ROSA Issue 1 – Summer 2022

Review of Sussex Arts Issue 1 –– Summer 2022

Nathan Coley: Tentative Words Change Everything Until 29 August

This project is part-funded by the UK government as part of the UK Community Renewal Fund

@sussexmodern

sussexmodern.org.uk / nathancoley

Enquiries Editorial editorial@rosamagazine.co.uk Sales and distribution office@rosamagazine.co.uk Partnerships and advertising jessica.wood@rosamagazine.co.uk

ROSA is published by Review of Sussex Arts Limited Company number 13431217 Registered office Unit 1a Starfish Studios North Street Lewes East Sussex BN7 2PE United Kingdom

Publisher Jessica Wood jessica.wood@rosamagazine.co.uk Editor Alex Leith alex.leith@rosamagazine.co.uk Art Director Rowena Easton rowena.easton@rosamagazine.co.uk Technical Director David Burke david.burke@rosamagazine.co.uk Assistant Publisher Oliver Collins oliver.collins@rosamagazine.co.uk

rosamagazine.co.uk Telephone + 44 (0)1273 488996 @theROSAmag @therosamag

Cover image Untitled #8 (detail), 2021 © Fergus Hare

Design Geometric Love hello@geometriclove.com Print KIND hello@kindagency.uk

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Editorial Summer Highlights: The season’s top Sussex shows My Sussex: Semiconductor’s county culture Cover Artist: Fergus Hare, moment seizer Langlands & Bell: Visions of utopia An interview with art superstars Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, who show ROSA’s Imogen Lycett Green round the three exhibitions they’ve created, and curated, at Charleston

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Pages from a Sketchbook: Robert Tavener The late Eastbourne printmaker Robert Tavener was an extremely talented draughtsman, as you can see from his sketchbooks, which we were able to delve into thanks to gallerist Emma Mason

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Pilgrim’s Progress: Can Hans Feibusch’s refugee mural find a safe home?

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ROSA SUMMER 2022

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Alexandra Loske’s world of colour In every issue the author and curator will examine the development of a different colour in the history of art, and its relevance to Sussex painters’ palettes. First up: Blue

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Glyn Philpot: Why did England’s top society portrait painter ‘go Picasso’ in 1931?

Katie Sollohub, seawatercolourist Studio Visit: Where the magic happens, through Adam Bronkhorst’s lens Glyndebourne’s programme book artists, from Hockney… to Himid?

It is a great honour to be chosen to create Glyndebourne’s Festival Programme Book cover. We feature some of the best from past years, by the likes of David Hockney, Grayson Perry and Raqib Shaw

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The Art of the Garden: Charleston, by Lulah Ellender

CONTENTS

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Architecture: Worthing’s Bayside Can stunning new architecture help revive the fortunes of Sussex’s seaside resorts? RIBA’s Paul Zara takes a look at a fabulously bold new development in Worthing

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A day out in… St Leonards Cinema: Tim Brown, on location Poetry: Ian Caws Column: David Jarman… on self-portraits Buying art: What’s hot this summer?

The Funnies: Harry Venning, Zebedee Helm and Joe Decie Victoriana, in augmented reality Leap Then Look: Participatory art Art Detective: Eric Ravilious’ Train Landscape, 1939

CONTENTS

TOWNER Cinema

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Editorial Did you know that the first examples of art created in Britain were found at Cissbury Ring? That Lewes’ Cluniac Priory was once the largest ecclesiastical building in the country?

That there was a Cubist exhibition in Brighton Museum as early as 1913?

Sussex – for centuries the playground of London sophisticates – has a long history of radical creativity, and has long drawn artists southwards to gulp down its inspirationally salty air (just ask Virginia Woolf, or Edward Burne-Jones. Just ask Constable, or Turner. Just ask Grayson Perry).

Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land’ (he wrote Jerusalem in the village of Felpham) has become the home to an inordinately large number of artists, then. Perhaps as a result, it has come to host a rich array of high-quality arts venues, stretching from Chichester to Rye, and including Pallant House, Newlands House Gallery, Brighton Pavilion & Museums, Glyndebourne, Charleston, Towner Eastbourne, De La Warr Pavilion and Hastings Contemporary.

The fact that all these venues are thriving, alongside so many others we don’t have room to mention, is testament to the increasingly art-hungry nature of the county. Imagine a Venn diagram with one circle representing arts lovers, the other representing people who live in Sussex. We bet the intersection is huge.

And now Sussex has its own arts magazine, for just that audience. If you’ve been following us on any of our online platforms, where we have been working hard since the summer of 2021, you’ll realise we’re here for Sussex arts lovers, Sussex artists, and Sussex arts venues alike. We will continue to follow that remit in these pages, and we pledge to work to a philosophy that best serves our readership.

Our manifesto: We will explore and celebrate the creative culture of Sussex, past, present and future. And by ‘Sussex’ we mean the whole of the region, West and East, including Brighton & Hove.

We will adopt an independent, critical voice, committed to indepth coverage of the arts.

We are an arts magazine, with an ‘s’: while our focus will be on visual arts, we will also feature Sussex’s finest musicians, live performers and writers.

We are reporting on a world with which we are fully engaged: our staff and contributors comprise professional artists, curators and published authors. We will commission original artworks on the cover and within the pages of each magazine.

While we don’t want to shy away from exploring complex and sophisticated topics and issues, we will never use unintelligible jargon-filled terminology. Our aim is to clarify, not to obfuscate.

As well as this quarterly print magazine, ROSA will provide daily updates about the Sussex arts on twitter (@theROSAmag) and Instagram (@therosamag) as well as producing a comprehensive online magazine with previews, reviews, features and columns, and a monthly newsletter.

We believe that we can become the hub of the Sussex arts scene, bringing together the whole community: from artists to arts lovers; from curators to collectors; from administrators to audiences. And by doing so, we can help that scene to thrive and grow, year on year. Of course you’ll go elsewhere for the odd cultural fix (London comes to mind). But – we bet – the more you find out about the wealth of the cultural scene on your doorstep, the less you’ll feel the inclination.

Alex Leith

Opposite © Rowena Easton

EDITORIAL

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Oil & Stone Painting & Sculpture

by Sarah Money

June 10–19, 2022 11am–4pm daily closed Mondays Location Star Brewery Gallery Castle Ditch Lane (off Fisher Street) Lewes East Sussex BN7 1YJ

@money.sarah starbrewerygallery.com

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MINORU NOMATA: WINDSCAPE Visionary paintings of imaginary landscapes.

21 May – 4 September 2022 FREE EXHIBITION Bexhill on Sea

Minoru Nomata, Gekka-4, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube.

Art to feed the senses this summer 8 July – 18 September

For details visit kew.org/wakehurst

Summer Highlights

Frank Auerbach: Unseen Newlands House Gallery until August 14

Name-to-watch curator Maya Binkin has ‘ransacked the Tate stores for a stunning group of Auerbachs’, as Jonathan Jones’ five-star review for The Guardian put it. Binkin’s sensitive curation tells a moving story: from Auerbach’s early experiments in mark making and studies of form, to his observational drawings of the English masters, and those extraordinary impasto oil paintings. Poignant and intimate, this is a fascinating survey of the artist’s development, and one that gives us fresh insight into the famously private man and his work. Unseen gets the full set of stars from us, too. Book a ticket at newlandshouse.gallery

Above Frank Auerbach Head of EOW I, 1960. Oil paint on wood Courtesy of Tate, London Photo © Rowena Easton

SUMMER HIGHLIGHTS

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Seafaring

Hastings Contemporary, until September 25 Showing us ‘the perils and pleasures of life at sea’, guest curator James Russell brings together more than 50 artworks – from 1820 right up to the present – in a superb follow-up to his Seaside Modern blockbuster of last summer. With Alfred Wallis’ simple depictions of 19th century Cornish fishing boats under the same marquee as those big, restless gestures of New York’s Cecily Brown, it’s clear that the scope of the show is huge. Sussex’s very own Robert Tavener (see inside his sketchbooks on pages 38-43) makes an appearance, too. It promises to be fun, educational, moving, and not to be missed. Get a ticket at hastingscontemporary.org

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Above Richard Eurich Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship, 1942 © Tate

Culture Spark 2022 Chichester until October 31

Above Glyn Philpot Entrance to the Tagada, 1931 Oil on canvas, Private Collection Photo © The Fine Art Society London, UK / Bridgeman Images

Chichester and its surrounds are buzzing with cultural activities this summer. Why? Because there are so many landmark birthdays to celebrate: Chichester Festival Theatre is 60 years old; Pallant House is 40; Chichester International Film Festival is 30, and The Novium Museum plus the Festival of Chichester are 10. Culture Spark brings together local artists, musicians and organisations to create a season of events for all to enjoy. Our top tips include: The Unfriend, a new play by Steven Moffat, directed by Mark Gatiss and starring Reece Shearsmith, at CFT; Glyn Philpot at Pallant House (pages 54-58); and The Art of Chichester at The Novium, telling the story of the city’s cultural life.

Browse the full events programme at thegreatsussexway.org

SUMMER HIGHLIGHTS

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Minoru Nomata: Windscape De La Warr Pavilion until September 4

This is the Tokyo-based artist’s first solo show outside Asia, and for the De La Warr Pavilion Nomata has created something rather special. The artist grew up in the district of Meguro City during Japan’s period of rapid urban and economic growth, becoming fascinated by the structural design of the industrial buildings around him. Having built a reputation for painting enigmatic imaginary landscapes – unpopulated, yet heaving with architectural superstructures and topographical forms – here he has created a sitespecific installation that responds to the Bexhill building’s Modernist aesthetic and its proximity to the sea.

Expect striking mast-like structures, rather like you might find in a shipyard, as well as those remarkable visionary paintings. Find out more at dlwp.com

Surrealist Picnic 2022 Farleys House & Gallery August 28

Farleys’ annual picnic is likely to sell out, so get in quick. It takes place (rain or shine) on the August Bank Holiday Sunday in the beautiful sculpture garden of what was once the home of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. You are invited to dress up and bring your own surrealist feast to eat while enjoying some live jazz, surreal performance and dance. There are exhibitions on throughout the summer, too, on Thursdays and Sundays until October.

We like the look of Grace Pailthorpe’s vivid watercolours from the 60s. And look out for Julian Wild’s elegant new piece in the sculpture garden (see Spend it on Art on page 94). Start planning those weird and wonderful picnic costumes now. Tickets are available from farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk

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Nathan Coley: Tentative Words Change Everything Lewes district until 29 August

The Turner Prize-shortlisted artist’s enormous found-text sculptures can be found illuminating the Sussex landscape – and switching on the imagination – in places as various as a churchyard and a vineyard; perched atop a castle mound and parked on a derelict Modernist car park. There’s one in Newhaven facing over the Channel, and another outside Charleston Farmhouse (the latter having been newly commissioned for the site). It’s an invitation to spend the summer exploring some of the loveliest areas of the county. If you’re heading over Charleston way, we highly recommend the Langlands & Bell shows, too (see our interview on pages 32-36). Plan your tour at sussexmodern.org.uk

Frank Brangwyn: The Skinners’ Hall Murals

Esther Pearl Watson: An Apparent Brightness

Usually set above a ten-foot-high wainscot in The Skinners’ Company banqueting hall, eight mural panels by Sir Frank Brangwyn RA (1867-1956) will go on eye-level display for the first time ever. We’re only getting this unique opportunity to see the panels up close because they’ve been removed while their usual home in London undergoes restoration. As they are arranged floor-to-ceiling over ten metres, the effect promises to be extraordinary: at once intimate and overwhelming.

Also on show are Brangwyn’s etchings, photographic studies, ceramics and furniture, providing context for his time spent in Ditchling’s thriving artist community. Book tickets at ditchlingmuseumartcraft.org.uk

A small slice of American Weird lands in the Regency-style grandeur of Hove’s Adelaide Crescent this summer, as Texas-raised, LA-based Esther Pearl Watson brings her shiny flying saucers and glittery meteorites to Maureen Paley’s seaside gallery. Watson is famous for her lively autobiographical paintings based on current events, her diaries, and a curious childhood.

At Morena di Luna you can see new drawings, paintings and ceramics, anchored by an immersive walk-in screen installation. She tells us: ‘Bright and magical things are going on in my studio these days’, and we can’t wait to see them. Arrange your visit at maureenpaley.com

Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft May 26 – October 16

Morena di Luna until June 26

Moncrieff-Bray Gallery A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim Towner Eastbourne June 11 – September 25

Nourish: Art to feed the senses Wakehurst July 8 – September 18

Kew’s botanic garden in Sussex is premiering five outdoor installations, each exploring the future of plants and food. Among the highlights is a 24ft-high sculpture that rises and falls in response to rainfall. There’s also a unique opportunity to experience the gardens at sunset, with live performance and outdoor dining. Get tickets at kew.org/nourish

Lucy Carrington Wertheim, the midtwentieth century art dealer, collector and gallerist, rated British Modernist artists as highly as their more celebrated continental counterparts.

Among those she supported were Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Christopher Wood. She was the founder of the Twenties Group and while her most famous gallery was in Mayfair, she also ran one in Brighton (where she settled for the latter part of her life).

This show marks the 50th anniversary of her bequest, upon her death in 1971, of 50-plus works to the Towner. Find out more at townereastbourne.org.uk

Woodruffs Farm, Woodruffs Lane, Egdean, Nr Petworth This converted-barn gallery truly comes into its own during the summer.

Dog and kid and hiker-friendly, it welcomes all-comers with its landscaped sculpture garden, a pool and wonderful views over the Rother Valley. The lofty, light-filled barn is chock-full of Mayfair-quality paintings, sculptures and ceramics. Exactly what you’d expect from Elspeth Moncrieff, whose previous life was as a curator at the V&A, Deputy Editor of Antique Collector and Apollo Magazine, and the Art Market Correspondent for The Art Newspaper. Find out more at moncrieff-bray.com

Opposite Nathan Coley, from Tentative Words Change Everything Photo by Keith Hunter

SUMMER HIGHLIGHTS

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Glyndebourne Festival

Glyndebourne Opera House May 21 – August 28 The 2022 Festival offers a strong lineup of new stagings and innovative productions. Top of the bill is Melly Still’s major new production of The Wreckers, the first staging of Ethel Smyth’s opera since 1939. Michael Grandage’s five-star rendition of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is back, set in 1960s Spain complete with sports cars, short skirts, Pucci prints and Alhambra-inspired interiors. We can also look forward to Floris Visser’s newly minted staging of Puccini’s La bohème; Francesco Micheli’s new version of Handel’s magical fable, Alcina; Mariame Clément’s mischievous reading of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Laurent Pelly’s Poulenc Double Bill. The Festival Programme Book tells you all you need to know and is highly collectible, too (see pages 70-74). For the classic Glyndebourne experience, bring a picnic to enjoy in the landscaped gardens, or choose from one of its casual and fine dining options indoors. Beyond the Festival, its excellent Learning & Engagement programme encourages musical participation and experience across the wider Sussex community.

