Meet the Artists of Fame and of Promise
- Messum's Studio
- Aug 31, 2021
- 9 min read
Updated: Sep 2, 2021
As we look ahead to our exciting September exhibition at Messum's St. James's, which opens on 8th September, we are providing Friends of Messum's with a 'sneak peak' at those who have been selected for this major exhibition. The show, which runs until 1st October, highlights the work of twenty artists selected from our stable of contemporary artists and artists estates. With a diverse group of over sixty paintings and sculptures on show at Messum's St. James's, this provides an exciting opportunity for collectors and presents a great chance for new collectors to explore both our emerging and established artists. To purchase the fully illustrated catalogue which shows the complete show, please CLICK HERE.
To see more works available by the artists, click on their names.
Annear’s work is strongly influenced by the painters of St Ives – in particular, Ben Nicholson – as well as Klee, Picasso, Braque and Miro. He was an active member of the Newlyn and Penwith societies of artists during the 1990s and has had numerous one-man shows at Messum’s, in St Ives, and at galleries in Berlin, Bremen and Leipzig. In the early 1990s he spent a year as artist in residence at the Atelierhaus Verlag in Worpswede, broadening his field of artistic interests over international horizons. Several visits to Australia brought Annear into contact with Aboriginal art for the first time, the graphic elements of which he found fascinating and which made subsequent appearances in his painting.
“In Jake Attree’s art, I see Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Auerbach synthesized and made into something new, both lyrical and melancholy. In these pictures experience, care, and devotion merge art and life—without any fanfare or sensation—in unfolding perceptions of what is possible, what is lost, what is dreamt of and what is regained. He is the Spencer Gore of our age.”
Alexander Nemerov - Author of Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin, 2021)
Carter’s Essex landscapes illustrate the act of painting as much as they do place. He contends that painting is about illustrating visual observation, which is in itself a process that develops from looking and sketching to painting itself. It is through the act of painting, of coordinating colours and making marks, that the artist’s interpretation of space and its visual elements emerge.
In 2005, Alan Cotton accompanied His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales to Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji as his Tour Artist. In 2009, he was nominated as an icon by the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Committee. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2006 by the University of Exeter for his outstanding contribution to the arts and was later appointed Hon. Professor of Arts at the University of Bath.
Once a shipwright, Dodds’ paintings illustrate the anatomy of boats, revealing the materials and curves that underwrite the finished vessel. This aspect of his work is explored in Emily Harris’ film for Classic Yacht TV, ‘Shaped by the Sea’, which draws many parallels between the art of the boat builder and the painter of boats. Yet his paintings go beyond retracing the shipwright’s logic. Rich in colour, tone and texture, they move beyond the literal and evoke sailing’s mythic and historic dimensions. Ethereal in light and tone, paintings of restored boats evoke a lifetime at sea, unearthing the layers of memory that shroud every vessel.
“A really good artist makes you look at the familiar in a new way; things you might once have passed without a second glance becomes suddenly remarkable. Paul Nash did it with his winter landscapes and paintings of trees; Maxwell Doig does it with the gable end of an old building, a deserted farmhouse, or the clocktower of an abandoned woollen mill. What at first sight seems ordinary becomes, through his hands and eyes, extraordinary.
And you can never look at those things in quite the same way again.”
David Boyd Haycock
author of A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (Old Street, 2009)
MICHAEL FORSTER 1907-2002
Experimental and fresh in his use of paint and different media to the very end of his life, Michael Forster's landscapes and quasi-abstract works are astonishing in their variety of handling and richness of colour. Forster was educated at Lancing College in Sussex and studied painting at the Central School of Arts under Bernard Meninsky and William Roberts. He also spent some time studying at the Académie Colarossi, Paris. Forster’s work flourished, his primary concern as a painter being the transference of the experience of light and the patterns of nature into instinctive abstract forms. Following in the footsteps of Constable, he took great inspiration from the ever-changing light and cloud formations of the sky. “I try to work in a state of open, receptive, mindlessness”, Forster observed in around 1970, “to be alert to every hint, every direction that reveals itself in the course of the work”.
Philip Hicks’ work has been widely appreciated, with over thirty successful solo gallery shows here and abroad to his credit. He is past Chairman and Vice-President of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution.
Painting until his death earlier this year, Philip Hicks concentrated on bringing together the two sides of his works, forging a synthesis which resulted in a new personal and very recognisable style. It allowed him to deploy his subject matter with great freedom across the canvas, and his gift as a colourist, together with his love of paint, reveal themselves more strongly than ever.
Rose Hilton, who died in March 2019 aged 87, was an important figure in late twentieth and early twenty-first century British painting. Grounded in her experiences of the Cornish landscape, and with her close study of the human figure and her love for Matisse and Bonnard she steadily built a reputation as a major St Ives School artist. For many years Rose was the muse and model for her husband, the artist Roger Hilton. After his death in 1975 Rose re-emerged from his shadow to draw upon her training at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s (where her contemporaries had included Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach). A singular painter of sensuous, vividly coloured and exotically exquisite images, Rose was a woman who spent a lifetime challenging herself, and an artist whose openminded determination to improve and willingness to experiment never faltered.
Now Messum’s most long-standing artist, Horton is nationally recognised as one of Britain’s true ‘romantic’ landscape painters. His eye for the mystical is rooted in Samuel Palmer, but also extends into the traditions of Paul and John Nash. There is something visionary in his use of pure colour and the way birds, boats and flowers appear to grow out of his softly shifting hills, skies and shores. His landscapes are akin to watching fast-motion footage of a flower bloom or a seedpod burst: they are natural, but still a bit magical.
