Cathy's Art Diary

Creepy exhibition at Flowers of new work by Scottish artist Ken Currie. These were majestic works which imagined an archipelago of barren islands and the people who live on them without shelter. The upper floor was dominated a painting of a group of depressed looking people with shades of American Gothic and a similarly large image of a white, emaciated horse on a boat. I’m not sure what they are about but they got under my skin and were the stuff of nightmares! Closed 16 November 2024    

Beautiful exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Tai Shan Schierenberg. I loved this large colourful works exploring Schierenberg’s German and Chinese Malaysian heritage via portraits and landscapes. I know him best as a judge on Sky Arts annual paintings completions but had seen and liked his work in this gallery before. My favourite was this church interior with a boat. It reminded me of Italian church interiors which I Iove but also the last room of the recent Yoko Ono exhibition. I also liked this beautiful big portrait of a woman and dog. I can always be won over by a good dog portrait! Closed 22 June 2024

Weird but intriguing exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Stuart Pearson Wright. Wright is most known for his portraits and is a previous winner of BP Portrait Artist of the Year, and there were some wonderful examples here, hung to look like a living room. His work has a hyperreal, eery quality,   just shifting the proportions to be slightly off. They draw you in and play with your eyes. Shown with these were two sculptures of men. I’d seem a picture of ‘Bloke’ in an email and assumed it was a painting so was surprised when I popped to the gallery a couple of weeks ago while the show was being set up to realise it was 3D. The two works dominate the space and it feels quite odd walking nearby them. I realised now from reading the press release that ‘Bloke’ and a couple of the paintings are interactive. I’m not sure if I didn’t notice or if they weren’t working, but I’m quite glad they didn’t as I think I’d have found that a bit freaky. Closed 25 November 2023 ...

Clever exhibition at Flowers Gallery Kingsland Road of cyanotype photographs by Janelle Lynch. Cyanotype is a photographic technique invented by Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, in 1842 and used by botanic images by Anna Atkins soon after. It uses paper coated with a light-sensitive solution to make a print of a real object without a camera or negative. The blue pictures were produced during a period of solitude along the Atlantic Ocean and feature sea plants, a birds wing and her own body. The works had an ethereal quality and were calming contrast to Jiro Osunga’a images downstairs. Closed 1 July 2023  

Fabulous exhibition at the Flowers Gallery Kingsland Road of a large painting/installation by Juro Osuga. Taking over the whole ground floor space and circling the walls this huge painting showed an airport departure lounge and put you in that space. Even though you were looking out at it you felt part of the scene. The piece was full of figures and you gradually realised some were historic or alien. Was it about the part and future always being with us? Who knows but it was fun. Some sections were cleverly painted to give a 3D effect like a kiosk in one corner whose canopy looked as if it was protruding into our space. I particularly loved coming round a corner and finding a riff on Ford Maddox Brown’s “The Last of England”. Closed 1 July 2023

Delicate exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Victoria Cantons. It was a mix of figurative work and decorative paintings of flowers mainly in light pastel colours. The flower pictures were simplified with a lovely drip effect and were evidently done on a residency in Italy. They were undemanding and would be lovely to live with. My favourite work was shocking in comparison and was a self-portrait after facial surgery complete with bruises, gauze and blood. It was an amazingly honest look at herself. I’d seen it in an email from the gallery but hadn’t realised the scale of it being nearly 2m in height. Closed 20 May 2023    

Vibrant  exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Lucy Jones. These were big bold landscapes and portraits painted since the start of the pandemic so they reflect the painting of the landscape and people around her in Shropshire as well as works which mark liberation and a seeking of new locations. I preferred the landscapes, loving their bold colours and slightly quirky viewpoints. Reading the press release I learned that the artist has physical challenges and paints on the ground and remaining close to her car. There was also a beautiful, full length, nude self-portrait with lovely skin tones and a piercing, insightful gaze. Closed 8 October 2022