Discover more at glyndebourne.com

Glynde Place Concert Series Glynde Place June 25

The final concert of the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists showcase presents Simon Höfele (trumpet) and Frank Dupree (piano), who perform works by Antheil, Ravel, Enescu, Takemitsu, Bernstein, Gershwin, Kapustin and Costello. Concerts are held in ‘The Gallery’ of this classic Elizabethan country house, an elegant, panelled room hung with historic works of art. Guests are invited to arrive from 5pm, to picnic in the gardens and watch the sunset gild the hilltops of the South Downs, before listening to performances.

Find out more at glynde.co.uk

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Our City Dances The Dance Space from July 16

Above Photo © Chris Parkes

The long-awaited public opening of this state-of-the-art purpose-built space kicks off with a week of free outdoor and indoor performances, classes and digital dance films. Expect ceilidhs and folk dances like you’ve never seen; free classes and workshops in everything from salsa, kids’ street dance and South Asian Bharanatyam; plus cutting-edge performances from the likes of StopGap Dance Company (above) and award-winning duo Thick & Tight. The Dance Space is the brainchild and new home of South East Dance, whose vision for the building is a welcoming and accessible space where the whole city can explore what dance can mean. The full launch programme is announced in June. Get updates at southeastdance.org.uk

South Downs Summer Music International Festival St Andrew’s Church, Alfriston July 19 – 24

This week-long showcase of classical music takes place in the ‘Cathedral of the Downs’, St Andrew’s Church, in the beautiful village of Alfriston, tucked away in the Cuckmere Valley. The festival, directed by the Benyounes Quartet, attracts some of the world’s most exciting musicians: this year’s performers include violist Timothy Ridout, violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky and the Julian Bliss Quintet.

A dramatised re-telling of the life of Violet Gordon-Woodhouse – pioneering musician of the early 20th century – with Maggie Cole on harpsichord, and actors Harriet Walter and Guy Paul, is a highlight.

Recently it has included non-classical artists, too, plus poetry evenings featuring the likes of former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. Browse the programme at southdownssummermusic.co.uk

Love Supreme Festival Glynde Place July 1­– 3

The Teapot Prince Brighton Pavilion June 19 – 21

The Ballet des Porcelaines has rarely, if ever, been performed since 1741. Fortunately for Sussex, a contemporary reimagining, created by art historian Meredith Martin and choreographer Phil Chan, will be staged amid the Chinoiserie of the Royal Pavilion. This is one of only two venues it will be performed in before it travels to Italy, with the tour culminating in Paris, at the Sèvres Museum.

The live score is a mix of original Baroque and contemporary music by Nicolas Racot de Grandval and Sugar Vendil. Get tickets from brightonmuseums.org.uk

SUMMER HIGHLIGHTS

Europe’s biggest outdoor jazz festival makes a welcome return to Sussex’s summer calendar, offering its usual rich blend of world-class artists from across the jazz, soul, R&B and funk spectrum.

Top of the bill are ‘Queen of Neo Soul’ Erykah Badu, and multi-million-selling jazz vocalist Gregory Porter. Other highlights are: Mr Jukes & Barney Artist (a collaborative project from Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman and the London rapper); fast-emerging British-Nigerian singer-songwriter Samm Henshaw; gospel-soul trio Gabriels; powerhouse US vocalist Lady Blackbird; Blue Note saxophonist Melissa Aldana, and Grammy-winning singer and pianist Jon Cleary. All this in the glorious grounds of Glynde Place, at the foot of the South Downs. Explore the full programme at lovesupremefestival.com

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Our next – autumn – edition, hitting the shelves in late August, will have the theme ‘Earth’ and include an examination of Sussex landscape painting, inspired by the forthcoming exhibition on that subject at Pallant House in November (featuring the likes of JWT Turner, John Constable, Eric Ravilious, Ivon Hitchens, Edward Burra, Eileen Agar and Wolfgang Tillmans).

We’re also planning stories on contemporary painter The Baron Gilvan, Glyndebourne’s Tour schedule, CINECITY 2022, and Japanese ceramicist Shoji Hamada’s strange connection with Ditchling. Plus features on a couple of extremely exciting events we have to stay quiet about, for the time being.

And much more besides, keeping you fully informed about Sussex’s thriving arts scene: past, present and future.

For subscription offers see page 60, or go to rosamagazine.co.uk

Left Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt Photo © Adam Bronkhorst

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My Sussex: Semiconductor Can you describe your artistic practice in fewer than 20 words?

Research driven space-time animations, which explore the physical nature of the material world, fundamental reality and our place in it. (Space-time is one word isn’t it?!)

Where do you live?

In the Elm Grove area of Brighton, where we are part of a vibrant mixed community. But we have lived all over Brighton and Hove in the nearly 25 years we’ve been here.

Why/when did you move here?

We both moved here in 1994 to go to the Art School at Brighton University.

All our contemporaries left the city to become artists in London, and most didn’t succeed. We stayed here as we wanted to experiment and find our own language, and Brighton was the perfect melting pot of so many independent creatives, it allowed us to carve our own space.

Tell us about your studio…

Our studio is often the various science laboratories we’ve had residences in: CERN, the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley and The Mineral Sciences Laboratory at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. But when we’re at home you can find us at Phoenix Studios, Brighton.

What are you working on at the moment?

We’re completing a site-specific commission, a kinetic brass sculpture for the new DeepMind building in Kings Cross, working with the fabricators

millimetre, based in Portslade. Plus we’re starting a new residency with the Extreme Light Group at the University of Glasgow.

What’s your favourite Sussex venue?

There’s been a great series of events in Brighton called Third Thursdays recently, run by Videoclub, where you walk a trail and they project moving image works onto buildings. It’s been a great way to see the city reinvented, and a real coming together of audiences.

What do you like about the cultural scene in Brighton?

That there’s a really broad range of independent creatives, from craftmakers to musicians to new media artists, which means there’s this amazing melting pot of activity and so much creative energy.

What do you think could improve the cultural scene in Brighton & Hove?

One space which brings together all these different audiences so there’s more opportunity to cross-pollinate.

And a Cinematheque equivalent, to indulge in experimental filmmaking and moving image.

Cinematique?

It was an independent 60-seat cinema which ran out of Lighthouse and had a collective of programmers/artists/ filmmakers bringing experimental works and an excellent community of creatives together. We showed a lot of our early work there, it was such an inspiring environment to be a part of.

MY SUSSEX

Do you get any artistic inspiration from your surroundings? If so, how?

A major reason for living here is the access to nature: it’s important for us to be able to step outside of ourselves. Key to our work is considering humankind’s place in the cosmos and Sussex offers wilderness aplenty, where we can think about these things.

Do you feel that you are part of a ‘Sussex’ art scene?

Our dialogue has always been with a wider international network, because of the nature of our works as media art, the artists and curators we have a critical dialogue with, and where our works take us. But we’ve always firmly thought of ourselves as Sussex artists.

How would you spend a perfect Sunday?

A car boot sale, maybe at Brighton Racecourse or further afield, a trip to Hope Gap to hunt for fossils or a cycle over the Downs. We like to be on the move.

Tell us a Sussex secret.

A recent discovery has been Lullington Heath Nature Reserve, it’s a chalk heath which sits behind Friston Forest, and as a landscape it looks so out of place round here: with its heathers and Dartmoor ponies, it feels more like being in the New Forest. There’s an abundance of wildlife, including nightingales, so the dawn chorus is spectacular. It’s such a special place you feel you need to tiptoe through it.

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Hare today The moving story behind our cover artist’s current series

A middle-aged woman emerges from the sea, looking longingly at her shoes on the shingle, some way in front of her. A young, yellow-topped girl monkey-swings on a seaside balustrade.

A bobble-hatted female figure strides up a snowy path in the mountains, towards the welcome warmth of a chalet.

Snapshots of everyday lives, deftly painted in acrylics, on linen.

No sense of the who, or the where, or the when. Welcome to the ambiguous, deliciously wistful world of Fergus Hare.

And just to think that a few years ago, Fergus was primarily a painter of unpeopled landscapes, crafted in oils, in the open air. And space-scapes, too: an expert at painting the moon.

There’s a lot of talk of ‘narrative’ in art, and the word is particularly appropriate in relation to Fergus Hare’s work. Later we’ll look at the way in which he invokes a narrative in the mind of the viewer, imagining the before and after of the moment he has seized, Cartier Bresson-like, in each of his paintings.

But first, his own narrative. How did he get to where he is now? And where is he going, with his art?

Fergus Hare was born in 1977, in South London, and was drawn to art because his two older brothers were good at it, and he “wanted to be like them”.

He’s telling me this in the fine studio he has recently had built in the back garden of the Portslade home he lives in with his wife and two kids. If an artist’s studio represents the mind of that artist, then Fergus is neat, well-organised. In-progress

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paintings are hung on the wall; finished ones are stacked in purpose-built racks, carefully wrapped in see-through plastic.

He decorated the room himself, immaculately.

Fergus’s mother died when he was 18, after which (actually, he later tells me, because of which) he decided to go to art school. He got a place at Norwich School of Art & Design, on an illustration course. His brother was already studying photography at the same college; he had relatives in Suffolk.

During this traumatic period, it was important to be near family.

He was heavily influenced by the work of NC Wyeth, the American painter (and Andrew Wyeth’s father) who specialised in adventure-story book covers: “Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, that sort of thing”. He sold the painting he exhibited in his graduate show, a book cover design for Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This was in 1999, two years after the YBA’s Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, when catchy conceptualism was king.

Fergus’s work, it is quite safe to say, was deeply untrendy.

But he didn’t care. He wanted to do his own thing, more interested in 19th-century British landscape artists than selfportraits in frozen blood, or bed-partner memoirs. Constable, Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby.

At this point he couldn’t yet make a living from art, so he did so in art. While developing his plein-air landscape style, in his spare time, he took on a series of jobs. He worked in pubs in South London – how many artists haven’t pulled pints? – but also for a top-rung art-handling specialist, 01 Art

Left Crowd scene #8, 2022 Acrylic on paper, 39x59cm © Fergus Hare Below Harbour, 2022 Acrylic on linen, 50x70cm © Fergus Hare

COVER ARTIST PROFILE

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Services, where he learnt to hang and handle pictures. “Once,” he tells me, “I had a Lautrec, a Hirst, a Warhol, and a Pissarro in the back of the van. My boss told me not to stop until I got to the gallery.”

And in his free time, he painted. And painted, and painted. His ‘ten thousand hours’ was spent in front of canvas and easel, in all weathers, in South London and – when he could afford to get away – in Suffolk, and Ireland, and Cornwall.

He got bloody good at painting hills, and clouds. He developed a distinct visual voice.

Fergus moved to Brighton, in 2010, and became assistant to Turner Prizewinning artist Keith Tyson. His earnings enabled him to run a studio, and he shifted his subject-matter from the world around him, to the worlds above him.

He’d always been obsessed by Space; he’d chosen the Apollo Landings as the subject for his third-year dissertation, for which he blames his less-than-perfect grades. He bought himself a telescope

– a Skywalker 8” Reflector – and started “painting through it.” Deeply influenced

by Galileo’s lunar sketches, he decided to represent the moon “in an emotional way, rather than attempting accuracy.”

And then came his big break.

In 2011, he caught the eye of the Lewes gallerist Sarah O’Kane, a specialist in representing emerging Sussex-based talent. He became part of her stable, his work displayed in regular group shows, until 2013 when he was given a solo exhibition, The Horizon Rim, in Pelham House in Lewes. Another star turn for O’Kane, this time in St Anne’s Galleries – Beneath the Moon – followed in 2015. He was picked up by New Art Projects, too, who gave him a couple of solo shows in their Hackney gallery. In 2018, one of his paintings was shown next to a seascape of his early hero John Constable, at an exhibition in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.

His career was taking off. His star, if you’ll pardon the astronomical metaphor, was in the ascendency.

Left Earthshine #2, 2014 Charcoal on paper, 20x30cm © Fergus Hare

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I had a Lautrec, a Hirst, a Warhol, and a Pissarro in the back of the van.

My boss told me not to stop until I got to the gallery.

Fergus Hare 27

Above Snow Scene #4, 2020 Acrylic on paper, 37x53cm © Fergus Hare Right Dragon Clouds, 2018 Pastel on card, 45x64cm © Fergus Hare Opposite Beach Scene #7, 2022 Acrylic on linen, 70x50cm © Fergus Hare

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clue in the titles. There is, instead, a delicious and deliberate equivocality about the images. “I avoid giving too much facial detail, as it’s not relevant who the subjects are. You can create character much better through poses, anyway. And clothes.”

All this timeless ambiguity lends the paintings an ‘everyman’ quality. You might not recognise the person Hare has depicted, but something about the essence of his figures reminds you of someone you do know. A relative? A friend? A neighbour?

Sometimes, even, you are reminded of yourself.

So what do you do, when you’ve made your name as a lunar artist? Fergus Hare, while still an “amateur astronomer at heart” decided to change tack. And medium. He went back to landscapes. But he no longer felt the need to sit outside, painting what he saw in front of him, in oils. He worked from his memory and imagination, in soft pastels. In his studio he could work “longer, and bigger”. He “created places that could be real, but they aren’t”. “You can get away with quite a lot with skies,” he says, “because no two are the same”. And: “I don’t go into too much detail, so I don’t get into too much trouble.” He generally set these poignant scenes at dusk, using the powdery quality of the medium to evoke the look and mood of the dying day. Those ‘ten thousand hours’ were coming in handy.

Did I say: ‘change tack’? Hare might have shifted from one modus operandi to another, but the mood of his pieces – gentle, quiet, timeless – remained, essentially, the same. It’s only recently that he fully realised what it was – who it was – that drove that mood.

Hare first started working in acrylics in 2016, on a painting trip to Snowdonia. He now hardly ever uses any other type of paint.

“I don’t think I’ve painted in oils for two years”, he says. “I love the way it [using acrylics] works. The speed I can get things done with it.” Making people the subject of his paintings, as he almost always currently does, followed three years later. “I started using old photos as source material,” he says.

Sometimes old family photos, sometimes ones he’d recently taken. “Using acrylics helps achieve effects without too much detail, so they don’t look like reproductions of photographs.”

It perturbs him, rather, that he is often compared to Edward Hopper. “I don’t see it, myself,” he says. “I studied his work doing GCSE, but I haven’t paid much attention since. I’m not entirely sure I agree with the comparison.” He cites Bob Dylan as his biggest artistic influence (“though not for his artwork, for his lyrics, and for his way of being. He taught us how to live, and how to be an artist.”)

I can see the Hopper in his work, though, even if he may have come to similar conclusions via a different route. There’s a loneliness about his paintings, a wash of melancholy. His figures carry an emotional charge, which heightens your desire to know where they have come from, and where they are going. If these were stills from a movie, you’d want to watch the whole film.

A few days after my interview with Fergus, he gives me the key to understanding his work, in an email, responding to a couple of queries I have. “I can connect a line of every piece I have done to my mother,” he writes. “As if I am trying to contact her with what I do, as if she were alive. Not in subject, necessarily, but emotionally. I realised that quite recently, and things started making sense for me, when I did.”

Whatever subject matter Fergus chooses for his next series of works, whenever he might choose to make that shift, you can guarantee that the paintings will hit the same poignant note.

