Galleries - May 2014

peripatetic successor to this nomadic tradition with his constant need to seek and engage with new geographical and geological vistas. His recent travels have taken him to Skye (The Misty Isle) and the rugged terrain of the Cuillin Ridge. Such mountainous magnificence has inspired a series of evocative pastel and austere charcoal drawings. Draper has skilfully mastered these graphic mediums on an impressive scale which involve such a high degree of manual dexterity that the practice hovers between painting and modelling. This direct physical contact is essential in order that the artist can fully convey the exhilarating experience of being a keenly receptive presence in such a magical place, where the echoes of history mingle with the ever-changing patterns of light and shadow. ( Open Eye Gallery until 14 May.) Bill Hare Alternative Strategies For all the growth of a stronger regional gallery system over the last decade, artists seem ever more intent on taking matters into their own hands, witness the astonishing rise of the 'Open Studio' movement since 2000 – there seem to be few districts in the UK without one. This month we have notice of at least half a dozen – and those are just ones who have contacted us. Initially they seemed to follow the county-wide model e.g Cornwall Open Studios (24 May to 1 June) or Surrey Artists Open Studios (taster shows in May, open studios 7 to 22 June) with 150 plus participants. In recent years, though, a more 'local' tendency has become apparent, smaller groups of 25-50 artists from a limited geographical area. Pilgrims Way Artists , actually founded in 1996 in Lenham, Kent and one of the earliest of its kind, has just 25 members. It doesn't do 'open studios' as such, but holds an annual show in the village's magnificent tithe barn (16 to 26 May). Similarly with Teddington Artists – just 16 of them – showing in the National Physical Laboratory atrium in Bushy Park. Crouch End Open Studios , as their name suggests, do – some 30 of them – on the weekend of 10/11 May with a preview show in Hornsey Library 1 to 15 May. Finally a very different model again, Second Floor Studios and Arts in Greenwich, a huge single site complex that aims to provide affordable studio spaces (250 of them) for London's increasingly hard-pushed (economically speaking) artist and design community, next opening 15, 17/18 May. What diversity and what opportunities: do let us know if you have an event later in the summer . . . Jankel Adler Born in Łodz in Poland in 1895, Jankel Adler transfixes us in a 1926 portrait by Otto Dix with his fiercely quizzical, dark-eyed, prophetic regard. Living in Düsseldorf in 1922, Adler had befriended Paul Klee, and later in Paris knew Picasso. Finding refuge in Scotland in 1941, living later in London, he inspired and tremendously enriched British artists such as Colquhoun, MacBryde, Vaughan and Clough with his exploratory continental avant-gardism. Focussing on his final years in Britain, where he died in 1949, the exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery (until 25 July) of over 100 oils, watercolours and drawings, reveals his marvellously sensitive, humane achievement – seen in taut, thrilling abstracts; ecstatic still lifes in which each artefact is distinct with vivid potency; and a 1947 series of delicate semi-abstract watercolours where poignant, diaphanous figures, eerily pin- eyed and angularly abstracted, are choreographed in a disquietingly playful, harrowing post-Holocaust no-man's-land. Philip Vann Matthew Draper Scotland has produced many renowned itinerant artists – from David Roberts and Andrew Melville to Boyle Family and Barbara Rae. Matt Draper is a MAY 2014 GALLERIES 11 from left: J ankel Adler ‘Musician with Trumpet’ at Goldmark Gallery Terence Coventry Couple I, bronze at Pangolin London Sculpture Trail