Colourful exhibition at Flowers of work from throughout the career of John Bellany, a contemporary artist who died in 2013. These were big bold works many of them influenced by his childhood in a seafaring community. I loved “Silver Crest II” off two fishing boats in a harbour. Some of the works were more symbolic. My favourite, shown here, “Still Life With Mexican Vase” from 1996 was a large still life, at a metre and a half long, and full of colour and interest. Closes 27 August 2022    

Calming exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new works by Victoria Crowe. Most of these pictures were amazing deep snow scenes which felt hyperreal but when you got close to the surface they were very painterly. You realised that the blue was painted on the black not visa versa as I would have expected. Other works placed vivid red branches against a black sky. The contrast played with your eyes in a pleasing way. Closed 22 May 2022    

Interesting exhibition at Flowers Gallery of work by six self-taught international artists. All the artists explore the idea of surrounding yourselves with others, real and imaginary, often for companionship. All of them create a group of characters who repeat in their work over the years. I liked Keisuke Ishino’s small flat figures. Reading the nice booklet for the show it says he creates over 300 figures a year. They are made from 2 dimensional drawings in marker pens which he converts to 3d art works. I was also intrigued by Susan Te Kahurangi King’s drawings from the 1960s on show here particularly as they were done on old copied of The Business Who’s Who of Australia. The picture shown here is by Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso made from construction paper and fringed with evenly spaced brown tape used by the artist to stick them to her walls at home. All presented interesting, very personal ideas. Closes 28 August 2021  

Striking exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Tai Shan Schierenberg. These were large, imagined landscapes often placing a lone figure in them. They had a sublime quality but were more coherent from a distance than close up. I loved “No Man is and Island” shown here which had a cool grandeur. I hadn’t realised when I was at the exhibtion that the artist is one of the judges on the Portrait and Landscape artist of the year tv programmes so I was fascinated to see his work having listened to and often agreed with his opinions. Closed 10 July 2021  

Bright exhibition at Flower Gallery of recent work by Bernard Cohen. I liked these works but, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I understood them. The commentary says that they layer motifs such as doors, paws, aeroplanes and railway tracks. They reminded me of those 1980s illusionistic posters where some people saw an imagine in an apparent abstract but I never did. I still remember a friend’s shouting as me “But look it’s Freddie Mercury”! However I loved the colours and textures of the works. I’ve included a picture of the surface of one work to show how the dots all over the surface are like florets of icing. I want skirt made of a material of the pattern and colour combinations. The technique is meticulous. Closes 22 May 2021  

Stunning exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Tai Shan Schierenberg. There were just a few large pictures in this show by a former winner of the BP Portrait Award which examined ideas of masculinity in Western society. They grabbed you with their size and colour as you entered the gallery. I loved “No Man Left Behind” a study of two men supporting a slumped figure. I assume he was a drunk on a stag night but it could be a runner in a race. All the figures have a well caught, naturalistic stance. Other pictures showed footballers as he was artist in residence at West Bromwich Albion for a Channel   4 series. My favourite piece was a striking double portrait (140 x 200 cm) called “Brothers”, two young men sitting one behind the other and facing in different directions with a blue bookcase behind.  Closed   23 November 2019

Charming exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Claerwen James. These were delightful full length portraits of children against striking blue backgrounds. As a number are in ballet clothes you can’t help but have Degas thoughts however these children look out and engage with you. As they are based on photographs they place you in the position of the photographer. They capture a moment in time, not just in the photographic sense, but also with the idea that these children will continue to grow and change even before the picture is finished. Closed on 23 June 2018  

Striking exhibition at Flowers Gallery of large limited edition photographs by Scarlett Hooft Graffland. These all show desert and sea scenes with incredible large blue skies. They place unusual objects or people in the landscape providing a focus and a puzzle for the eye I loved one from Bolivia of a cracked salt landscape where an image of a carpet had been created on the surface of the salt by painting in the cracked areas and squaring off the edges. It really fooled the eye into thinking it was a real carpet. I also liked one of flat fishing boats pulled up on a beach which when you looked closely all had a figure lying in them with one knee raised. My favourite though was a calming image called “Resolution” of a boy standing in the sea with a model of a sailing ship. I loved the shades of blue in the sky and sea and reflection of the boy and ship in the calm sea. Closed on 29 April 2017  