A pre-teen girl, holding a yellow plastic racket, in the shadow of a swingball pole, waits nervously for the ball to come her way.

A matronly figure stares across a bay at the skyscrapers on the far shore. A young mother urges an unwilling child across a daisy-flecked lawn, towards a summerhouse. Snapshots of everyday lives, deftly painted in acrylics, on linen. Welcome to the ambiguous, deliciously wistful world of Fergus Hare.

Words by Alex Leith

If you look at a photo you immediately want to know who it depicts, where it was taken, and when it was taken. The reason photos are captioned is to give you this information. Fergus’s paintings deliberately avoid giving you any of that. There’s no who, there’s no where, there’s no when. And you’ll find no

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Top Mountains #7, 2020 Oil on linen, 50x70cm © Fergus Hare

Regency costumes crafted from paper and thread by artist Stephanie Smart

Regency wardrobe Royal Pavilion Brighton 19 March – 11 September 2022 Open Daily Admission fee payable brightonmuseums.org.uk 03000 290900

Images © The House of Embroidered Paper. Photographs by Ray Sullivan

The

Two’s company Imogen Lycett Green meets Langlands & Bell

Charleston is nearly ready for visitors – the walled garden is weeded and edged, the flowerbeds bright with tulips and forget-me-nots; a hoover hums quietly in the farmhouse; a seamstress sits stitching a rag rug from the bedroom of John Maynard Keynes. Here is the familiar round pond, there is the Virginia creeper climbing up the walls, everywhere is chalk and flint, unchanged. In the farmyard, even the chirrup-chirrup of nesting sparrows cannot break the film of stillness.

Into this revered space, so beloved of Bloomsbury devotees, walk Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, an unlikely pair, you would have thought, to marry up with figurative artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell [no relation]. Yet Langlands & Bell, first bought by Charles Saatchi for the notorious YBA show in 1992, have been invited here to make three exhibitions.

“After you,” I whisper. It feels like breaking and entering as we tiptoe through the terracotta-tiled old kitchen, and follow an emerald green runner up, up into the empty house.

Langlands & Bell are introducing me to Near Heaven, their new installation in Vanessa Bell’s attic studio, a space that has been for years, until now, chock-full of abandoned objects and empty frames, old chairs and dusty files. They encourage me forward, through a tiny door, up the narrow wooden stairs. The stairs creak, as attic stairs should, in a house full of ghosts. “You first,” they say. At the top, I push open the small door. Gasp. I face an enormous five-paned window with stone mullions (Vanessa had the original small farmhouse window reconfigured in 1939) with a view over the walled garden, to the far Weald and beyond. The day is hazy, blue at the edges. The north light is gentle.

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“Angelica Garnett, Vanessa’s daughter, described her mother’s studio as near heaven,” says Nikki. Ben says, “Virginia Nicholson [Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter] told us she slept up here in the attic when she was little, but she never went into the studio. She was not forbidden, but she felt it wasn’t appropriate to enter.”

Now the room is empty but for a vase of narcissi on the window ledge and two busts – one of Virginia Woolf and another of celebrated Pre-Raphaelite beauty Julia Stephen, Virginia and Vanessa’s mother. Hung to the right, there is a charcoal drawing by Duncan Grant, of Vanessa, drawn a month before she died on 7th April, 1961, and a digitalised portrait of Vanessa, made by Langlands & Bell. Leaning against the wall is Vanessa Bell’s original mirror, which she used to make self-portraits. The vaulted ceiling has been lined with more mirrors, installed by Ben and Nikki.

“We want you to stand in the physical space where Vanessa stood. Look at the marks and traces left,” says Nikki, her hand trailing down the door frame. “You see the circles above the door, and these nice squiggles like a serpentine up the side of the door frame.” Nikki falls silent as the three of us look up, catching ourselves in the many angles of the mirrored ceiling.

“Living at Charleston with these big personalities,” says Ben, “Angelica was a child growing up in a hall of mirrors and she felt as a child her own ego was reflected back at her by all these massive egos.”

Nikki adds: “Art is about relationship.”

Images Photos © Rowena Easton From Absent Artists

INTERVIEW: LANGLANDS & BELL

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Nikki and Ben met at art school in the 1970s. “I was eighteen,” Nikki tells me with girlish delight. “Even younger, perhaps 17,” adds Ben. “Working together seemed natural,” they say in tandem, nodding. Ben lived over the field from Charleston as a boy, the son of architects and designers. Nikki grew up in Paddington, then St John’s Wood. Partners in life and art for 44 years, their own relationship is the foundation for a practice which focuses on relationships linking people with architecture, and on a wider global level, the “masscommunications and exchange we use to negotiate an increasingly fast-changing technological world.” They make installations and full-scale architecture as well as sculpture, film and video. Langlands & Bell finish each other’s sentences and even dress alike, in navy and black, their clothing as interchangeable – truly androgynous – as their sentences.

Yet there are differences – “Nikki is...” starts Ben. “I’m more… gregarious,” finishes Nikki. “We’re both Gemini, so there are actually four of us,” she says, her eyes glinting with mischief.

The couple’s cosiness and humour belies the seriousness of their life’s work. When we visit what we decide together to call ‘the mini-retrospective’ in the dazzling new highceilinged Wolfson gallery, they take me through each piece, the conception of each idea tenderly recalled. The show begins with Surrounding Time (1990) a perfectly balanced constellation of elliptical glass-topped cases and tables housing distorted models of municipal buildings such as the Colosseum in Rome and La Maison de Force, an 18th radial prison, formerly in Ghent. Ben explains, “We noticed that circular typologies are very commonly used when you are talking about spectacle and power and states, when you’re trying to enthuse the population in the kind of corporate project, when they want you to believe in what they are doing.

So whether it’s Roman circuses or a multi-national company with global ambitions or surveillance and control in prisons, we see the circle repeated.”

Why, I ask, is the circle is such a powerful shape?

“The circle”, Nikki responds, “is inherently a resolved form and is, with the triangle and the square, the primary code of all architecture.” Ben adds: “The circle often implies equality – gives visual access. But there is power in where the person who has built the circle – the priest or emperor – positions himself.”

“We wanted to make a constellation of elements,” says Nikki.

“It’s reflective, so you are reflected in the panels and there is space for the observer to step inside the work.” Using tables, the ‘person’ is implied. Nikki explains why they often use tables and chairs in their work: “Furniture mediates between the body and the building.” Catching myself reflected in the black surface of the work, I feel this mediation in action.

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Shortlisted for the Turner Prize and winners of a BAFTA for video installation The House of Osama bin Laden (2004), Langlands & Bell have always resisted belonging to a ‘school’ of artists. Perhaps because their work is unlike anyone else’s.

They show me models of African buildings which interrogate imperial relationships and pieces from their 2018 exhibition, Internet Giants: Masters of the Universe, which examine the wielding of power and corporate notions of ‘utopia’. We stand before the remnants (the original piece burnt) of their very first joint piece, Kitchen (1978) which helped to secure their joint degree, a Double First, awarded – with some suspicion from the establishment – at a time before the meteoric rise of Gilbert & George, before artist duos were a thing. There is a model of a church, there are combs and toothbrushes – they like to challenge ideas of what is venerable by putting everyday objects under glass, as they would be in a museum. They speak of centuries of “extraction and profit” where values visible in 18th-century slave architecture on the Ghanaian coast remain visible in the internet giants’ corporate structures built by ‘starchitects’.

“Architecture always tells a story”, says Nikki.

Their own stories as artists originated in relation to space.

Nikki was allocated a white space in the attic of her childhood home which she was allowed to transform – she made organic paintings and decorated the ceiling. As a child, Ben did not visit Charleston but spent time at Furlongs, the flint cottage at the foot of the Downs in Firle which was ‘transformed’ by designer and teacher Peggy Angus and famously portrayed in paintings by Eric Ravilious.

Now they live and work in Whitechapel as well as Kent where, twenty years ago, they bought a field in which they built an off-grid studio/house, made of glass, wood and aluminium.

The house is called Untitled, they say, with glee. The planners welcomed their desire to “appear, then disappear” as Nikki puts it. You tread lightly on this earth, I say. “We hope to,” says Nikki. “The space needed transforming and restoring.”

Ben says: “We both believe, and I think Nikki would agree – [suppressed smile] though I can’t always rely on that – we both have an intrinsic belief in transforming surroundings and the power that has to change you.”

Can they ever switch off, I wonder. If their space is art and their art is space? “Of course!” they say. They make meals, drink wine, see their friends, go to concerts. (Nikki’s brother is Laurence Bell, founder of Domino Recording Company, home of the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand.) “He’s just signed Wet Leg,” says Nikki, relishing the unusual band name. “I can’t wait to see Wet Leg in concert.” They don’t have a television – they were given one by Gilbert & George, their neighbours in Whitechapel, but it blew up (“Perhaps

‘We both have an intrinsic belief in transforming surroundings and the power that has to change you’ Ben Langlands

Right Portrait photo © Imogen Lycett Green

INTERVIEW: LANGLANDS & BELL

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we’re not meant to have one,” says Nikki) – but they listen to music and the radio while they work. “We absorb what’s going on. You have to.” While making pieces, they use trestle tables which they fold away when a work is complete. “We make a mess but we tidy up,” says Nikki.

A video of their (immaculate) studio space in Whitechapel, intersected with Turner’s studio at Petworth Park, opens Absent Artists, the final section of Langland & Bell’s Charleston season.

“Our three works at Charleston are connected by two main themes – transforming your life through transforming your space”, says Ben. “And notions of utopia – which aims, of course, to change the world through transforming it, to put it in a rather grand way.” He adds: “All architecture aspires to do that at some level or another.”

Absent Artists is curated by Langlands & Bell (their first ever curating gig, which they thoroughly enjoyed – “it told us so much about ourselves – not always comfortable – about our prejudice and taste”) from the collection of art dealer Katrin Bellinger. The exhibition is beautiful as a whole and intriguing piece by piece, with its juxtaposition of David Hockney’s studio next to Hogarth’s, next to Rembrandt’s, next to Lucian Freud’s. “Beauty and content,” notes Ben. “The two things are in flux, all the time.” They have transformed the exhibition space too, by making a serpentine with a parabolic arch for visitors to walk under. They also painted the walls a striking mauve. “The mauve was a spontaneous decision. It just felt right.” What, I say, to both of you? “Conceptually,” says Nikki, “we are in tune.” “We have rows,” says Ben, smiling. “But so far they haven’t been terminal.”

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All the pictures they have chosen from the Bellinger collection depict studios without the artist present. The empty studios ask what is conveyed by empty space. “When the artist is no longer there,” asks Nikki, “why does the visitor come? What are they hoping to find? Are they looking for something in themselves?” asks Nikki. She believes there’s a romance to it. Ben adds, “As people, we need to reimagine. Are we hoping to find insight into emotional life? Meaning in life? To examine the process of working?”

Every work of Langlands & Bell asks questions. They turn the world over with a sense of discovery. What is this? What is this? What is a kitchen? What is a Colosseum? What is a studio? What is Charleston? And in the asking, the house of ghosts splutters into life. If questioned and transformed by new eyes – your eyes and my eyes as well as the eyes of contemporary artists – it will remain alive.

By the time we part, I feel I am in a relationship with Langlands & Bell. They seem to know how to live and I want to go home with them. But instinctively I know that three would be a crowd. Their unit is unassailable. I ask them: if they were placed at far ends of the world from each other, how would they go on making work? “I would stop,” says Nikki. “I would stop too,” says Ben, his words overlapping with hers.

“But together, we keep moving,” says Ben. “Keeping moving forward,” says Nikki. “Avanti!” And they walk away, her hand in the small of his back.

Imogen Lycett Green is a journalist and author, and a trustee of the John Betjeman Poetry Prize Langlands & Bell’s three shows, Ideas of Utopia, Absent Artists and Near Heaven are at Charleston until August 29.

INTERVIEW: LANGLANDS & BELL

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‘My seed corn over 40 years’ Inside Robert Tavener’s sketchbooks

In 2002, Emma Mason was asked by her friend, the veteran printmaker Robert Tavener, to put his life’s work into some sort of order, a job that she reckoned would take about a year. “He was in his eighties, and the task was beyond him,” she says.

The artist died in 2004, and his daughter, Mary, asked Mason to take care of his entire archive, and to oversee the sale of his remaining prints. Twenty years on, there are still limitededition Taveners on sale on the walls of her plush Eastbourne selling gallery, among print works of other (largely British, largely 20th-century) artists.

Tavener, originally a Londoner, moved to Sussex in 1953 to teach at Eastbourne Art School, where he was given a day off every week to pursue his career as a printmaker, specialising in linocuts and lithographs. He spent most of his free time at his artwork: either out sketching and plein-air watercolour painting; or cutting the prints; or at his press, producing hundreds of editions for an expanding number of collectors in the ‘art for all’ period in which the medium was booming.

He was also successful as a commercial artist, as national companies, such as British Rail and London Transport, were in that era committed to commissioning artists to design posters for their advertising campaigns. He produced magazine covers for Lilliput, Homes & Gardens and The Listener, plus illustrations for the likes of Methuen and Penguin.

All images © The estate of Robert Tavener

But it’s his fine-artwork for which he is best known today. “He was an extremely talented draftsman,” says Mason, “who had a finely tuned sense of place, and the ability to get across the tone and mood of the English landscape and of English architecture. He was also extremely technically adept, an absolute master of the mechanics of his medium.”

PAGES FROM A SKETCHBOOK

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PAGES FROM A SKETCHBOOK

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Tavener was passionate about Sussex, avowing that if it weren’t for commercial constraints, he would happily spend all his time in Eastbourne and the countryside around it. His home town features strongly in his work, as do Brighton and Hastings, and the South Downs. The artist rarely held exhibitions outside the county, organising his own shows – which were highly successful in terms of sales – in small venues.

The artist’s prints enjoy enormous cachet among Sussex-based collectors, but, largely thanks to Emma Mason’s hard work, the artist’s worth is nowadays recognised nationally, and, indeed, globally. “A lot of our sales,” she says, “are to buyers from the USA, Australia and New Zealand.”

Part of Mason’s Tavener archive will never be put up for sale.

Among all the prints in the archive, Mason discovered scores of pages the artist had pulled from his sketchbooks, featuring quickly executed drawings he’d made throughout his career, since he was a young WW2 veteran, training at Hornsey School of Art. These were wrapped in sheets of paper, on which he’d written: ‘50 years of sketches. Please do not destroy’, and ‘My seed corn over 40 years!’

Mason was kind enough to let us delve into those sketches, and choose a number to reproduce here, as the first in our series examining Sussex artists’ sketchbooks. Most of them have never been published before. These elegant visual vignettes often found their way, in one form or another, into Tavener’s final prints. Of which the artist stated: “You have to be careful not to think of them as portraits of specific places.

They are usually an amalgam of my drawings and paintings made into a sort of summing up of a landscape.”

Words by Antonia Gabassi Emma Mason, 21 Lushington Lane, Eastbourne, BN21 4LJ emmamason.co.uk

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PAGES FROM A SKETCHBOOK

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Pilgrim’s Progress Can Hans Feibusch’s refugee mural find a home?

