CLOSE TO HOME BY JONATHAN HOOPER by THE ART COURT

X EYE ROOM

CLOS E TO H O M E BY JONATH A N H O O PE R 2 JAN - 31 MAR 2024 AT EYE ROOM

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THE ART COURT

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The Art Court works in the North of England to promote a welcoming and accessible culture of collecting art. We are passionate about supporting artists and sharing their work with audiences because we know that art has the power to create a sense of connection and enhance lives. We are excited to be collaborating with Eye Room. This is the first in a series of exhibitions that the independent optician will be hosting at their Scandinavian setting in Leeds city centre. Already known for their carefully curated range of eyewear and discerning sense of style, art exhibitions further enhance a visit to Eye Room for clients and art lovers alike. The exhibition can be viewed in this online catalogue or in person. OPENING TIMES Mon - Fri, 10am - 6pm Sat 10am - 5pm All welcome Eye Room, 9 Mill Hill, Leeds LS1 5DQ For those seeking to purchase or commission art for either public or private settings, The Art Court offers tailored services that include personal art shopping, curation, project management, and commissioning. We work with our clients to understand your taste, space, budget and logistical considerations to guide our search through an extensive network of artists to find the perfect fit. Our team is always on hand to assist you.

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CLOSE TO HOME JAN - MAR 2024

The exhibition Close to Home presents a selection of paintings made over the past three years by the Leeds based artist Jonathan Hooper. Working from his home studio in Far Headingley, Jonathan starts his day with a walk around his local area where he takes photos as source material for his paintings. He focuses on houses and shops in northwest Leeds - all the subjects are within half an hour’s walk of his home. Within his work Jonathan uses colour to create an emotional atmosphere: each painting uses a particular restricted and non-naturalistic range of colours. He develops the colour theme for the paintings in watercolour drawings and maintains it across a series of works in oils. He has the unique ability to create works that are both structured and loose, calm and energetic, and familiar yet otherworldly. Jonathan said: “These paintings show the characteristic residential architecture of this part of Leeds: large Victorian stone houses on Otley Road in Far Headingley; post-war semi-detached houses in the Queenswood Drive area of Kirkstall; and Victorian red-brick terraces around Meanwood Road and Monkbridge Road

in Meanwood. In the paintings of shops in Headingley I was looking for a subject to complement the houses: I was interested in the glimpses of interior spaces that shop-fronts offer. In one pair of paintings I looked at the front and the back of the same three shops, exploring the contrast between the ordered “public” and the more pragmatic “private” faces of the buildings.” The notions of the public and private are interesting. When we look at people’s homes, we usually see only the front of the house. However, with commercial properties on the high street, we can often explore both the front and the back of the building. The front facade is presented in a considered way whilst the back reveals so much about the history of the building, and its changing uses over time with layers of paint and a patchwork of extensions and styles. Presenting the exhibition at Eye Room, a heritage-listed commercial property that comes imbued with a sense of history further contributes to the themes of the exhibition, making for a great setting to see the show. Courtney Spencer The Art Court

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VISION AND VISIBILITY: NEW OPPORTUNITIES A N D A L T E R N AT I V E E C O N O M I E S F O R CO N T E M P O R A RY A R T I N L E E D S BY DEREK HORTON

There is a tiny part of the art world in which artworks are both the ultimate luxury consumer goods and a viable investment for the super-rich. Less than 1% of artists find themselves as players in that game, whilst the remaining 99% of hardworking and creative but underfunded artists find themselves faced by a broader commercial art world that still cannot accommodate more than a tiny fraction of them. Combined with an increasing professionalisation that pushes art students towards advanced degrees, this leaves new generations of artists with massive student-loan debt in a field with very limited job prospects, and in a property environment where a lack of both affordable housing and studio space adds yet more financial strain. Consequently the vast majority of artists are having to find ways to survive in a less and less artist-friendly environment. Leeds has for centuries had an economy partly based around trade, commerce and finance, as well as its industry and manufacturing. Consequently, although it suffered, like all of the urban North, from an economic decline that began in the early-1970s, it was never as devastated as many of the Pennine towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire that were solely dependent on the textiles and coal industries that largely disappeared over

the same period. Since then, like many post-industrial cities that have transformed themselves in the face of drastic shifts of fortune, Leeds has turned itself into a destination city not just for global finance, insurance and accountancy companies, and government offices such as HMRC, but also for British and international tourists. There has been significant support for the arts too, from the city council, Arts Council England, and also corporate sponsors and individual philanthropists, but this has been especially concentrated in the performing arts, where there has been a particular focus on theatre, opera and ballet. Meanwhile the visual arts have mostly received much less emphasis. For example, whilst Leeds has an important and increasingly forward-looking municipal gallery, and has been home to the Henry Moore Institute since 1993, it has lacked the kind of investment in visual art that has created major institutions in other northern cities such as Tate Liverpool or the Baltic in Gateshead. Nor can it match smaller but significant and long-term sustainable institutions such as Birmingham’s Ikon, HOME in Manchester, or the Bluecoat and FACT in Liverpool. It has often been remarked that Leeds is the only major British city to have only one football club, thus avoiding the fierce antagonisms that divide football fans in

