Galleries magazine - page 13

that power cables stretching
across a ploughed Essex field or
a gas holder on the edge of
picturesque Lavenham have no
less beauty than a moonlit beach
at Walberswick or the isolated
lightship on Tollesbury Marshes.
See them at the
Chappel
Galleries
, 1 to 30 March.
At Home
There’s something rather
appropriate about a former estate
agent running a gallery from
what looks like a perfectly
straightforward domestic
residence, but that is exactly
what Paul Watts, the owner of
Bournemouth’s
ArtHouse
Gallery,
has done. Open the
garden gate and walk up the
black and white tiled path to the
immaculately kept period house
in the city centre and suddenly
you enter an absolute treasure
trove of current figurative and
abstract art – it’s a clever idea too
as it is, one presumes, very much
the kind of house some of his
potential clients might own
themselves. It isn’t just a
domestic market he serves either,
of course, as he does a good
deal of corporate selling as well.
Sven Berlin, Prunella Clough,
Terry Frost, Martin Brewster and
Peter Joyce are all included in
the current show. Great stuff!
biographer, Peter Khoroche
writing the catalogue essay, the
gallery has done full justice to
what amounts to a substantial
body of work by one of the major
masters of 20th Century British
landscape abstraction.
Painting and Staining
Now firmly established in its
new-ish home at the
Mall
Galleries
, the
Lynn Painter-
Stainers Prize
was founded 9
years ago to encourage
representational painting and
draughtsmanship skills. The
Prize attracted a record entry in
2014, the selection from which is
on show from 17 to 22 March.
Not surprising, perhaps, given a
total prize fund that now stands
at £25,000 and a First Prize of
£15,000 . . .
Eastern Angles
The great advantage of living
most of your working life in close
proximity to the landscape you
are painting is that you soon
begin to see through the skin of
the picturesque to the real
beating heart of the place, plain
and honest. Wladyslaw Mirecki,
born of Polish parents in
Chelmsford, is self-taught as an
artist and has spent the greater
part of his painting life in and
around North Essex. He paints it
– always in watercolour – with a
warm and inclusive directness so
MARCH 2014GALLERIES
13
ANTENNAE
Chance Encounter
In an age when almost all the top
artists – and not just Damien
Hirst – have massive studio-
warehouses full of assistants
carrying out the mundane job of
actually making the work, the
story which has recently come
out about the painter Ivon
Hitchens and woodcutter Ted
Floate’s chance encounter in
1956 in the Sussex woods, where
both lived and worked, has a
charmingly other world, other
age quality about it. It started
badly – with Hitchens rather
officiously putting out a fire
Floate had made in an oil-drum
that he felt could have set fire to
the wood. No chance apparently
– it was in an open space – but
once that moment passed,
Hitchens went on to ask Floate to
come and do some odd jobs
around the studio – stretching
canvases, framing and even
some technical advice. He ended
up, in short, becoming not only a
close companion but also
indispensible to Hitchens’ studio
practice for the next 23 years
until his death in 1979. In the
process, he found himself being
given a generous number of
canvases and drawings over the
years which, now, at 85, Floate
has finally decided to sell –
Goldmark
are, as a
consequence showing some 10
previously unseen canvases, a
watercolour and a number of
drawings. It is, as they say, quite
a turn up and, with Hitchens’
from left: C
harlie Schaffer ‘Antonio’ oil on canvas
at Lynn Painter-Stainers/Mall Galleries
Ivon Hitchens ‘Two Woodsmen’ (detail), oil on
canvas, at Goldmark Gallery. Sven Berlin ‘Rain
God’ (detail), 6 x 4ft, at ArtHouse Gallery
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