Alex Grey investigates

If I’d known five years on – with Britain still split down the middle over the EU, a global medical emergency playing fast and loose with both lives and livelihoods, and all of us staring down the barrel of World War III – that I’d still be working flat out to find a new home for a little known and rather dusty mural, would I still have thought the effort was going to be worth it?

My story begins on a mild and sunny day in the autumn of 2016.

I’m standing at the foot of a deconsecrated church building of such staggering dilapidation that I hardly know whether it’s appalling or beautiful, waiting to meet Fenya Sharkey, a community arts worker who’s promised me a guided tour of a secret mural in the church’s crypt.

I believe that good art yields up its secrets to anyone who will stand still long enough to look and learn – which is not to say that a position of ignorance is as interesting a place to stand as one of knowledge – so I’ve been compiling a list of the thousands of works of art hiding in plain sight in Sussex streets, parks, churches and other public spaces, with the intention of writing in unpretentious terms about where to find them, what I know about them and how they make me feel.

My list of must-sees so far includes sculpture by Epstein, Hambling and Gill, glass by Chagall, Reyntiens, Burne-Jones and Rossetti, paintings by Sutherland and L’Ortolano, tiles

by Pugin, Morris and Picasso, tapestries – and much else besides – by Piper. But one work stands out as a particularly urgent mission: Hans Feibusch’s vast, two-sided mural,

Left Early section of mural – Feibusch (Christian) leaves his homeland Photo © Alex Grey Opposite A well loved section of the mural formerly used for football practice Photo © Alex Grey

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Pilgrim’s Progress, painted directly on to the crypt walls of St Elisabeth’s Church in Eastbourne – which is slated for imminent demolition.

The mural’s story started in 1943 – except it really started in 1933, which is the year the Nazi Party came to power and Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor. With the writing on the wall for Jewish artists and intellectuals, Feibusch left for London, where he set up his art practice at the Landseer Studios in St John’s Wood and joined the London Group, which had been founded by artists including Walter Sickert and Jacob Epstein and went on to become a who’s who of twentieth-century British art. Feibusch almost single-handedly revived the church mural tradition after his 1937 Footwashing, at the New Methodist Hall in Colliers Wood, came to the attention of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, who promptly commissioned him to paint a Nativity for St Wilfred’s in Brighton, the first of dozens of biblical murals he painted in English churches, many of them in Sussex. The Nativity is still there, as is the church building, which was turned into sheltered housing in the 1980s after a long period of neglect, having narrowly escaped demolition itself.

Opposite top Scenes from Christian’s story Photo © Alex Grey Opposite bottom Celestial City (north wall) flanked the chapel’s altar Photo © Alex Grey Below Tom Organ and the Arté Conservation team removing a plaster-backed panel Photo © Alex Grey

At around the same time – the foundation stone was laid in 1935 and the building was finished in 1938 – the fantastic white elephant of St Elisabeth’s was being built with money bequeathed to the diocese by local businesswoman Eliza Watson on the strict understanding that it would only be used to erect a church building of epic proportions, whether anyone wanted one or not. Situated at the already very high summit of Victoria Drive, its heavy presence would have dominated the skyline even if it had been in keeping with the local architecture. As it was, its modern exterior was sometimes likened to Edward Maufe’s neo-Gothic Guildford Cathedral and sometimes, less kindly, to a telephone exchange, library or bingo hall. Its architect, Peter Stonham, had been more accustomed to building cinemas – and it showed. Worse than that, while no expense was spared on the Venetian glass light fittings and the embroidered chancel tapestries, an error in the construction specifications meant that almost from day one the roof began to subside and water to seep in. By the 1980s, parish and diocese were locked in an ongoing debate about whether to repair or demolish, and increasingly the arithmetic favoured demolition.

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Thirty-odd years on, the warm red and orange brickwork looks as though it’s had ten tonnes of mouldy yoghurt dropped on it and pigeons swoop in and out of the glassless windows of the vast church nave. The diocese is keen the demolition is paid for by an as-yet-unidentified purchaser, and in any case the building is listed and still full of unrescued treasures. As a car door slams nearby, the pigeons take to the air, beating their wings as one.

The story goes that Professor George Reilly, the noted architect and art critic, wrote to George Bell in September 1943 asking for help on behalf of ‘dear little Feibusch’, who was ‘very depressed and tackling an enormous canvas in the hope of coming out of the black night of the soul.’ Could Bishop Bell find some suitable walls for Feibusch to paint, he wondered. A large-scale area was needed: ‘It is only then his brush flows freely.’ The story Feibusch had set his heart on painting, Reilly added, was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

And Bell did find some suitable walls – in the crypt of the newly minted St Elisabeth’s, where the vicar agreed to create a war memorial chapel incorporating a mural ‘of lasting beauty and worth… a permanent work of art within the diocese, no matter what be the final chapter to the troubles of the church above.’ Feibusch worked solidly on the mural for four months, undaunted by flying bombs landing nearby, one of them hitting the church itself. The war memorial mural and chapel were dedicated in a service in October 1944 by Bishop Bell, who described them as “full of the memories of evacuation and war”.

Full of the memories of evacuation and war.

The crypt is sunless, its air stale. I enter through a heavily fortified door at the rear of the building and immediately I’m overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the mural, which runs from floor to ceiling around three of the large room’s four walls. Fenya kindly invites me to “spend some time alone with it” and leaves. The silence is broken only by the distant cooing of pigeons in the church above. The sense of pastness is palpable. The dusty oak parquet, the uneven columns of stacking chairs neatly lining the one blank wall, and the flaking paint alongside a column radiator habitually used as a football goal all create a sense that time has stood still in this room – as if the parish kids left and locked up one afternoon and simply never came back.

As my eyes adjust to the light, I begin to see the detail. A palette I come to understand as distinctively Feibuschian: powder blue, acid green, lavender, cinnamon, butterscotch, rich crimson. Larger-than-life figures, the folds of their garments deftly suggested by sculpted blocks of light and darkness. Expressions of horror, desperation, exhaustion, uncertainty, relief, guilt. And as I walk clockwise round the series of tableaux, I come to realise that, although Feibusch

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has ostensibly depicted scenes from Bunyan’s Christian allegory, the story he’s actually told is his own: a frenzied departure from the apocalypse of his homeland, re-entry into civilised life with the support of friends and helpers, recovery from trauma, the search for grace.

This is war art. Holocaust art.

At that moment, I realise that allowing this extraordinary work to become collateral damage when the church is demolished would be just plain wrong.

In the five years since, I’ve learned more than I ever imagined there was to know about lottery funding, war memorials, church politics, the process of setting up a charity, twentiethcentury paint polymers, and the difference between strappo, stacco and stacco a massello.

In late 2019, after a long process of negotiation with the Church of England, specialist art conservator Tom Organ, who contacted me to offer his help after seeing a BBC news item about the mural, began removing Pilgrim’s Progress in the form of two dozen painted panels backed with the thinnest possible layer of plaster. For five months, the St Elisabeth’s crypt looked like a field hospital, with curtains of plastic sheeting dividing work areas from dust-free zones and panels stretchered out of the building, one by one, to go into storage. The last panels left for Kent in February 2020, the week before the first pandemic lockdown.

St Elisabeth’s is gone now. The demolition process was completed at the end of 2020, but the site remains undeveloped. The mural awaits an injection of cash to fund its detailed restoration – and it needs a new home where it can be on permanent display, enjoyed as a world-class work of art, understood as a powerful piece of social history, and respected as a war and Holocaust memorial.

And to answer the question, if I’d known where we’d be five years on, if anything it would have heightened my sense of urgency. I wrote in 2018 that the mural is ‘a disturbing visual record that has enormous resonance in the context of modern anxieties about the displacement of refugees from conflict zones and the position of the British people in the history of diaspora.’ As I write now, in 2022, the number of Ukrainian refugees crossing Europe to escape war and genocide approaches four million, while the UK anxiously formulates and reformulates its political response.

I’d say the mural has never been more relevant.

Alex Grey is a writer and curator who works with the Feibusch Progress Project

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

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‘All the blues I ever dreamt of’ Alexandra Loske on the queen of colours

The past is a foreign country. In my case, quite literally so. I am writing this piece about the colour blue on a short break under the low, dull skies of Northern Germany, where I was born and grew up. The Rhine is a mighty river in these parts, yet it never inspired me. I’m not alone: the light of the Mediterranean was one of the main reasons why Northern European artists have always flocked to Italy and Greece.

But, from an early age, I was drawn to somewhere closer to the Rhineland: England, with its watery fabric and everchanging skies. When I was in my early twenties, an admirer, knowing about my interest in British culture, sent me daily postcards of JMW Turner watercolours. Forty or so arrived, depicting mist, storms, rain and untamed water. I began to create my own image of England. It emerged from Turner’s hazy visions, Constable’s obsession with atmospheric conditions, and the many poets and writers who had managed to describe the same in words.

Years later, working as a museum curator at the Royal Pavilion & Brighton Museums, I found myself glued to a small screen, watching an art auction at which Brighton Museum acquired a small watercolour painting: Turner’s Brighthelmstone, which depicts Brighton in 1824, seen from the sea, just off the nowgone Chain Pier, with the Royal Pavilion visible among the scramble of elegant Georgian houses. The sea is wild, and painted in deep – now somewhat faded – blues, suggesting the artist sketched the image while being tossed around in a boat, and the sky is filled with clouds that have just emptied themselves of rain and are parting over the town to reveal a lighter blue, and a faint rainbow. It reflected perfectly how I imagined England to be, before I lived here: buzzing with life, and framed by skies and sea. Landscape that tells story after story… and many of them in blue.

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Our world is mostly blue Seen from space, our world looks like a blue, veined, glowing marble in a sea of dark infinity. In most of the world, what we see when we look up on a cloudless day is a bright blue sky, and at night the firmament often appears to be inky blue. One of the elements of life, water, although colourless, also appears blue to the human eye. The deeper the water, the deeper its hue of blue. We are surrounded by blue on a cosmic, all-encompassing scale.

Blue is the most visible of colours to humans. Blues and purples form the largest part of our spectrum. When the sun is high in the sky, light gets scattered in all directions. Blue light is more likely to be scattered than red light because of its shorter wavelength, which is why we see the sky as blue.

In many respects blue stands for distance. The further away objects are, the bluer they appear, which is something painters often utilise when attempting to create perspective and depth in a painting. But in the Western world blue is also associated with otherness and exoticism, because of the geographical distance of the raw materials needed to create blue paints and dyes. Indigo dye came from India, and the allure of cobalt blue in Chinese and Japanese porcelain created a craze for Asian ceramics for many centuries.

Ultramarine: the bluest of blues In Medieval and Renaissance painting there was one blue that was the unrivalled queen of colours: ultramarine. This was a pigment with a name as romantic and exciting as the depth and quality of the colour it produced. It was the most coveted and expensive colour in art for hundreds of years, mixed only cautiously and sparingly with other colours by painters and often paired with gold leaf.

Above The “possible Turner” gifted to Alexandra Right JMW Turner, Brighthelmstone, Sussex, c1824 © Royal Pavilion & Museum Trust Brighton & Hove. Pencil, pen and black ink and watercolour with scratching out on Whatman paper, 14.6 x 22.2 cm

ON COLOUR

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Left Fergus Hare, Moon, 2018. Acrylic on paper Private collection Bottom Blue Verditer in the South Galleries in 1823 From John Nash’s The Royal Pavilion at Brighton, 1826 © Royal Pavilion & Museum Trust, Brighton & Hove

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Right Edward Louis Lawrenson, Moonrise on the Rape of Hastings, East Sussex, c1920 © Royal Pavilion & Museum Trust Brighton & Hove

Traditionally ground from the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli, it can produce the most intense, cool shades of blue.

It also has a particular translucency that gives paintings a brilliance that no other pigment can provide. And, crucially, it is stable, meaning it does not deteriorate or fade easily. Frequently referred to as ‘the royal pigment’ or ‘the diamond of pigments’, its name reflects its geographical remoteness: ultramarine literally means ‘from across the sea’, alluding to the distant place where it was sourced: the Sar-e-Sang mines in the mountainous terrain of the Badakshan region of modern-day Afghanistan.

The remote origin, rarity and brilliance of ultramarine were reflected in its price, which used to be higher than that of gold, but also in the way it was used and in what an artist chose to depict with it. Patrons often gave clear instructions to artists as to exactly how much ultramarine should be used in a painting, and where exactly it should be applied. It might also occasionally have served as currency in Renaissance Venice. A pigment of such high value became naturally associated with the most revered subjects, and achieved an almost divine status. It is not surprising that ultramarine was often used in Christian art to depict the robes of the Virgin Mary, Christ, or particular saints.

A revolutionary blue: Prussian Blue In the early eighteenth century a new, powerful blue arrived on the scene, and it revolutionised painting and printing: Prussian Blue. Soon after its discovery it was used everywhere: in oil painting, interior decoration, watercolours, in Japanese woodblock prints, and even on stamps.

Prussian Blue is often considered the first synthetically produced pigment of the modern age. It is a ferric ferrocyanide and was discovered by chance between 1704 and 1707, by the German alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel. The exact recipe of the pigment and its production

methods were kept secret until 1724, but by the later 1720s the pigment had become widely available in Europe.

A powerful, deep colour, Prussian Blue was a good alternative to ultramarine, but it was nowhere near as bright and luminous. Large areas of the Royal Pavilion, where I still work as a curator, are covered in Prussian Blue, found on printed wallpaper and decorated surfaces.

However, in areas where a lighter blue was required, such as in the galleries on the upper floor, we see a copper-based, lighter blue called Blue Verditer. When you are closer to the sky, you clearly need a blue that looks more sky-like.

Sussex artists’ blues In 2017 I interviewed a Sussex artist, Mary Anne Aytoun Ellis, in her studio at the foot of Lewes Castle, while preparing an exhibition catalogue. I was intrigued by a small area of particularly vivid blue in one of her paintings. And sure enough, it was ultramarine. The real thing, made from lapis lazuli sourced in Afghanistan.

She decided to use it very carefully and in specific areas. We both pored over the beauty of the raw pigment, and I accepted payment for the writing in the form of a couple of spoonfuls of ultramarine, a piece of bright sky in a jar.

Recently we hung a painting by the now little-known Sussex artist Edward Louis Lawrenson (1868–1940) in Brighton Museum, titled Moonrise on the Rape of Hastings, East Sussex. He loved spending time on the road, travelling widely in England and on the continent in a motorcar, painting in the open air.

He was particularly keen on capturing the effects of light, and – in true Impressionist manner – largely avoided black or very dark tones in his palette.

In this painting Lawrenson expresses his passion for changing light conditions, capturing a late summer moonrise framed by tall trees that dramatically cut vertically through the composition.

He chose a range of muted blues, greys and greens to depict the crepuscular

ON COLOUR

evening light. Looking at it reminds me of Goethe’s notes on colour and light, but there is also a melancholy that is associated with blue landscapes.