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Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Glasgow. I mention this because, even more unusually, art education in the city finds itself in the opposite position. Uniquely, Leeds has three higher education institutions, all within a few hundred metres of each other, each offering multiple degree and postgraduate courses in art. The marketisation of higher education that has intensified over the last three decades means that there is little collaboration between the three university art schools as they compete for student numbers and shrinking resources, especially under a government higher education policy in which arts and humanities subjects are increasingly marginalised. Nonetheless, this proliferation of higher education opportunities in art means that Leeds annually generates more artist graduates than anywhere outside London, and successive generations of them have created a vibrant climate for visual art and a national and international network of artists with whom they connect and interact. Since I first arrived in Leeds over thirty years ago, there has been an undoubted improvement in the visibility and recognition of contemporary art, in the incentives for young artists to stay longer and enrich the culture of our city, and in the infrastructure necessary to cultivate their energy and talent in ways that the city so badly needs for art and artists to flourish here. Over this time, the urban landscape of Leeds has changed rapidly, particularly over the last decade, a change that is continuing at pace, and often in positive ways. For example, there is a rapidly growing community of residents in the city centre (even though, for its long-term sustainability, this community needs to be enabled to develop with a much more diverse demographic). At the same time there has been considerable

and ongoing environmental improvement, including much greater emphasis on public transport, cycling and pedestrian access, improving street furniture and lighting, and a significant extension of landscaping, planting, and green space. And, although there is still a long way to go, the first steps are taking place toward moving away from a city centre devoted entirely to commerce and retail, with such cultural developments as the arrival of Channel Four, the new Leeds Mathematics School on the Headrow, the Trinity University campus in Trevelyan Square, the Tetley about to move home, and, hopefully, the long-planned British Library of the North. A downside of all this regeneration, though, is the increasing scarcity and disappearing affordability of ambitious, non-profit spaces that fulfil a need that neither big cultural institutions nor temporary, small-scale, artist-run initiatives (through which artists have always creatively adapted to changing urban geographies and scarce resources) can provide for. An example of this is the five-year survival but eventual closure (in 2017) of &Model gallery, in its highly visible site on East Parade, which supported local artists whilst simultaneously bringing to Leeds nationally and internationally established artists who would not otherwise have shown here. In this context, as they always do, artists have adopted survival strategies through their camaraderie; making work and curating self-organised shows in collaborative and improvised exhibition spaces and shared studio and workshop facilities that are often precariously selffunded, in obscure locations, and of poor environmental and architectural quality. These provide an opportunity to share ideas and critique, and can be a valuable morale-boosting self-support structure for the artists involved, but often end up

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creating an insular art scene that exists below any wider public radar and with little or no formal critical attention. In a healthy culture though, art should belong not just to an audience of artists and enthusiasts, but also to a diverse and unspecialised wider public, and be made visible in ways that might be on the edges of their engagement in many other activities. Increasingly unstable local and global economic circumstances, as well as rapidly developing communication technologies, have led to new strategies and professional roles in the infrastructure within which contemporary art is produced, circulated, displayed, and exchanged. Whilst the high-end economy of blue-chip galleries and art-asinvestment is not going to go away, there is real potential for “small is beautiful” changes in the nature, scale, and visibility of a different art market that can enable new and more open, accessible, and affordable contexts for the production and distribution of art, and to the promotion of much wider participation in its consumption. Real change can often occur below the radar, and in small, incremental ways. This new collaboration between The Art Court and Eye Room is a small-scale but very welcome addition to the diversity of opportunities for artists to show, and audiences to see, art in Leeds. The Art Court was established by Courtney Spencer to connect artists, audiences, and collectors through temporary exhibitions in a range of public and commercial spaces across the north of England. Tomas and Hafiya of Eye Room have generously partnered with her in this groundbreaking venture, and this is the first of an ongoing series of small exhibitions of contemporary artworks in their small showroom. Unlike too many such ventures, they have avoided the simplistic approach of merely putting some artworks on the wall.

