Blog
*Exhibition at Voewood - trying out new setups
Voewood Music room
27/07/2016
A few weeks ago I showed my currrent work about the Raj at Voewood, Simon Finch's beautiful flint and brick Arts & Crafts house in north Norfolk. Simon has been warmingly interested in my painting project as he too has family links in India - even some Indian blood. I wanted to see how the work would look out of the studio, and felt that the atmosphere and decoration of the house lent itself to the work.
I was given the music rooom, decorated in mellow colours with an African tang - wall streaked with plaster patterns, stuffed animals, woven textures. This suited the palette of the paintings and though friend Frances Kearney thought the paintings would look best dotted around the room, I wanted to see them in a considered group relating primarily to each other and only secondarily to the room, through echoes of colour and scale: the heads on the paintings are life-size, which somehow suited the homely setting. Too small and they would have seemed more ornamental.
The three boards that the paintings were to hang on were sited in front of the north window 3 feet from the wall; this gave them a monolithic presence, a single large simple geometry within the organic shapes and forms of the room. The crisp white surface of this sub-wall contrasted with the nubbly textures and earthy shades of the surrounding space, and the white within the pintings could dance freely with the solid areas of paint.
The spacing of the paintings was not as free to make as I had thought, and relationships of colour mostly determined what hung where, as well as getting a good variety of size. I was aiming at a broken wholeness. Natural light was very good, as there are windows on three sides of the irregular shaped room with its sofas, piano and assortment of skulls, heads, cloth and parquet - a distinctly Raj atmosphere.
I love to show work in a non-gallery way, and this was site-specfic in the sense that the white-wall set-uop was mad just for Voewood. The plus is that the paintings become briefly part of someone else's life, adjascent to someone else's story. Also the work becomes new again - once I had it back in the studio I tried out arrangements I'd briefly explored at Voewood with the fruitul result that more work suggested itself.
I was given the music rooom, decorated in mellow colours with an African tang - wall streaked with plaster patterns, stuffed animals, woven textures. This suited the palette of the paintings and though friend Frances Kearney thought the paintings would look best dotted around the room, I wanted to see them in a considered group relating primarily to each other and only secondarily to the room, through echoes of colour and scale: the heads on the paintings are life-size, which somehow suited the homely setting. Too small and they would have seemed more ornamental.
The three boards that the paintings were to hang on were sited in front of the north window 3 feet from the wall; this gave them a monolithic presence, a single large simple geometry within the organic shapes and forms of the room. The crisp white surface of this sub-wall contrasted with the nubbly textures and earthy shades of the surrounding space, and the white within the pintings could dance freely with the solid areas of paint.
The spacing of the paintings was not as free to make as I had thought, and relationships of colour mostly determined what hung where, as well as getting a good variety of size. I was aiming at a broken wholeness. Natural light was very good, as there are windows on three sides of the irregular shaped room with its sofas, piano and assortment of skulls, heads, cloth and parquet - a distinctly Raj atmosphere.
I love to show work in a non-gallery way, and this was site-specfic in the sense that the white-wall set-uop was mad just for Voewood. The plus is that the paintings become briefly part of someone else's life, adjascent to someone else's story. Also the work becomes new again - once I had it back in the studio I tried out arrangements I'd briefly explored at Voewood with the fruitul result that more work suggested itself.