I am lucky to live with several paintings by artist Fergus Hare, and have over the years had many conversations with him about blue. We share an interest in ‘cosmic blues’, and I have used his observational studies of the moon and night skies in some of my publications.

But I am also interested in what blue paints and pigments he uses, and have learnt a lot about how the materiality of colour matters in art.

A few years ago, he was almost exclusively using Prussian Blue, partly because it mixes well, having experimented with many different blues. To my surprise, he was never too keen on ultramarine, stating that he found it too purple. Fergus is still “getting lost”, he tells me, in the enticing world of blues, but likes to restrict himself to one or two. Now that he paints more in acrylics, he works mostly with Cerulean Blue (as a pure blue), and Payne’s Grey to darken most tones.

A blue postscript Just before the pandemic, a very generous art collector gave me a blue thumbprint of Turner, in lieu of a Christmas card. Turner had left this smudge accidently on a small sheet of watercolour samples. It is one of my prized possessions, and incidentally the blue is very similar to that corner of blue sky after rain in the 1824 Brighthelmstone painting. Later, the same person gave me a small watercolour that might well be

by Turner, depicting the Sussex coast, in intense deep blues. The county I now call home has given me all the blues I ever dreamt of, while living under those low Rhineland skies.

Alexandra Loske is a curator at Royal Pavilion & Brighton Museums and the author of Colour: A Visual History (Tate, 2019)

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Mr Philpot changes trains Why did society painter Glyn Philpot ‘go Picasso’?

Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) was, in his popular heyday, widely considered to be the most talented artist of his generation, in an era when successful oil painters enjoyed celebrity status, and all the trappings that went with it.

In 1923 he became the youngest Royal Academician, having for some years exhibited much-praised paintings in the gallery’s Summer Show. He had already established a reputation as London’s most sought-after society portrait artist, the successor to John Singer Sargent, called upon to paint twelve or so lucrative likenesses a year, of the great and the good (and the rich and the famous) in England, and beyond.

Stanley Baldwin. Sir Oswald Mosley. King Fuad of Egypt.

He also had frequent solo shows in London, selling his more personal paintings and sculptures (mostly of a symbolic nature, in classical, religious and historical settings), for significant – though significantly lower – sums.

On the face of it, Philpot was a traditionalist, his techniques reflecting the many hours he had spent studying the Old Masters at the National, the Louvre, and the Prado, and his extensive classical training in London and Paris. There was little hint of the twentieth century in his elegant society portraits, beautifully composed and drafted, and rich in glazed colour, which reflected his major influences, from Velázquez to Titian to Veronese.

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The considerable sums of money he earned from his art enabled Philpot to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle, with a studio and flat in Holland Park (and, latterly, another in Montparnasse), and a country pile near Horsham in Sussex, with servants and a chauffeur. He was a tireless traveller, making several trips abroad a year, mostly to continental Europe, but also to the USA, and North Africa. He was good-natured and generous, subsidising the lifestyle of friends and family, particularly his long-term companion Vivian Forbes, a lesser artist who he met while on military service in WW1.

So why did he risk all this, when, in 1931, he ‘came out’ as a Modernist, largely eschewing his old style for something much sparser, and more stylised, and thus alienating most of his potential patrons, who wouldn’t want to be seen through such a ‘Jazz Age’ filter?

A closer analysis reveals that Philpot’s conversion wasn’t as abrupt as might first appear. Long before his celebrated shift of style, there had been hints of a more radical painter bubbling under the surface, in the subject matter and composition of his uncommissioned, personal paintings. He showed, for example, a predilection for painting unusually dignified portraits of Black, male subjects (particularly, from 1929, his muse and manservant Henry Thomas); his religious paintings were often painted from unconventional perspectives, including, in The Angel of the Annunciation (1925), Gabriel seen from the perspective of the Virgin Mary, in a suburban, Sussex setting. No-one had ever done anything like that before.

Right Glyn Philpot, Balthazar, 1929 Oil on canvas Private Collection © Pallant House Gallery/Luke Unsworth Below Glyn Philpot, Resting Acrobats, 1924 Oil on canvas Leeds Museums & Galleries Given by HM Hepworth, 1934 © Leeds Museums & Galleries UK/Bridgeman Images Below right Glyn Philpot, Siegfried Sassoon, 1917 Oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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Philpot’s male gaze was aimed, largely, at male subjects. He was a homosexual, in an era when homosexuality was illegal in the eyes of both State and Church, and damningly taboo. Unable to be open about his sexuality in public, he increasingly explored his passion for the male figure on canvas. There is, thus, a marked homoeroticism to many of his portraits and paintings. Take his 1923 painting Penelope, whose real subject isn’t the titular abandoned wife of Odysseus, relegated to the farleft edge of the canvas, but three of her scantily clad suitors, hogging the limelight, a louche loitering triangle of unfulfilled fancy.

Several things happened, in the early thirties, that precipitated Philpot’s shift into a more Modernist style. In 1930 the painter was invited to be a juror for the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, travelling across the Atlantic on the Mauretania with Henri Matisse to judge a competition eventually won

by Pablo Picasso (with a portrait of his wife Olga). In the same year he exhibited a number of his (traditional) pre-1924 paintings in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; the nearby German Pavilion displayed radical works by the likes of Otto Dix, and George Grosz. Did these two events make him start to feel a little ‘square’ about where he stood as an artist, already a dinosaur at the age of 45?

In 1931 Philpot took a flat and studio in Montparnasse, which was Modernist in design, and fitted with angular, Bauhaus-style furniture. And he took two trips to Berlin, where he was shown around the decadent and permissive nightlife scene – chronicled

by Christopher Isherwood in his semifictional novels Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains – by a teenage German guide, Karl-Heinz Müller, who was to feature in several works. The series of paintings he produced in his Paris studio was markedly different from his previous work, in its style, subject matter, and setting.

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The fruit of his newly styled labour was unveiled to the British public in two shows in 1932, which changed Philpot’s reputation for good. In the Royal Academy Summer Show, Aphrodite and Ascending Angel, both allegorical paintings, painted in a Modernist style in a modern setting (Philpot’s Paris apartment) led to much headscratching in the press, unsure of how to take this unexpected turn from the hitherto golden boy of British art. The art critic from The Scotsman, famously, proclaimed ‘Glyn Philpot goes Picasso’, stating the artist had ‘looked too long at, and caught infection from some neo-classical nude by Picasso, or his disciples Chirico [sic] or Souverbie.’

This was the pre-war art scene’s equivalent moment to Bob Dylan picking up an electric guitar at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966.

A few weeks later, in his first one-man show for a decade, Philpot exhibited more fruit of his Parisian work at the Leicester Galleries, along with sculptures he had made in his Sussex studio. The portraits he displayed were not of high-society celebrities, but of characters (Black and Caucasian) he’d met in more bohemian milieux, in Paris and Berlin. There were also some allegorical pieces – in a much sparser, stylistic manner than his earlier works – often featuring the same sitters, notably Karl-Heinz Müller. The show garnered mixed reviews, with more progressive critics heralding the dawning of an exciting new stage of his career.

The critic Frank Rutter declared: ‘Mr Philpot’s new development deserves a welcome rather than hostility… it needs great courage for an eminent painter to get out of a groove which has brought him success, and search experimentally for new methods of expression.’

Glyn Philpot died, aged 53, of a cerebral haemorrhage after a dental operation, in December 1937. In the preceding five years, since his ‘coming out’ at

the Royal Academy, he’d become unfashionable among the high-society elite. His portrait-painting career had largely dried up, with ever-fewer commissions paying ever-less money.

By then, worried about cashflow, he had abandoned his Paris studio, and sold his Packard motor car, and his Sussex mansion. He had suffered the shame of a painting – The Great Pan – being rejected by the Royal Academy in 1933, for his drawing attention to the erect male organ of one of his subjects (ironically by covering it, with a jet of flame). But he hadn’t veered from his Modernist path, enjoying a series of one-man shows in London, including in November 1937 what turned out to be a valedictory exhibition of 25 oil paintings and 45 watercolours at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street, which ran until three weeks before his death. ‘Some years ago,’ wrote The Scotsman’s critic, after the vernissage, ‘he rid himself of all Venetian opulence of style; though his romantic mood is as strong as ever, only expressed in a modern French idiom… It is ‘escapist’ art, still, though the subjects nowadays are more akin to Picasso than Burne-Jones.’

‘Escapist’ art, indeed, for Glyn Philpot had freed himself from his traditionalist shackles. Who knows how far his new, liberated style would have led him, if his road had been a little longer?

Words by Alex Leith Many thanks to Simon Martin, director of Pallant House Gallery (showing a major retrospective of Philpot’s work, Flesh and Spirit, until October 23, 2022), for his time and for allowing me to delve through the pre-publication proofs of his monograph of the exhibition.

Above Glyn Philpot Mrs. Clement Cross, 1934. Oil on canvas Long term Loan from Private Collection Right Glyn Philpot Portrait of Henry Thomas in Profile 1934-5. Oil on canvas Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

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Above Glyn Philpot Acrobats Waiting to Rehearse, 1935. Oil on canvas © Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust, Brighton & Hove

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GLYN PHILPOT

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Charlotte Snook, Over the Wall with Gorky’s Mask, 2021

“Who am I today?”

Katie Sollohub’s daily post-swim portraits

Above and right © Katie Sollohub

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Katie Sollohub is a painter, who swims in the sea. Or is she a sea swimmer, who paints? The distinction, like much of the recent body of work she has produced, is somewhat blurry.

Let me explain. Katie’s daily practice, for her latest series of work, is to paint a head-and-shoulders self-portrait immediately after her daily swim (all year round, rain or shine), in the bathroom of her Shoreham home, before she has changed into her everyday clothes. She uses watercolours, thinning the pigments with a mini jam-jar full of the seawater she has just swum in.

When I visit her, one cold blustery morning, 18 months into this practice, she’s already had her plunge. “I thought that I’d stop my post-swim portrait after a year,”’ she tells me, curled into an armchair, in a sitting room full of her own paintings.

“But then I thought, ‘why stop?’ it’s become part of my daily routine, like cleaning my teeth. In fact, I paint the pictures in the same place as I clean my teeth: the paints sit next to my toothbrush.”

We spend over an hour together, in that cosy space, overlooking the estuary that turns the Shoreham Beach area into something of an island (seeing the tidal flow every day, she says, has a subtle but powerful effect on her). She’s a great talker; I hardly have to ask any questions.

First, she tells me the story of her swimming. She hadn’t been a natural swimmer as a kid, but she learnt to love it when she was studying for a year at University of Perugia in 1993/4, and she had a lot of time on her hands. When she came back to Brighton, to study art at Northbrook College, Worthing, she had a daily swim in the Prince Regent pool, which she kept up for seven years, perfecting her crawl technique, and a splashless butterly stroke. At the pool she met a friend, who suggested she swam in the sea, instead. So she joined a group of all-year swimmers called ‘The Water Babies’, who swim off Shoreham Beach, five minutes from her home. All this, despite a fear of straying too far from shore (“of monsters, lurking”), which she compares to vertigo.

Throughout this time, of course, she was painting, but it wasn’t until recently that the two practices converged. She had developed a reputation as a painter of interiors, in oils.

Large, colourful paintings in which she “lets go of gravity” with the result that the viewer is left immersed in the setting, experiencing the room through the emotions it evokes in her, as well as through her eyes. There’s a Cubist element to them, a relaxation of formal structure: things aren’t necessarily in the places you’d expect them to be.

Covid put a halt to all that, so she merged her passions. She started painting fellow swimmers, after their dip, still on the beach, learning to work quickly, in gloves, using watercolours.

She often employed her left hand as well as her right, to create a more intuitive, spontaneous feel to the portraits, the fluidity of her brushstrokes recalling the fluidity of the sea they had just emerged from. She was awarded an Arts Council grant for this project, and kept it up, three or four times a week, for six months. “I liked watching their features emerging,” she says, “from the tide of watercolours, on my paper.”

She still does such portraits, but decided to concentrate on a sister project, which she had been practicing intermittently up to then: painting herself after every swim, “still shaken up by the experience of being in the water.” She finds the experience of her daily dip life-enhancing, and it’s important to her to capture her expression and mood while she is still buzzing with the “Redy-Brek glow” engendered by her immersion in the ocean. “I’m often surprised at who looks back at me from the mirror,” she says. “She doesn’t always seem to reflect how I think I feel. I go in there thinking ‘who am I, today?’ Maybe she knows something I don’t.”

She ushers me round her home: her studio in the garden; the tiny bathroom where she paints herself; her study, where she keeps all her portraits, stacked up neatly and placed, chronologically, in boxes, the date written, carefully, on the back. She spreads out a few of the more recent ones, to show me. It’s a rather intimate moment: like looking into her soul.

Some of the images are detailed, filling the square; others are brief, like visual haikus. There’s a whole spectrum of colours, and tones. She is usually still wearing her swimming cap, her goggles often perched on her head; in one she is wearing three hoods, like a rainbow halo. Though she rarely smiles, you can detect a range of emotions behind her eyes. “Sometimes the colours reflect my mood, sometimes the mood of the sea,” she says. “Sometimes they reflect the yellows and oranges of the sunset.”

Then she stacks herself back up, puts herself back into the boxes, a year’s work taking up the space of a few books on the shelf. It’s time to go. On the stairs, next to a rather sombre painting of her Russian grandmother, I ask her, as a parting shot, what she will do with the portraits. “When I start dying,” she says, as if the idea has just occurred to her, “I will immerse them, one by one, in sea water. The paint will dissolve, and I will disappear.”

Words by Alex Leith

INTERVIEW: KATIE SOLLOHUB

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20 December 2020 Happy Birthday me

3 Jan 2021 Cocooned

4 Feb 2021 The colour is different again

18 March 2021 Dissolving

25 May 2021 Birds

26 May 2021 Somedays I can’t

21 June 2021 Summer Solstice

30 July 2021 Less is more

4 Oct 2021 Ghost

27 Oct 2021 Self Portrait as a Russian Doll

5 Nov 2021 Cold again!

30 Nov 2021 Last one, a year of self portraits

INTERVIEW: KATIE SOLLOHUB

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Studi Vi

Left to right: Fine Art Painting BA graduate students Harriette LLoyd, Claire Shakespeare and Lydia Stonehouse in their Grand Parade studio Visit the graduate Summer Shows: 2–12 June University of Brighton, Grand Parade

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io is

Studio Visit Inside Sussex artists’ workspaces through the lens of portrait photographer Adam Bronkhorst

Painter Joshua Uvieghara in his studio at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton You can see Josh’s work in Catch Your Breath with The London Group at Waterloo Festival London, in July

STUDIO VISIT

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Painter and sculptor Sarah Money in her Chiddingly garden-studio Sarah’s solo exhibition Oil & Stone is on at Star Brewery Gallery, Lewes, June 10–19

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Sculptor Will Nash, in his studio-workshop in Lewes Will’s sculptures are on display in The Secret Garden, Kemptown open Sundays, July 4 – September 26

STUDIO VISIT

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Cover to Cover A summer-long exhibition at Glyndebourne highlights 70 years of programme covers

Since 1952 Glyndebourne Opera House has produced an annual publication covering its entire summer festival, known as the ‘Festival Programme Book’.