Sean Jefferson’s ‘visions’ are not to be taken lightly. “There is a very serious intent behind the work,” he affirms. “Each work definitely has a meaning.” He adds that his pictures aren’t actual places – in the same way that Palmer’s early paintings were never really of particular places – but that they are inspired by them to a degree. “The underlying theme seems to be ‘To what extent is our perception an internalisation of what is out there, and how much, what is out there, a projection of some inner reality?’”
Steve des Landes paints people and landscapes filled with angst, uncertainty, anguish and
hope; he reveals romance and disappointment; opportunity and failure; fear and fable. His
people seem to be preoccupied; life seems to be elsewhere. He is – as his work boldly attests – an artist with an extraordinary personal vision. At a time when painting is once again re-establishing its importance, he is a new force to be reckoned with.
In the 1970s and 1980s Miller travelled a great deal around the Mediterranean. There he became fascinated by the strong sunlight that renders shadows as intensely dark as the light is bright. These experiences loosened his brushwork and brought a new intensity of colour to his paintings of Cornwall. In 1995 he moved from Sancreed to Lelant and he is perhaps best known for his paintings inspired by early morning walks along the beach at Port Kidney. He developed a personal symbolism during the period, in which the sun became a symbol for the renewal of life, and the moonrise associated with the death of his mother.
Perhaps because he has lived on the tidal Thames for over forty years, David Parfitt is constantly aware of the continuing tension between the pastoral and the industrial that marks his part of West London. His primary subject is his immediate views by his late Georgian riverside home at Strand-on the-Green, the only house in this area that affords unimpeded views upstream towards Kew and Brentford; downstream towards Barnes and, most immediately, the magnificent 1869 railway bridge that is almost a metaphor for the history of the working Thames.
“The Rhythms of nature, the cyclical processes that link genesis, decay and regeneration, the patterns and harmonies to be found within natural and man-made forms – these are the essential concerns that underlie all Benedict Rubbra’s work.”
Jenny Pery author of ‘Point of Balance'
Music and Art run deep in the annuals of the Rubbra family. Benedict orchestrates his work as one might a musical score. In a virtuoso performance he constructs his arrangement, finally turning up the lights before beginning the picture. The magic of the script is then transformed through paint on to canvas making visionary landscapes that are a celebration of life and nature which sing out to you.
Ken Smith is inspired and motivated by his own family, the closeness of it and the suffering of various minorities, both ethnic and social. His time living with Franciscan monks and his years within social work have driven Ken to explore his spirituality in his sculpture. These themes and the human form are prominent in his work, although often in an abstract manner. The primary material in Ken’s oeuvre is Polyphant, which is blue-grey in colour and quarried in Devon. It is a soft stone, reasonably easy to carve, and with many hours of polishing, provide the works with a beautiful finish.
Taplin’s bird sculptures embody our longed for harmony with the natural world. His obsession with birds extends beyond their beauty to their endurance, intuition and symbolic loyalty. Mostly shorebirds of various species, each bird is composed to capture their specific habits and character. His simplified, stylised forms seem to breathe each bird’s very essence. Sculpted from found driftwood, which he forages from coasts and estuaries around the world, Taplin’s birds are therefore enriched by previous lives. Weathered by time and the elements, each piece of wood bears marks that enhance his design, suggesting the outline of a wing or layers of plumage.
Widely regarded as one of Britain’s most inventive landscape painters, Tress moves beyond a landscape’s immediate appearance and evokes a state of mind: a sense of self in relation to place, its primordial history, and the wild, cyclical rhythms of the seasons and elements. Expressing a visceral response, his paintings thus establish a dialogue between topography and abstraction.
His powerful technique is, perhaps, best described by art critic and writer David Boyd Haycock who comments “David Tress tears apart the British landscape, almost forces his way into it. His extraordinary paintings and drawings are like pages ripped from the places he has visited: like turfs dug from a field or a hillside, at times they are almost three dimensional in their form. He is no passive bystander; he is artist, archaeologist and visionary rolled into one.”
Lucy Unwin's early work depicted realistic seashells and human torsos and more recently ammonite fossils. It is only in recent years that Lucy has fully started to recognise the influences that her early life has had on her work.
Her latest designs see the amalgamation of the aforementioned subject matters, incorporating the subtle curves and lines of the human body amongst the twisting forms of an eroded shell. Often plant-like in their structure these organic shapes represent for Lucy the ever present influences of our natural environment on the human body, be it both physical and emotional. Her previous love of carving fossil shapes has now developed
into more sensual forms, prompting thoughts of renewal and femininity.
Much has been made in correspondence of George Weissbort’s technical abilities as an artist, and all agree that he was a masterful painter born into a period when abstraction was seen as being more fashionable. However, true to his beliefs, he painted throughout his career beautifully observed objects whether they were still life or portrait studies. Observation was what he cared about, finding magic in compositions so that the whole became a beautiful celebration of life and nature. Although each composition was of his own making there was no attempt at forcing his own personality into it, more important was that it read in a literal sense as a whole.
ARTISTS'S OF FAME AND OF PROMISE
8th Sept - 1st October 2021
For more information telephone the London gallery on 020 72874448.
David Messum Fine Art Ltd.
12 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AB
E: info@messums.com www.messums.com
Fully illustrated exhibition catalogue available to purchase online £15 plus P&P. Visit www.messums.com for more details.
Comments