Galleries - March 2011

DESIGNER MAKERS - JEWELLERY Gillian Gee: jewellery www.gilliangee.com DESIGNER MAKERS - METAL Paul Gottschalk: sculptor & art metalsmith http://www.paulgottschalk.com ILLUSTRATORS Victoria Hooper-Duckham: illustrator: books, cards, giftware http://www.www.victoriahooper-duckham.com STUDIOS Brockley Artists: 48 artists http://www.brockleyopenstudios.co.uk/ White Yard Studios: Bonnie Brown. Brian Bishop http://www.bonniebrown.co.uk/ - http://www.brianbishop.info/ GALLERIES ONLINE see area listings for stock Bicha: stimulation for the nation http://www.bicha.co.uk F.magnus-Hirshfield: sixty years in bronze and silver http://www.avignonfineart.com Galerie Besson: mainly one-person shows of contemp ceramics http://www.galeriebesson.co.uk Henry Moore Foundation http://www.henry-moore.org Lilford Gallery http://www.lilfordgallery.com Llewellyn Alexander: contemporary oils, watercolours, pastels http://www.LlewellynAlexander.com http://www.amillionbrushstrokes.co.uk Marine House at Beer http://www.marinehouseatbeer.co.uk Martin’s Gallery: art gallery http://www.martinsgallery.co.uk Off The Wall Gallery http://www.galleryoffthewall.com Pyms Gallery http://www.pymsgallery.com The Railings Gallery http://www.railings-gallery.com The Russell Gallery: all shows of artists on view http://www.russell-gallery.com Sea Pictures Gallery: contemporary marine art in all media http://www.seapicturesgallery.com Turner Gallery http://www.bibleproject.co.uk Twenty Twenty Gallery: contemporary art & craft gallery http://www.twenty-twenty.co.uk Wetpaint Gallery http://contemporary-art-holdings.co.uk The Whitley Art Gallery: contemporary paintings, prints, etc http://www.thewhitleyartgallery.com PUBLIC GALLERIES Dulwich Picture Gallery: important 17th & 18th C. Old Masters http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk Imperial War Museum http://www.iwm.org.uk INTERNET ART SITES 57. GALLERIES MARCH 11 For all their immediate outward appearance of hard-edged abstraction, John Holden’s vibrant paintings are, essentially, contemplative distillations of the seen world, works very much more within a European/English tradition, a tradition that finally owes more to Paul Klee’s kind of intuitive responses to the visible world than to the resolute intellectualism of much 20th C. American abstraction. Or, as he puts it “a synthesis between Nature and Modernism.” Drawing on rich visual resources that include a huge archive of photographs of urban geometry and vernacular architecture and a no less steady, largely abstract, drawing practice, paintings like MJQ II, with its rich, sonorous chords of blue, red and black rectangles processing across the canvas, give us the unmistakable sensation that here is a painter dealing with real, profoundly important visual memories and feelings embedded in his consciousness and emerging with these exhilarating palimpsests of paint and sensation. ( Agnew’s ) Luke Elwes’ approach to abstraction is also essentially landscape oriented and sensation based, though the paintings that result are of a rather different order. Whereas Holden’s subject matter is, for the most part close at hand, Elwes is irresistibly drawn to some of the world’s wilder and more extreme landscapes, though always locations imbued with powerful spiritual resonances. The latest such journey was to the hidden kingdom of Mustang, following an ancient pilgrim route to the red-walled citadel of La Mantang on the Tibetan plateau known as ‘The Plain of Aspiration’. It is always the still very evident human physical imprint of these spiritual quests on the landscape quite as much as the landscapes themselves that draw Elwes to such places and the paintings, with their delicate, almost abraded, washes of luminous colour, punctuated by clear-cut shapes of doorways and hillsides, tell a resonant story about Elwes’ inward philosophical journeys. ( Adam, London ) J ohnHolden ‘MJQ II’ and LukeElwes 'Spring' RANDOM GLANCE