Every one of those years they have commissioned an artist to produce an original artwork for the programme’s cover.

The identity of that artist is a carefully guarded secret until publication a couple of weeks before the Festival opens.

Until 1997 the artist concerned was one of the stage designers used in the Festival, including the likes of Oliver Messel, Sue Blane, David Hockney and Maurice Sendak. “Post 1997,” I’m told by programme editor Karen Anderson, “contemporary artists were invited to design the cover – Fiona Rae, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, to name a few – with Hockney and Anish Kapoor straddling both worlds of stage designer and contemporary artist.”

Other cover artists recently chosen include Michael Craig Martin, Grayson Perry, Julian Opie and Raqib Shaw. It is, as you might surmise, a big honour to be commissioned.

The first Programme Book Anderson worked on was the 2012 edition, and its cover, by the collage artist John Stezaker, remains one of her very favourites.

Another she singles out is last year’s post-pandemic work by local artist Tom Hammick, The Dark Woods of England, which “really captured a mood”. “And this year’s,” she reveals, “to mark the 70th anniversary of the book, is a little bit special.” The artist in question, we

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can reveal (they go to press before us, so this isn’t a spoiler) is Maggi Hambling, who has produced a work entitled Night of the Lotus Eaters.

There has recently been a shift in the method used to choose the artist.

“When I first started at Glyndebourne [artists’ product designer] Kit Grover was working with us – he provided me with the initial introduction to John Stezaker, Michael Craig Martin and Julian Opie. I then worked with them directly when they were creating the cover.”

“From 2015-17 we changed direction a little bit and worked with White Cube.

We built our own temporary exhibition space in the gardens and exhibited the work of three of their artists, Georg Baselitz, Rachel Kneebone and Raqib Shaw, in three consecutive years – each of whom designed a cover for us.

With more recent artists, Eileen Cooper and Tom Hammick for example, we’ve approached them directly.”

The artists, Anderson reveals, are given a completely open brief to create a work that is ‘inspired’ by Glyndebourne, “and that can be the opera on stage (the festival as a whole or a single opera), music, the gardens, the rolling hills that surround us in the Sussex Downs or how music makes them feel.”

This creative freedom has led to a wide variety of work, not all of which has been universally popular. “Raqib Shaw’s 2016 cover (right) raised a few eyebrows.

Opposite Raqib Shaw 2016

Shaw is known for his gloriously opulent paintings, which suggest a fantastical world full of rich colour and jewel-like surfaces – and they often contain a bit of mischief too. [He] was given complete freedom to create a cover in response to our opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but his fairies were not to everyone’s taste – as is often the case with art.”

Some artists, sadly, have slipped through the net. Anderson cites Lucien Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon and Helen Frankenthaler as artists she would like to have seen commissioned for past covers. And cover stars she would dearly love to use in the future? “Paula Rego, Tracey Emin, Michael Armitage, Lubaina Himid.”

Throughout this year’s Festival, there’s an exhibition, in Glyndebourne’s Gallery 94 and Archive Gallery, entitled Cover to Cover, featuring the original covers of the Programme Book, and original artwork by some of the artists involved. Also included in the show is a photograph of the collection

by Mark Vessey, and new monotypes by Tom Hammick. There’s also an exhibition of new work by Maggi Hambling, featuring a large-scale painting, a series of 12 stage diptychs and six ink drawings. These will be presented across several locations in the opera house, including the Green Room, hitherto rarely open to the public. Access is limited to Glyndebourne ticket-holders, but can be viewed by appointment and during the Open Gardens weekend in early September.

Words by Antonia Gabassi

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Above Eileen Cooper 2018

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Tom Hammick 2021

Grayson Perry 2011

Elizabeth Bury 1981

Fiona Rae 2009

GLYNDEBOURNE

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Martin Battersby 1973

Oliver Messel 1952

Mary Fedden 1999

David Hockney 1989

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Posterity’s garden How loyal should Charleston’s head gardener be to Vanessa Bell’s original plan?

In Christine Schutt’s short story The Duchess of Albany, a character proclaims, “A garden dies with the gardener”. But does it? I turn this question over in my head as I bump along the temporary track towards Charleston Farmhouse, near Firle.

Once parked and on foot, the lily pad-coated pond is the first thing you notice here, skimmed by trees and reflecting the farmhouse just beyond. A doorway to the right of the house leads to the walled garden, where I have come in the hope of finding an answer.

The walled garden at Charleston is renowned for its abundance, beauty and exuberance. But only 35 years ago it was grassed over and neglected. The fortunes of this place rose and fell with its most well-known inhabitants. In 1916 artist Vanessa Bell, her two sons, her lover-artist Duncan Grant (she was living apart from her husband Clive Bell) and Grant’s other lover David Garnett all moved to Charleston in search of a home that would offer them the space to paint, to live and love outside the socially acceptable parameters, and where the pacifist men could work the land and avoid conscription. When they arrived at Charleston the house was dark and cold; the walled garden was a muddy potato field with a few fruit trees.

Right Photo © Alex Leith

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As well as decorating the interior Vanessa Bell wanted a beautiful garden that would provide them with food and flowers to paint. With Roger Fry she planned a formal garden based around a grid of beds with gravel paths, two small ponds and a square of lawn. They planted vegetables and filled the borders with bright, voluptuous plants that would provide a visual impact, intoxicating scents and interesting architectural forms.

THE ART OF THE GARDEN

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Above Photos © Rowena Easton

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During the 1920s the house was a weekend and summer retreat, a space for friends to gather. It became a permanent residence when World War II broke out, and the garden by then was flourishing. In 1930 Vanessa Bell wrote, ‘I’m painting flowers – one can’t resist them – when the sun comes out you can’t conceive what the medley of apples, hollyhocks, plums, zinnias, dahlias, all mixed up together is like.’ The gardeners ‘Young Mr Stephens’ and Walter Higgins kept the garden in fulsome beauty, but after Bell’s death in 1961 it fell into a decline. By the time Grant died in 1978 it was mostly turfed over.

In 1986 the house was saved from a landlord’s renovation and designer Sir Peter Shepheard drew up a plan to restore the garden, using letters, paintings and photographs to establish how it might have looked. Since then, the garden has flourished again. Today it’s breathtaking. I am here to speak with the gardener, Harry Hoblyn, to unpick the thorny tangle of tending a historical garden. We sit with our backs to a door that in Vanessa Bell’s time would have been flung open to let the scents of the garden flow around the house.

In front of us is a gravel path bordered by deep beds and lined with a row of pinks. This particular variety, Dianthus allwoodii, or ‘Alice’, encapsulates the issue of how to find a balance between heritage and change. Hoblyn explains that the previous Head Gardener sourced this exact variety after seeing The Garden Path in Spring, painted in 1944 by Duncan Grant. The 1986 planting plan specifies a different variety, but she wanted the authentic plants to recreate Grant’s image of an avenue of pinks.

Yet these plants are fairly short-lived and it’s unlikely that Vanessa Bell or Grant would have propagated plants, so for how long would the path have looked like that? To which era should a gardener be trying to restore this garden? For Hoblyn this slightly misses the point. “Gardens are constantly in flux,” he says. Does a visitor to Charleston really want to see exactly the same plants every time they come?

The aliveness, ebullience and fluidity of this place comes from the skill of gardeners who have cleverly navigated this tension between past, present and future – between homage and creative vision. It is a constant tussle for Hoblyn, who is drawn to plants that capture the essence of the Bloomsbury Group’s time, but that also pull their weight in the border.

Yet despite the continuous flux, there are things that Hoblyn believes should remain as unchanged as possible. Firstly, the hard landscaping – the gravel, geometric brick-edged paths, the piazza and mosaics, the saddlestones, and the tiled ponds. Fruit trees dotted amongst the flower beds is also a key element. Similarly, smudges of silver foliage and the cotton lavender edging for the lawn are distinctive motifs.

I ask how he weighs up the desires of all the people who have an emotional investment in this place – the visitors, the family members, the organization – and his own creative vision?

For Hoblyn, it’s not his garden, nor even simply Vanessa and Duncan’s garden, “It’s posterity’s garden. It’s the people who come here’s garden. It’s also the people who will come here in the future’s garden. It’s so many people’s garden.” His job, it seems to me, is to make sure the garden doesn’t die with the gardener, but also that it isn’t fossilised or pinned like a butterfly to a certain moment in time.

We look across to beds of wallflowers, bright tulips and swathes of forget-me-nots. In summer the garden will be bursting with unfeasibly tall hollyhocks, a renowned Charleston crowd-pleaser but also an authentic part of the garden’s past. Beneath the hollyhocks you’ll find sea holly, cardoons, globe thistle, zinnias, stocks, poppies, nicotiana and phlox.

But few of these are old cultivars or original planting from the 1920s or 40s.

Each of these plants make up a living museum and a living painting – this is an artist’s garden after all. And whether they hail from the Bloomsbury era or just capture something of its spirit, they create an inspiring sensuous feast – what Vanessa Bell described as ‘sweet disorder’. They spill over paths, dance above walls, stand in vases, provide a backdrop for the statues and punctuate the box hedging. It is a tumbling, joyous gulp of a garden.

Time to move on. I walk back to my car, the ghosts of the past feeling very present as the wind rattles the trees and the rooks clatter overhead.

Lulah Ellender is the author of the memoirs Elisabeth’s Lists (Granta, 2018) and Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden (Granta, 2022)

THE ART OF THE GARDEN

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Bayside Worthing? Or Barcelona?

The future of UK seaside towns has been an interesting topic over the last few years. Attempts to fend off serious decline have been partially countered by various government monies such as the Coastal Revival Fund, the Coastal Communities Fund and lottery projects. The south coast has benefited from Towner Eastbourne, De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, Hastings Contemporary and Pallant House in Chichester. But have these interventions attracted enough new visitors to these former resorts?

The last couple of years have helped, obviously, but not for the right reasons. And people have started heading abroad again: maybe not to the same extent, but the allure of the sun and a warm sea won’t go away. Sustainability is the over-used but vital key word. And sustainability means people ‘living’ in a place, spending money in local shops, bars and restaurants. A city like Brighton & Hove doesn’t have to work too hard – it’s always been popular for a weekend break, whether that’s for an event like Pride or the Brighton Marathon, a cultural experience at the Brighton Festival, or a full-on stag or hen-do…

Other coastal towns have to work a bit harder. And to put faith in to a town like Worthing is a brave move. Roffey Homes have been building on the south coast for over 50 years, and in 2015 proposed a 21-storey £40 million tower on their seafront site, next to WilkinsonEyre-designed Splashpoint Leisure Complex, at the eastern end of Worthing seafront. The council rejected these plans, so Roffey appointed new, internationally renowned architects Allies and Morrison, and the 141-home scheme with seafront square, cafe and commercial space was

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eventually approved by Worthing Borough Council in January 2017. The local MP, Peter Bottomley, tried to fight the approval, but the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Sajid Javid, fortunately wasn’t interested in questioning the council’s decision.

The development sits comfortably adjacent to Splashpoint, and the two schemes are an exemplar of how to do ‘seaside’.

The pool complex is a striking building – copper, timber, glass – way better than most buildings of this type: sport with a sea view, almost more like a piece of sculpture than a building. The seafront area between Splashpoint and the beach is like a little piece of Barcelona, with interesting paving, palm trees, and bespoke concrete benches. On a sunny day it’s a delight, and if you eat some seafood at the Bayside Social or CrabShack nearby you get the whole Mediterranean experience.

Bayside is a playful counterpoint to Splashpoint. The overused terms like ‘landmark’ and ‘gateway’ do actually apply in this case. It marks the start of Worthing from the east and according to Ben Cheal of Roffey Homes, ‘the design from Allies and Morrison incorporates features from historic buildings in Worthing’. It does to an extent, but it’s more than that. It’s a bold and clever design; the tower itself is square in plan, but the use of curved balconies that ripple around the building in an ice-cream swirl make it eye-catching from a distance and playful from up close. It doesn’t really ‘fit in’, but then why should it? Some of the best buildings don’t fit in to their local context; they celebrate their own identity. There is a development nearby that is a very accurate pastiche of

Above © Allies and Morrison

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Left and below © Allies and Morrison

south coast seafront Regency architecture, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re going to do it like that just do it well, but it doesn’t raise the game. If more seafront towns could encourage and embrace bold new architecture, whether it’s for people retiring from their large family houses, or for renting out a seaside property, then maybe there’s a chance that some of the rather tired seaside resorts of Sussex could be given a new lease of life.

Paul Appleton, Partner in charge of the project at Allies and Morrison, talks about how the idea for Bayside came about very easily, a tower there had to be a “very, very good piece of architecture” to justify its height. The architects spent a long time exploring the site from close up views, how it would be seen from the town centre and from the approach from the east, and even from up on the South Downs, in order to convince themselves that it was a comfortable height. The council suggested it might be taller, but after assessing the site in great detail the current height was felt to be enough to be ‘emphatic’ without being over dominant in its context. Paul talks about how the project is “all about the sea”, its curved balconies “expressive of the shoreline and the boundary with the beach”. The lower part of the scheme, off the Brighton Road, has more to do with the an interpretation of the historic architecture of the town, forming a square that references the Regency architecture of the south coast, with a lush, green landscaped garden filled with planting that will survive the marine environment.

But there’s no denying that it’s the tower that makes the scheme something special. It’s a clever design, wrapping sensuous curved forms around a simple square footprint.

Off-setting the balconies not only creates an interesting organic statement, but also means that flats have effectively double-height space above their sea view, giving a grandeur that surprises and delights. It’s visible from a lot of the south coast – on a clear day you can see it from Brighton seafront. High quality housing-led development could well be the key to unlocking our coastal towns, but essential to this approach is design of the highest quality and Worthing has that covered.

Paul Zara chairs RIBA Sussex, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

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A day out in…

St Leonards

History

St Leonards-on-Sea (popularly just ‘St Leonards’) is located within the Hastings Borough, and is often associated with its joined-at-the-hip neighbour. But it’s very much a town with its own identity, and is well worth a visit in its own right.

Its history stretches back to the 1820s, when property developer James Burton, already responsible for large developments in Bloomsbury and around Regent’s Park, decided to create a posh south-coast holiday resort to compete with Brighton.

His work was continued by his splendidly-named son Decimus Burton, who lived in the town until his death in 1881.

St Leonards did, indeed, become a fashionable seaside destination for the Georgian era’s rich and famous, with royalty such as Princess Sophia of Gloucester, Princess Victoria (later Queen Victoria), the Duchess of Kent and Queen Adelaide spending long periods of time there in the 1830s. A pleasure pier was built in 1888, and the town’s reputation as being a ‘cut above’ other resorts was maintained until WW2, with the splendid ship-shaped Marine Court, a Modernist icon to match Brighton’s Embassy Court in scope and size, going up in 1938.

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After the war, however, the town suffered a decline. The pier was severed during the conflict, and never rebuilt, eventually being demolished in 1951. With holidaymakers increasingly preferring foreign destinations, St Leonards gradually took on a shabby appearance, its grand Georgian buildings fading and decaying.