Instead they have a real creative vision for sympathetically designed display spaces in which there can be a genuine integration of and dialogue between contemporary art and design in the form of their carefully curated eyewear. This opening exhibition consists only of paintings, but as the project develops, work in other media, and even sculptural installations are envisaged. There is an obvious synergy between contemporary visual art and a business concerned with vision and optics, creating opportunities for future exhibitions that explore this relationship quite directly. Tomas, Hafiya, and Courtney all deserve congratulation for an initiative that will broaden the audience for contemporary art and create a much-needed outlet for artists to expose their work to viewers who would not otherwise see it, and may even be inclined, and able to afford, to buy something, perhaps as the first step to building a collection. Derek Horton had an early career in community-based arts education, working on adventure playgrounds and community arts projects since the late-1970s. Subsequently, from 1990 onwards he spent many years teaching art in higher education, culminating in his role as Director of Research at Leeds Metropolitan University’s School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design, from which he retired in 2008. Following this he was Visiting Professor at the School of Art, Birmingham City University. He writes about art and occasionally about music as a regular contributor to various books and magazines. He co-founded the online magazine, Soanyway, which he currently co-edits. He was one of the three-person collective running &Model gallery in Leeds, from 2013 to 2017. With Dr Alice Correia, he recently researched and co-curated the exhibition, A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s, at Touchstones Rochdale in 2023, funded by a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

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J O N AT H A N H O O P E R B. 1963 LONDON, UK

Jonathan Hooper is an artist who paints the urban environment near his home in the north-west suburbs of Leeds.

his choice of non-naturalistic colour palettes and the architecture of the everyday.

He is particularly fascinated by images of houses and how they can remind us of other houses and by extension, of all the homes we have known, all similar but unique. He approaches painting houses like painting a portrait, behind the external form is an inner life and history but also a world of shared feeling and thought.

“I walk and take photographs each day - from these, I explore colour and composition using watercolour on paper, before making paintings in oil. At each stage I am not copying the source image, but creating a new one inspired by it. Each series of paintings has a similar colour approach and emotional atmosphere: this comes partly from the original subject and my feelings about it; but is partly arrived at independently in the studio, as I develop my pictorial ideas.” Jonathan Hooper

He is not trying to replicate the subject as it appears at a particular time but to show how it really is, how it feels, how it is in memory or imagination. Emotion and memory are his ultimate themes, which he approaches through

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Gunners Row (2) 2022 Oil on cradled board 23 x 20 cm £340 (framed)

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Gunners Row (3) 2022 Oil on cradled board 23 x 20 cm £340 (framed)

Gunners Row (4) 2022 Oil on cradled board 23 x 20 cm £340 (framed)

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Queenswood Drive (2) 2022 Oil on cradled board 24 x 18 cm £320 (framed)

Queenswood Drive (3) 2022 Oil on cradled board 24 x 18 cm £320 (framed)

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Queenswood Drive (5) 2022 Oil on cradled board 24 x 18 cm £320 (framed)

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Shops in Headingley (Charity Shop; Restaurant; Empty Unit) 2023 Oil on cradled board 64 x 95 cm | 25 x 37 in (incl. frame) £1,200 (framed)

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Backs of shops in Headingley (Empty Unit; Restaurant; Charity Shop) 2023 Oil on cradled board 64 x 95 cm | 25 x 37 in (incl. frame) £1,200 (framed)

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Shops in Headingley (Letting agent; Fast food) 2023 Oil on cradled board 51 x 41 cm £700 (framed)

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Shops in Headingley (Barbers; Letting agent) 2023 Oil on cradled board 51 x 41 cm £700 (framed)

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Otley Road, Headingley, Leeds (1) 2021 Oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm £900 (framed)

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Otley Road, Headingley, Leeds (2) 2021 Oil on canvas 61 x 51 cm £900 (framed)

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Street in Meanwood: looking down 2023 Oil on canvas 76 x 61 cm £950 (unframed)

Street in Meanwood: looking up 2023 Oil on canvas 76 x 61 cm £950 (unframed)

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Beckett Park 2022 Oil on canvas 91 x 61 cm £1,200 (framed)

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Cafe on Meanwood Road 2023 Oil on canvas 76 x 61 cm £950 (unframed)

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House in Meanwood, Leeds (3) 2023 Oil on board 39 x 49 cm £650 (framed)

House in Meanwood, Leeds (1) 2023 Oil on board 39 x 49 cm £650 (framed)

The exhibition is available to view in person at Eye Room. No appointment needed and all are welcome. OPENING TIMES Mon - Fri, 10am - 6pm Sat 10am - 5pm All welcome Eye Room, 9 Mill Hill, Leeds LS1 5DQ

If you would like further information about any of the artworks, our contact details are below and we would be delighted to assist you.

+44 (0)77 8618 1968 CU R ATO R @T H E A RTCO U RT.CO.U K W W W.T H E A RTCO U RT.CO.U K