUCTIVIST ART IN BRITAIN SINCE 1951 2 October to 30 January 2022 Calling into question the assumption that creativity and logic are two very distinct entities were the Constructivists of mid-century Britain, who relied on mathematical and scientific foundations to create their geometric abstract art. To celebrate the emotive and optical effects of colour and pattern so closely tied to the movement is this collection of paintings, reliefs, sculptures and mobiles, dating from the 1950s to the present day. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich. www.sainsburycentre.ac.uk

HOGARTH AND EUROPE 3 November to 20 March 2022 Few artists have defined an era like William Hogarth, whose satirical depictions of 18th-century England still capture imaginations today. However, he was not alone in painting the rapid changes to society, as this exhibition hopes to prove. Hogarth originals will be placed alongside those of his continental contemporaries, such as Parisian painter Jean-Siméon Chardin and Venetian artist Pietro Longhi. The comparisons should ensure the British artist’s work is revealed in all its complexity, while proving parallels and sympathies have no borders. Tate Britain, London. www.tate.org.uk

Artists & Illustrators

Fresh Paint

Inspiring new artworks, straight off the easel

Sarah Butterfield With its dreamy pastel hues, palm tree silhouettes and car headlights speeding into the night, Sarah Butterfield’s Oceans, Light and Palms XIV has a touch of Miami Vice to it. In fact, it was a return to another American hotspot – California, where the British artist had lived and worked as an architect in the 1970s – that first inspired this body of work. “I took our family to that place of dreams and a whole series of new paintings flooded my mind,” she explains. Collected together in her forthcoming solo exhibition Oceans, Lights and Beyond, Sarah’s recent works provide a much-needed dose of escapism for an audience largely confined to British shores over the last 18 months. “I hadn’t thought of my work as escapist, but I like the idea a lot,” she says. “We do need some form of escapism.” One of the aims of her paintings is to reveal beauty in unexpected places, whether that’s the Californian traffic in Oceans, Light and Palms XIV or a KFC restaurant just off the A27 in Hampshire. “When I capture these phenomena in my paintings, a feeling of escapism naturally follows as I hope the viewer can find the splendour of the menial or mundane process in their lives too.” Sarah’s perceptive paintings are backed by a sound knowledge of scientific theory, perhaps unsurprisingly as the daughter of the celebrated late medical researcher Sir John Butterfield. “Knowing some concepts helps you see perceptually,” she says, pointing to her interest in refracted light on water and the optical effects of complementary colours. “Think of Monet’s paintings of poppies in a grassy meadow,” she adds of the latter. “The increased luminosity of the red petals against the green grasses not only conveys a glow of light but the optical effect between these two complementary colours also even suggests the nodding movement of the heads of these flowers in the breeze.” Travel is another key aspect of Sarah’s work, yet the recent restrictions have given her a chance to reflect and refine paintings in readiness for the new exhibition. “Sometimes during lockdown, late in the evening, I would see a previously completed traffic painting I had seen around the house all day and would just pick up a brush and palette knife making gestural marks that captured what I had wanted to do much better than before.” Oceans, Lights and Beyond runs 2-6 November at Mall Galleries, London. www.sarahbutterfield.co.uk 14 Artists

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SARAH’S TOP TIP “If you are trying to wed two areas together, one of shade and one of sunlight, try adding a common colour to both mixes”

Fresh Paint

LEFT Sarah Butterfield, Oceans, Light and Palms XIV, oil on canvas, 122x152cm

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16 Artists

& Illustrators

Fresh Paint

SIMON’S TOP TIP

LEFT Simon McWilliams, Forest Ether, oil on linen, 153x121cm

“To vary the surface quality, I cover certain areas with stencils and spray a semi-opaque dammar varnish glaze over the painting”

Simon McWilliams Simon McWilliams may have been elected Vice President of the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA) earlier this year, but he has been creating paintings of equally impressive venues for more than half of his life. The Belfast-born artist has had a fascination with painting palm houses and greenhouses ever since he concluded a decade of artistic studies with three years at London’s Royal Academy Schools from 1995. “I like the contrast of the architectural with the organic,” he says, explaining how the built elements of his subject provide “a scaffold of realism” on which to experiment with oil paint. “The stimulus comes from the real world and gives me the excuse to use these techniques to say something, not only about the nature of the paint itself but also that which it depicts.” Forest Ether is perhaps his most impressive realisation yet of themes and interests that were further inspired by an influential visit to a Michael Andrews retrospective at Tate Britain in 2001. Last year, the curator and art historian Dickon Hall noted that Simon “has constantly made technical experiments within the space of these works” and that is certainly true here, as the leaf motifs on the left of the painting were printed in place, while impasto tree shapes were created by pushing oil paint with a piece of card as if it were a squeegee. More than just being a depiction of plants in a glasshouse, however, there is a transcendent quality to Forest Ether and other paintings in this series, a sense of these spaces being not quite of this world. “It made me think of the early 70s science fiction film, Silent Running, where all plant life on Earth was becoming extinct and specimens had been preserved in a series of enormous, greenhouse-like domes floating in space,” agrees Simon. “I have always been attracted to the universality of subject matters, that it is not necessarily a portrait of a particular place. The otherworldliness of the painting suggested the title for me, it was an attempt to direct the viewer in a spiritual direction, as if above the forest was this mysterious substance suffused with light.” Would the RUA’s new Vice President class himself as a spiritual person then? “As openness is generally a personality trait of artists, who knows?” he says. “I’m open to any ideas.” The Royal Ulster Academy’s 140th Annual Exhibition runs from 29 October to 17 January 2022 at Ulster Museum, Belfast. www.royalulsteracademy.org

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Duncan Grant ART HIS TO RY

Coinciding with the launch of two new exhibitions, RAVNEET AHLUWALIA celebrates the brave and intimate paintings of the Bloomsbury Group’s Scottish maverick

26 Artists

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heavily enthralled to the simplified forms and bold colours of Henri Matisse who she would have first truly discovered, like much of Britain, via the 1910 exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists. This landmark collection was arranged by another artistic Bloomsbury Group member, Roger Fry, and introduced the works of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso to the unsuspecting and rather traditionally minded British public of the time. Perhaps the most interesting and under-explored artist of the original

Duncan Grant was the most interesting and under-explored artist of the Bloom sbur y Group

he collective power of the Bloomsbury Group left a long and lasting impression on the first decades of the 20th century. This liberal congregation of intellectuals and creative types famously “lived in squares… and loved in triangles”, such were their complex, intertwined lives which played out amid the leafy residential enclaves of bohemian central London A century on, however, while those controversial lifestyles continue to fascinate, the wide-ranging work that emerged from this hotbed of critical thinking has also lost none of its power to impress: Virginia Woolf’s novels remain loved and studied the world over for their idiosyncratic visions of urbane womanhood and English social structures, Clive Bell paved the way for abstract art with his theory of significant form, and John Maynard Keynes became one of the world’s most influential economists thanks to his development of macroeconomics in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Painting remained at the core of the group’s interests, however. Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, was an accomplished figurative artist,

A R T H I S T O RY

BELOW The Pond, Winter, 1943, oil on canvas board, 41x51cm

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