A perfect destination, then, for an artistic community to thrive.

Creative types started using the town as their base in the 90s, and in recent years this influx has boomed, with an abundance of new studios and galleries sprouting up, particularly on the western stretch of Norman Road, a short walk from St Leonards Warrior Square train station. This small street boasts no fewer than eight small-sized galleries, in spaces that were originally used for shops.

The town still has a scruffy look to it, but we can’t think of a place that better deserves the description ‘shabby chic’.

Alongside the galleries there’s a fine array of bars, pubs, cafés and restaurants, as well as an embarrassment of junk shops and second-hand clothing stores (aka charity shops), which are

difficult to come out of empty-handed.

Oh, and a marvellous independent cinema/events venue, the Kino-Teatr.

All that, and the sea, with long stretches of shingle beach a pebble’s throw from the centre of town. No wonder house prices are on the up again.

Culture

St Leonards’ many boutique art galleries are unlikely to be open on Mondays or Tuesdays, so we recommend visiting in the latter half of the week. We can pick out three particular Norman Road favourites, but do pay a visit to them all.

Lucy Bell Gallery sell and display fineart and rock/pop-related photographic prints; Solaris is run by an expert printer, who exhibits high-end artwork by artists and photographers (Susan Ormerod’s work will be on display until the end of July); Project 78 mixes emerging artists with big names, inviting them to take risks (no pressure to sell) in a space that divides the gallery from the framer’s workshop behind. A 15-minute walk further west, Electro Studios Project Space puts on curated group exhibitions and events in a sizeable L-shaped unit.

Before you book your trip, check out what’s on at the Kino-Teatr.

Eating

There’s so much choice, we suggest you follow your nose, but we can particularly recommend a few eateries. For a snacky lunch, try the Goat Ledge Café, on the seafront, which serves own-brand ale as well as surprisingly good food (Brazilian prawn moqueca stew, anyone?), which you can eat in (pre-bookable) beach huts overlooking the ocean, or on the wooden tables on a promontory amid the shingle. Or try Starsky & Hatch, further Hastings-wards on Bottle Alley, serving imaginative delicacies such as Bloody Mary Crumpets, or Indian-spiced sausage rolls. Parlour, in the same building as Kino-Teatr, is a brasserie offering healthy, beautifully presented brunches (including a best-you’ll-have-ever-tasted kedgeree) and evening meals (if you’re feeling flush, try the ‘surf and turf’, with

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smoked butter seafood and fillet steak), along with a choice of fine ales and wines. Another upper-end possibility is the classy independent St Clement’s, which serves locally sourced ingredients including catch of the day from the Hastings fishing fleet; their two-course Sunday lunches are good value, and their sticky toffee puddings are legendary.

Drinking

St Clements is next door to St Leonards’ most famous traditional pub, the bow-windowed Horse and Groom. It’s nicknamed ‘The Doom and Gloom’, or simply ‘The Doom’, by the locals, who are still in shock after the death of its long-serving landlord, David Sansbury, a man much respected for his inability to suffer fools (or DFLs) gladly. This is a real old-school pub, dominated by a horseshoe-shaped bar, with an array of military hats hanging from the ceiling, and a clientele who like to stick around for several drinks, putting the world to rights, in front of the fire. We can also recommend the Marina Fountain, just off the coast road, under new management since 2019, who care deeply about the beers the serve, the music they play, and the politically motivated art they put on the walls.

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Shopping

If you arrive by train (which we advise) the first street you’ll walk down is the Kings Road, a colourful mix of junk shops, old-style butchers and bakers and independent cafes with imaginative names and menus. After a two-year hiatus, the popular monthly Kings Road Street Market is now back in action, on the first Saturday of the month, a good time to point yourself in the direction of this characterful and ever-surprising town.

Accommodation

If you fancy making a weekend of it, there are plenty of hotels, traditional bed & breakfast, and Airbnb options. We can recommend the boutique hotel Hastings House on Warrior Square (featured on Channel 4’s Four in a Bed last year) or, if you’re after a luxury option (with themed rooms and whirlpool-dip opportunities), the Zanzibar International Hotel, on the seafront, is a gem of a place.

Next issue: Petworth

A DAY OUT IN...

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On Location

Right annihilation of domesticity Judith and Nathaniel’s room in Berg, a film set-installation

by Anna Deamer with CINECITY. The Brighton Film Festival University of Brighton Gallery, 2014 Photo by Bernard Mills

Why has Ann Quin’s Berg never found the film director it deserves, asks Tim Brown

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father...

In 1964, Ann Quin’s debut novel Berg was published and quickly established her reputation as one of the most intensely original, contemporary British writers. A boarding house in an out-of-season seaside town – never named but clearly Brighton – is the background for this strange and darkly comic oedipal drama about the triangular relationship between hair tonic salesman Alistair Berg, his father and his father’s mistress.

Ann Quin was born in Brighton in 1936. She wrote a further three, increasingly experimental novels, but despite considerable acclaim, she remained one of the best-kept secrets of British literature. She died aged just 37, drowning in the sea off Brighton in August 1973. Recent years have seen a steady revival of interest in her work with her short stories collected together in one volume and a biography in the works.

The early 1960s were a golden age of European art cinema, enjoyed and absorbed by Quin, an avid cinema-goer with an interest in Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, the nouvelle vague.

It all proved intensely liberating for a working-class female writer, transcending the prevailing ‘kitchen sink’ social realism.

“I’d love to make a film, if the conditions over here were different. I have a very visual sense: scenes and people become films in my mind.”

Berg started to be optioned for the screen and Ann Quin needed the money as she lived off her writing with no independent means. Meanwhile European directors including Roman Polanski and Francois Truffaut came to work in the capital and with the sixties in full swing, Michelangelo Antonioni

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arrived to direct his first film in English. It was just after Blow Up had won the Best Film at Cannes in 1967 that Dennis C Lewiston, a camera operator on the film, offered to buy the screen rights for Berg. Lewiston intended to write the script himself and the link with Antonioni seemed like a good omen but like the others, his proposed film of Berg never saw the light of day.

Brighton’s reputation as a town that looks like it is ‘helping the police with their enquiries’ has partly been founded on events such as the infamous ‘Brighton Trunk Murders’ of 1934, when a dismembered woman’s body was discovered in a trunk at left luggage at Brighton railway station. The murders were said to have informed the research for Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, published in 1938 and also Val Guest’s 1962 film Jigsaw, where Brighton police investigate a dead body hidden in a trunk in Saltdean. They also find an echo in Berg when Aly takes what he believes to be his father’s body wrapped in a carpet, to left luggage at Brighton Station.

Berg’s violent and absurd adventures with a ventriloquist dummy/‘body’ (‘killed’, rolled up in a carpet, pushed into a wardrobe, drowned at sea) contain an element of Ortonesque farce. In 1964, the same year Berg was published, Joe Orton completed his play Loot (originally called Funeral Games) in which the main prop is a dead body, which becomes the subject of much tomfoolery, at one stage stripped naked and hidden in a cupboard. With the Roman Catholic Church especially pilloried, the Lord Chamberlain would only grant the play a licence if the corpse was very obviously a dummy.

When Loot was made into a film in 1970 and shot near Brighton Racecourse, the climactic scenes were filmed in Woodvale cemetery where Ann Quin was cremated, her ashes scattered in the Garden of Rest.

Berg eschews the almost documentary realism of Brighton Rock to evoke a more hallucinatory or dream-like sense of place. Ann Quin certainly shared something with Greene; she was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in Kemptown and described Catholicism as “a ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience. A death wish and a sense of sin.” a plastic crocodile box … stuffed animals, an owl, a mouse, a fox’s mask…waxen fruit and flowers… Dresden shepherds, faded water-coloured pastoral scenes, the shiny television set...(Berg, p.19) In the boarding house in Berg, a flimsy partition is all that separates Aly from his father and his mistress in the adjoining room and both bedsits are stuffed full of objects. The American priest and writer Father Andrew Greely wrote that ‘Catholics live in an enchanted world,’ in which all objects – not just rosary

beads and bottles of holy water – are sacramental. Just as in the films of Alfred Hitchcock (a fellow Catholic), where many objects seem to be imbued with forces beyond the physical realm, so the objects in Berg possess a similarly highly-charged quality.

At the climax of the novel, the mass of objects, the multitude of props, are trashed in a final ‘annihilation of domesticity’. One can imagine a film of Berg, at least one true to Quin’s vision, joining a distinctive group of films from this era that explored psychologically charged, uncanny interiors such as Repulsion, Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965) and Jan Svankmajer’s The Flat (1968): rooms fighting back and taking on a life of their own, walls closing in.

Towards the end of her life Ann Quin was writing plays for television but they remained unfinished. Her obituary in The Times confidently stated that a ‘film of

CINEMA

Berg is to be made soon’, but it was fully 25 years after her debut was published that the only screen adaptation of her work appeared. Killing Dad or How to Love Your Mother, a film loosely based on Berg, directed by Michael Austin, was released in 1989, but as there was precious little of what made the novel so original and compelling, in a sense it remained unmade. It was shot in Southend-on-Sea, as Brighton was already by then too smartened up and not seedy enough. Despite an excellent cast featuring Julie Walters, Richard E Grant, Denholm Elliot and Anna Massey, the film was savaged by the critics: ‘The best thing about Killing Dad… is probably the title’. Years later in an onstage interview at the National Film Theatre, Richard E Grant declared that it was one of the biggest disappointments of his career.

Tim Brown is director of CINECITY The Brighton Film Festival

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From The Rusty Café IAN CAWS A still boat on the bracelet of water and on the promenade people dancing.

The duo will keep playing till later in the rusty café while the inching tide tempts paddlers where they can still be heard beneath a soft sky and stars that grow hard.

And if there are people on the still boat they do not dance on the quiet water and to the fish they do not offer bait or not that I can see. It grows lighter inland or maybe those are village homes where altered music laces other dreams.

Ian Caws’ poem will also be published in the forthcoming 100th issue of the bi-annual poetry magazine The Frogmore Papers (on sale from Skylark in Lewes or by subscription from frogmorepress.co.uk) in September.

Thanks to editor Jeremy Page.

Above image Rowena Easton, Untitled from the postcard series, 2022 © Rowena Easton

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Leap Then Look Art School at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton An innovative contemporary art school for children aged 8-14 Our art school is a chance to explore new ideas and ways of making art in a fun, supportive and collaborative environment, developing skills, confidence and friendships. Participants will work with experienced professional artists, using exciting and unconventional approaches, including object making, performance, installation, film, and photography.

It runs during the summer, half-terms and Easter Holidays. Booking information is available on the Phoenix Art Space website. Follow us on Instagram @leap_then_look for updates. leapthenlook.org.uk

David Jarman...

On self-portraits

With considerable hesitancy our museums and art galleries are emerging from the pandemic. A few, like Brighton and the British Museum, were happy to allow members of the public to just turn up and gain immediate admittance. But, as I write this in April, many others are still insisting on advance online booking, even when entrance is free. Likewise, gallery shops are often operating a card-only payment system even if the transaction is limited to a single postcard. Examples of this, it is to be hoped temporary, practice are Pallant House in Chichester and the newly refurbished Courtauld. At least the latter has now removed from sale the ear-shaped erasers, the worst of many tacky knick-knacks relating to the gallery’s Van Gogh Self-Portraits exhibition.

This was the first show I went to after the easing of restrictions. Many dates, according to the website, were sold out. So I considered myself lucky to secure a ticket; lucky, but then baffled to find myself in the company of just a handful of other visitors. Was the Courtauld taking an over-cautious approach to limiting numbers? Not that I’m complaining.

Of the 35 known self-portrait paintings, 15 were on display. There was also a drawing. The two rooms ended with the two pictures that, as the catalogue had it, ‘are not strictly self-portraits’. One was Van Gogh’s portrait of the Belgian artist, Eugene Boch. The other was the famous Van Gogh’s Chair, usually on display, for free, at the National Gallery. As a variant to the catalogue, the caption next to these two exhibits conceded that they were ‘not selfportraits in the conventional sense’. Or in any sense at all, I felt tempted to say. According to the catalogue Van Gogh described the chair as a ‘symbolic self-portrait’ but chapter and verse were not supplied.

The first thing I read in the first room was a quote from a letter that Van Gogh sent to his brother, Theo, in September 1889: ‘People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either.’

Accordingly, it was perhaps unfortunate to see, in the second room, a reproduction of a portrait of Van Gogh by the Sydney-born painter, John Peter Russell. Unfortunate because it was once described, as the exhibition catalogue reveals, as: ‘much more convincing as a likeness than any of Van Gogh’s self-portraits’.

This was the opinion, apparently shared by other fellowartists, of AS Hartrick in an article published in 1913, entitled: Post Impressionism, with some personal recollections of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

But we all know of lousy artists all too adept at fashioning a facile likeness. And gifted artists, unable or unwilling to furnish a likeness to save their lives. Van Gogh was only too aware that these were, to a certain extent, expressionist self-portraits and that, as some paintings with specific dates show, his appearance and mood were changing all the time. Looking at this exhibition I was reminded of the story about, I think, Thomas Hardy. Studying for the first time a perhaps rather grim, uncompromising portrait of himself, he observed that he didn’t know whether it looked like him, but it certainly looked like how he felt.

Above Selfie (self-portrait as Van Gogh’s chair), 2022 © David Jarman

COLUMN

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Spend it on art For the price of a car, a sofa, even just a meal out, you can buy a work of art that will give you a lifetime of pleasure. Unlike most other purchases, art has the added bonus that it may well significantly increase in value. Sussex is a great place to build up your art collection via its commercial galleries, auction

houses, museums, antique shops, open houses, markets, and even vineyards. Alternatively, you can buy direct from the region’s makers and artists online. So forget working on your perfect beach body this summer; head out to build up a beautiful body of art instead. Here’s a Summer 2022 wishlist.

A cult photo by Michael L Abramson

Fan with Light Edge, 1974 – 77 Limited-edition vintage silver gelatin print, 11” x 14”, £1,350+VAT Striking black and white images of Chicago’s South Side subculture in the 1970s by US photographer Michael L Abramson (1948-2011) are on show June 11 to August 11 with Sussex’s contemporary photography specialists, Crane Kalman Brighton. Once the poor relation of painting and sculpture, photography is becoming an increasingly collectible art form. cranekalmanbrighton.com

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A seascape by Frederick Cuming RA

An original drawing by Sir Quentin Blake

Full Moon, Camber, 2020 Oil on canvas, 95 x 95cm inc. frame, £14,900 An elected Royal Academician since 1974, a member of the New English Art Club, and a Rye resident, Fred Cuming first fell in love with the south coast when he arrived here as an evacuee from the Blitz, and he’s been painting it ever since. Now in his nineties, he continues to produce evocative impressionistic landscapes and coastal scenes. Cuming is represented by Rye Art Gallery, which is best placed to advise you on a purchase.