Fabulous exhibition at Flowers Gallery of new work by Patrick Hughes. I have seen his work before in Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions and love it! It really plays with your eyes and mind. They works are really hard to explain! I’m going with painted reliefs. A detailed, almost super real picture is painted across a 3D surface which means that it alters as you walk round it. Sections which first appeared to protrude actually seem to recede from another angel. They remind me of the 17th Dutch optical illusion box pictures. There was a stunning picture of Venice which really brought back my recent holidays there. Also some of interior scenes which views of Venice thought the window. I loved some of art galleries but wanted to know if they were real galleries! The pictures on the walls were ones I knew but I couldn’t remember where they were to work out if it was a real space, however I suspect they are fantasy galleries sand don’t we all have them! Closes on 5 November 2...

Interesting exhibition at Flowers on Kingsland Road bringing together five international contemporary artists who investigate the form and surface of the photographic print. No I’m not too sure what that means either! I liked Alessandro Dandini De Sylva’s “Paessaggi” in which he intervenes in the process of developing Poloroid images breaking the images down into a sequence of colours and shapes. I Was amused by Tom Lovelace’s “Forms in Green” which were two felt boards from a library which had had notices on them which had stopped the green felt fading. There was an interesting red room of chemically unfixed photographs by Ryan L. Moule addressing the idea of a dissolving image. Closed on 3 September 2016  

Intriguing exhibition at Flowers on Kingsland Road looking at abstraction in contemporary photography. The show took its inspiration from a series of cloud studies from the 1920s by Alfred Stieglitz who incidentally came up in other exhibition a few days later as he was Georgia O’Keefe’s husband. As some of you may have realised I’m not that fond of abstract art but this show had some really interesting images. I loved Wang Ningde’s “Form of Light/Colour Filter for a Utopian Sky no 1” which was made of small pieces of coloured film set into a board at a right angle to it. The light filtered through it casting colour onto the white board behind. More art using film than photography! I also liked Michael Benson’s ”US Cloud Sheet” where a real image becomes abstract by the way it is photographed. Other interesting work included Letha Wilson’s pictures printed onto pleated paper to give the impression of a Venetian blind and Chris McCaw’s work made by lines burnt throug...

Stunning exhibition at the Flowers Gallery of new photographic works by Boyd & Evans. These were wonderful large pictures made up of up to 100 individual photographs put together into large views with a heightened sense of reality. They were of scenes from the Western USA and ranged from panoramic landscapes to tender views of dilapidated buildings. The panoramic pictures reminded me of the huge American Sublime landscape paintings from the 19th century and in reading the press release again I notice that the artists started off painters. The pictures had a real sense of painters observational eye. I loved “Shafer Trail Utah” in which the orange rock in the middle seemed to jump out at you. Also “Tonopah NV” where lines on the road led your eye to a rocket in the desert, a wonderful blending of the natural and manmade. Closed on 12 March 2016

Colourful exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Hoxton, of new work by Tom Hammick who has recently been artist in residence at the English National Opera (ENO). There was a mix of oil paintings and prints based on them. The blurb says they were “dreamlike landscapes” and they did have an other worldly dream like feel. They often felt very real and familiar and yet with a different spin. My favourite was called “Riding West” and showed the silhouettes of a man and a woman on horses facing a sunset. The reds, turquoise and yellow of the sky were stunning and it’s only now I realise turquoise is an odd colour for a sunset but it works. I also liked a print called “Early Morning Above a City” which was a view of people at the windows of a block of flats in pale blues. It was really interesting to see the oil pictures and prints together and to think about what works in each medium. Review Times