Prices start at £500 for etchings and £2,500 for paintings. ryeartgallery.co.uk

With Eyes on the Top of Their Heads (SP245/027), 2020 Chinagraph pencil on cartridge paper, 295 x 420mm, unframed signed by the artist, £500 Celebrated British illustrator Sir Quentin Blake is Artist Patron at Hastings Contemporary. The gallery holds regular exhibitions of his work and has originals for sale. As a post-pandemic fundraiser, Blake created a new series of his inimitable drawings, which are being snapped up at £500 each. hastingscontemporary.com

Affordable artwork via #artistsupportpledge on Instagram

Matthew Burrows, Sternō 21, 2022. Acrylic ink on paper 27 x 22 cm, £200. Available from July 1 Hastings artist Matthew Burrows more than deserved his MBE for the ingenious scheme he devised to help artists during the pandemic. Two years on, #artistsupportpledge is a global micro-economy with a turnover of £30 million and a new campaign to support Ukraine. The project has a simple formula: artists create works, or sell studio stock, up to a maximum of £200; once they earn £1000 they buy another artist’s work.

Even if you’re not an artist, it’s a good way to bag an art bargain. artistsupportpledge.com

SPEND IT ON ART

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An abstract steel sculpture by Julian Wild

Miami Tree, 2022 Powder-coated and polished stainless steel, 200cm, £20,000 A former assistant to Damien Hirst, Sussex sculptor Julian Wild’s own career path is on an upward trajectory. He was Vice President of The Royal Society of Sculptors from 2015-19 and has exhibited at London’s Sculpture in the City, as well as venues including Chatsworth House (Sotheby’s), Canary Wharf, Modern Art Oxford and The Saatchi Gallery. He is showing at two Sussex exhibitions this summer: In Nature: A Celebration in Sculpture at The Secret Garden, Kemptown Sundays throughout the summer; and Farleys House & Gallery until October 30. Join Cate Blanchett in commissioning one of these striking works. Prices start at around £2,000 for smaller pieces. julianwild.com

A nautical painting by Fred Whitehead

A willow piece by Annemarie O’Sullivan

Coastal Life, an exhibition of paintings by Fred Whitehead (1936-2020), is on at Emma Mason’s Eastbourne gallery June 9-25. Whitehead, an Eastbourne resident in later life, loved the sculptural forms of traditional clinker-built fishing boats, particularly those of the ancient beach-launched Hastings fleet. The exhibition supports the Hastings Fishermen Protection Society and the Eastbourne fishing fleet. emmamason.co.uk

Annemarie O’Sullivan makes contemporary basketry using ancient British techniques. She grows around 20 varieties of willow, which she harvests by hand on a half-acre plot near her East Sussex home and uses to create functional domestic objects and large woven sculptures. She’s had solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, and Fabrica, Brighton. Prices start at £400, going up to many thousands. annemarieosullivan.com

Fishing Boats Sussex, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, 40cm x 40cm, £290

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Large handwoven willow sculpture

Contemporary ceramics by Sylph Baier Lift range, blue teapot, £65

Baier’s Lift teapot is an example of the studio ceramics on sale – alongside furniture, glass, jewellery, metalwork, textile art and woodwork – at the Borde Hill Sussex Guild Contemporary Craft Fair, held over the weekend of June 25-26. thesussexguild.co.uk

Around the houses

Sussex is blessed with a wealth of auction houses, frequented by dealers from all over the country. If you are interested in attending then register in advance (for free); and view the works beforehand – either in-person or online – so you can decide your maximum bid. Sales tend to take place during the working week. Here’s our pick of Fine Art sales for the season: June 23 Interiors, including Silver, European Ceramics and Glass bellmans.co.uk June 23 Fine Art burstowandhewitt.co.uk June 28 Summer Fine Art Sale gorringes.co.uk

A limited-edition print by Hermione Allsopp

Lustreflash, 2019 Giclée print, 55 x 41 cm, edition of 20, £235 (unframed) Master fine-art printer Alex Drawbridge runs Solaris, a gallery/ workspace where she prints and exhibits work by high-end artists and photographers. One of her clients is Hermione Allsopp, a sculptor who takes photographs of her work in progress, from which she creates collages. Prices for limitededition prints at Solaris start at around £40. solarisprint.co.uk

July 14 Printed Books, Manuscripts and Maps bellmans.co.uk July 14 Fine Art & Antiques to include Silver and Jewellery henryadamsfineart.co.uk August 2-4 Interiors, including Asian Ceramics and Works of Art bellmans.co.uk Words by Jessica Wood

SPEND IT ON ART

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RIP Clare

Opposite Harry’s Clare in the Community strip, including his last (bottom) for The Guardian © Harry Venning

The Guardian’s loss is our gain

In August 2020, the Brighton-based cartoonist Harry Venning, who had been drawing the weekly strip Clare in the Community in the Guardian’s Society section for 25 years, received some bombshell news. As part of a widespread cost-cutting measure, he was told, the paper had decided to axe the series.

He likens his relationship with the character he created – a pious lefty social worker, whose personal politics didn’t always live up to her right-on self-image – to a marriage. “I was devastated,” he tells me, sitting in a coffee bar in North Laine, Brighton. “I thought it was going to go on till I died.” Clare had given Harry a good run, and not just in The Guardian. A radio version on Radio 4 – starring Sally Phillips in the titular role – ran over twelve series from 2004 to 2019.

Many heard the news from the horse’s mouth: Venning’s valedictory strip (left, bottom) featured a bemused Clare listening to a breakfast news announcement on the radio: ‘and in other news, the UK’s social workers have done such an exemplary job of eradicating societal ills, they have put themselves out of a job.’ She responds, simply, ‘Bollocks’.

“The irony was,” he continues, “the strip was more popular than ever. In the last few months, it was regularly getting into the ‘Most Popular’ list of links on the online version of the newspaper.” There was an outpouring of dismay – grief, even – on social media, after the unexpected announcement. For many, Clare had been the only reason to turn to that section of the paper, or to click onto the site.

Did Venning’s demise, I wonder, come about partly because the newspaper could no longer stomach running a strip that – in effect – took the mickey out of its readers? Not quite, he responds, then reveals that I may not be far wrong.

“For many years they didn’t change anything, ever”, he says.

“Latterly they were really on it, and if there was anything that they thought might cause offence, the joke would get spiked. They even came up with a few alternative captions they’d thought up, that wouldn’t offend anyone… It was really frustrating, because I’d come up with an idea and I’d think ‘that one’s never going to get through’, and I wouldn’t do it.

That took a lot of the pleasure out of it. Self-censorship and social satire are not a good fit.”

Venning continues to create cartoon strips for several magazines, including a send-up of the acting profession – Hamlet, featuring an anthropomorphic luvvie pig – that has been running in The Stage for longer, even, that Clare graced The Guardian. His latest strip, we are delighted to say, will be published in ROSA, and will be a “gently mocking pisstake of the art world”. You can see it overleaf. We promise that we haven’t vetoed the caption.

Words by Alex Leith

RIP CLARE

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Arty And Drew: Culture Vultures

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HARRY VENNING (above) / ZEBEDEE HELM

JOE DECIE

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Pioneer 2.0 How artist Luciana Haill uses state-of-the-art digital technology to recreate feats of Victorian engineering

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Take a look at the photograph opposite… or better still, take a look at the postcard that you will have found inserted inside the pages of this magazine.

Perhaps you’ve seen images of Victorian inventor/engineer Magnus Volk’s Pioneer (aka Daddy Long Legs) before.

Dubbed ‘A Sea Voyage on Wheels’, this was an ingenious contraption which, between 1897 and 1901, transported hundreds of thousands of passengers from the terminus of Volk’s electric railway at Paston Place in Kemp Town, Brighton, eastwards to Rottingdean, through coastal waters, along tracks embedded in the sea floor. Sadly, Brighton Corporation’s decision to extend its sea barriers meant that the tracks needed to be diverted, and Volk could not raise enough money to do this, so the Pioneer was decommissioned.

The project was, needless to say, ahead of its time. Perhaps it’s ahead of our time.

Now, thanks to some imaginative digital wizardry from Sussex artist Luciana Haill, you can relive the magnificent sight of a (seemingly) 3D recreation of the Daddy Long Legs, by installing an app (details below) and scanning the image we have provided.

Like magic, up pops the War of the Worlds-style vehicle, available for 360-degree inspection.

Better still, make a journey to the East Brighton seafront, point your app-loaded device in the direction of the Pioneer’s tracks, still running along the seabed, and you can watch a recreation of a 3D Pioneer in-situ, travelling eastwards, real waves lapping its digital stilts, destination Rottingdean.

This feat of back-to-the-future augmented reality is the fruit of several years’ hard work by Haill, as part of an ongoing project to bring to life bygone monuments and structures from the Sussex seaside’s glorious heyday.

Without going too far into the technical side of the project, Haill uses mobile technologies, such as geo-tagging and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, to bring the past to life, with the help of an app made by creative technologist Alex May.

Left Photo from the James Gray archive courtesy of the Regency Society.

Scan this image (or the postcard inserted) with the Pioneer app (see right)

Her stated aim is to “explore urgent contemporary themes around innovation, hubris and technology elitism through a reflection of Victorian technology.” “By fulfilling a ‘hauntological’ desire to visit places that no longer exist,” she says, “the past becomes present and absent at the same time.”

This is the second stage of Haill’s heritage artworks, unveiled with great success in November 2021 at the Brighton Digital Festival, when 60 excited punters witnessed the relaunch of the Pioneer, through their mobile phones and tablets. The experiment was repeated a couple of weeks later, on the 125th anniversary of the real-life maiden voyage of Volk’s outlandish seatrain. The best viewing places, it turned out, are from Banjo Groyne in Kemp Town, or from the seawall of the Marina.

The first stage of the project, Apparitions, created in 2017, was based around long-disappeared landmarks near Haill’s St Leonards home: some much-loved Bexhill beach huts blown away in a storm in 1905; St Leonards Pier, demolished in 1951 after being ‘severed’ in WW2 and never restored, and the Prince Albert Memorial clocktower, which stood in central Hastings between 1862 and 1973, when it was demolished after a suspected arson attack. These structures were similarly re-edified as scannable 3D images, with recreated Victorianera sound effects enhancing the experience.

As for Brighton’s Daddy Long Legs, Haill hopes it can once again, in its new form, become a popular Brighton tourist attraction. She is currently in discussion with Brighton Council about mounting plaques on the seafront, alerting tourists to the possibility of witnessing the digital apparition of Volk’s majestically ungainly contraption.

And there may be more to come. The artist has recently managed to transpose a 3D video image of herself sitting inside the Pioneer, using “mixed reality”, and is working on a way of enabling other viewers to do the same. So as well as watching the seemingly miraculous passage of the Daddy Long Legs along the sea bed in front of our eyes, we might soon be able to enjoy the ride from within it, like so many Victorians did before us.

Words by Alex Leith

To activate the experience, install the free app ‘Pioneer AR’ from Google Play or Apple iTunes App Store. You can scan the photo opposite, but you may get better results if you scan the inserted postcard. Or point your device at the sea from one of the two locations described. Headphones are advised, to enable a complete experience, with added sound effects. daddylonglegs.site

PIONEER 2.0

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In every issue of ROSA participatory artists Leap Then Look will invite you to actively explore and investigate an artistic process, prompt or question. These activities can be done alone or with others, by the young, the old, the newcomer, the experienced artist and anyone in between.

You don’t need specialist art equipment. The pair often use things they find outdoors or around the house and use their phones to take pictures and make videos

Making experiments water

As our theme in this issue is we want to think about the qualities of this ubiquitous liquid and the ways in which it shapes our lives, physically and conceptually.

For us, water suggests movement and flow, change and transformation, stillness and reflection. How can we use these ideas to discover new ways of making?

Leap Then Look is a participatory arts organisation run by artists Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie. Their mission is to involve people of all ages and abilities in the practice, thought and experimental possibilities of contemporary art. leapthenlook.org.uk

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This edition’s prompts are…

Change and transformation Explore how water moves and changes Make a sculpture that changes over time Set objects in ice and record them melting Make something to leave out in the rain

Movement and flow

Stillness and reflection

How can you capture flow and movement?

Make a sculpture that flows Create a drawing with one continuous flowing line Take these movements into your body

Get involved by posting your responses on Instagram using the hashtag #makingexperiments and tag @leap_then_look and @therosamag

Find a quiet place, close your eyes and listen to the movement of the world around you When you open your eyes, make something immediately Try to capture this feeling

LEAP THEN LOOK

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Eric Ravilious Train Landscape, 1939 © Aberdeen City Council (Archives, Gallery & Museums Collection)

The mystery of the missing Long Man

get a day ticket and go up and down in the train all day long between Eastbourne and Lewes drawing and painting from his carriage,” says Margy.

He painted a first version of the watercolour in 1939, but he was dissatisfied with how it turned out, so created a second version, replacing the Long Man with a White Horse, and darkening the colour of the livery. He still wasn’t happy, though, and abandoned the project.

“Tirzah, who often collaborated with her husband, writes in her autobiography, Long Live Great Barfield, that she cut up the two paintings, and joined together the better bits, to make a satisfactory whole,” Margy tells me. And so this is more of a collage than a painting, and might accurately be captioned ‘Train Landscape, by Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood’.

This familiar Eric Ravilious image, entitled Train Landscape, is not all it seems. In fact, it is not entirely Eric’s own work.

And it has much more relevance to his home county of East Sussex than you’d imagine.

I discovered this while chatting to filmmaker Margy Kinmonth, in front of the painting, at the Ravilious exhibition Extraordinary Everyday, in Winchester, earlier this year.

Margy has spent the last five years making the documentary Drawn to War, about Ravilious’s life and work, and has become an expert on the Eastbourne-and-bred artist.

The chalk horse you can see is a representation of the Westbury White Horse, on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, also depicted in two other Ravilious watercolours.

But Eric, Margy tells me, originally painted an image of the Long Man of Wilmington in the place of the horse, a symbol that was recurrent in his artwork, appearing in several of his watercolours (held by the V&A), his Zodiac series wood engravings, and the mural he produced at Morley College.

The Long Man of Wilmington is visible on the train line between Lewes and Polegate, and this was a journey that Eric frequently made, as a child and as an adult, travelling third class (he was short of money all his life). “He used to

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Tirzah’s memory of the process, it seems, was verified when the overlays were temporarily removed before a Ravilious exhibition in Wiltshire in 2021, to reveal the Long Man of Wilmington, and cream-coloured livery, underneath.

The story means a lot to Margy, because it was the Long Man of Wilmington which drew her to the film project in the first place. “I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents who lived in Wilmington,” she says. “We’d go out of the back of the house and there was the Long Man on the hill at the top of the village, just beyond the church with its ancient yew tree. As children, we used to climb all over it, tracing our journey in his steep outline, which used to be made of bricks.”

“And we used to watch from the train window to get a glimpse of the Long Man of Wilmington up on the Downs, as we sped past on our way to Polegate Station. The same was true for Eric Ravilious, he loved looking out of the train window. He used to stick his head out, and, apparently, once his hat flew off.”

Words by Alex Leith Drawn to War is released in July in select cinemas, including Lewes Depot where Alex will be conducting a post-film Q&A with Margy Kinmonth (July 1). @raviliousfilm | lewesdepot.org

ART DETECTIVE

Credit: Tatty Devine

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