Chris Watson at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Sound recordist and musician Chris Watson was in conversation at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum with RSPB communications officer for the South West Tony Whitehead last night. Perhaps the differentiation between the two endeavours is a false one, however. In response to a question about the influence of his natural sound recordings on his music, Watson replied that he made no distinction between them. He has spoken before about the microphone being his instrument, and a highly versatile and adaptable one at that. Musicians and composers have long attempted to mimic or summon up the sounds of nature, from the shrill marsh bird cries of Japanese shakuhachi players through Beethoven’s programmatic traversal of the countryside in the Pastoral Symphony to Messiaen’s transliteration of avian song .Perhaps electronic musicians have come closest to evoking the complex and profoundly inhuman soundworld of melodic birdsong clusters, the seethe and chitter of insects and the compression and echoing boom of subaquatic depths. Watson mentioned his own indebtedness to Pierre Schaeffer and his musique concrete descendants. He fondly recalled his own early childhood recordings with a portable reel to reel tape machine given as a present by prescient parents. He fixed a microphone to the seed-strewn bird table in the garden, set the reels in motion and retreated inside to see what hungry visitors he might sonically capture with his new magnetic magic box. It was one of those moments, epiphanic in recollection, when a lifetime of vocational creativity is seeded. Bird seeded in this instance.

Watson, a son of the People’s Republic of Sheffield now resident in Newcastle, spent a decade of discovery and experiment in Cabaret Voltaire with Stephen Mallinder and Richard Kirk from 1971-1981, pre- to post-punk, only recording in the latter years of that fertile period. Working in his attic, a space which was half artist’s garrett, half mad scientist’s lab, the trio played freely with sound, seldom producing anything resembling conventional pop or rock. If they did, it was by accident and would be swiftly discarded. Watson built his own equipment, exhibiting an inventiveness and ingenuity, as well as a readiness to make lateral use of the materials to hand, which would stand him in good stead for the challenges of his future career. He laboured over cut-ups and tape loops, guided his oscillator through undulating frequencies and transformed his organ playing through heavy processing until it sounded less like its instrumental self, more like a generator of sound swarms. He was delighted with the development of synthesisers, and the way that ‘non-musicians’ like Brian Eno used them, and bought an EMS AKS in the latter half of the 70s. It was this which he used on the debut Cabaret Voltaire LP Mix-UP, released in 1979. Watson left the group in 1981, shortly after a visit to the Top of the Pops studios to witness another band performing. Horrified at a vision of what might be, he left to pursue other interests. He did briefly continue his tape and concrete explorations with The Hafler Trio, however, a proliferating project initiated and masterminded by Andrew M.McKenzie and only occasionally and incidentally attaining the status of an actual trio.

Watson joined Tyne Tees Television as a sound recordist and then returned to that epiphanic childhood moment and worked for the RSPB, recording the sounds of birds and their environments. As he pointed out in his discussion with Tony Whitehead, the production of RSPB films was an invaluable apprenticeship for him and many others who went on to make wildlife films for the BBC. Watson himself is now a highly esteemed wildlife recordist, and has worked on innumerable programmes, including the all-important Attenbouroughs. He mentioned what a privilege it was to work with Sir David, describing him as ‘the perfect travelling companion’. These programmes have given him the opportunity to immerse himself in a hugely diverse range of environments and build up a cumulative sound picture which effectively encompasses much of the globe.

The detail and texture of sound are very important to him, as is the way in which it is heard. He is mildly disdainful of the compression and diminution of sound transmitted through TV speakers or stereo headphones. He prefers installations in which surround sound set-ups can come nearer to approximating natural sound as it is perceived in situ. The upstairs gallery to the rear of the museum allowed for a wide speaker spectrum, with a bass cone in the middle emitting low frequency rumble. This was ideal for the subsonic sounds of elephants, a harrumph whose vibrations affected the diaphragm as much as the eardrum. Watson pointed out that the fundamental, the root note, was below the range of human perception, so what we were hearing were the harmonics arrayed above it. Close-up recordings of a cheetah purr were similarly deep and resonant, solid waves of physically palpable sound which weren’t so far off from Sunn ((o)) drone power chords. Watson spoke of the musicality of this sound, and of others. There is something very Cageian about his refusal to demarcate between music and the sounds of the natural world. Close listening reveals the musicality inherent in a whole spectrum of living sounds. He also emphasised the intelligence of various animals, exhibiting a respect for life and a scepticism about the primacy of humanity and its assumed position at the head of the great chain of being. Orcas and Vultures seemed to particularly draw his admiration.

We were treated to a dizzying panoply of natural sounds, from the tiniest shrimps to the mightiest whales. The blue whale recording was not his own, he confessed. It remains his holy grail, a more benign Ahab quest to capture an awe-inspiring call capable of sounding out hundreds of miles of subaquatic space. The whale call truly tested the capacity of the speakers, its submarine frequencies a bone-shuddering groan until pitch-shifted upwards into a more audible range. It still made the chants of Tibetan monks sound like soprano squeaks, though. Watson argues, naturally enough, for the sound picture of a natural environment being as important as the visual aspect. It can be more stimulating to the imagination, and create more of a sense of being vitally present. Sound recording can almost be akin to magic in the way that it transports us to worlds which would otherwise be wholly inaccessible to our senses. We shrink to earwig on insect kingdoms and grow invisible to listen to animals which would shy from the merest hint of human presence. One of Watson’s most remarkable recordings was made by attaching contact mics. to the inside of a zebra’s rib-cage, killed the previous night and already lion-chewed and stripped of its prime cuts. Watson had rehearsed such a set-up on a post-Christmas turkey carcass, rejected by his seasonally satiated family. He recorded the metallic skraw of starlings which soon descended to devour the flesh and pick the bird’s bones clean. The vultures had spotted the zebra’s corpse from way up high and surrounded it, checking out the locale. Watson observed them and noted that they were highly aware that there was something unusual about this piece of carrion, even though he had done his best to conceal his wires and mics. Again, he emphasised the wily intelligence of these wary creatures. It took them some five hours before they eventually set to, beginning their thorough clean-up operation. By this time the unfortunate zebra was engulfed in a dark nebula of flies. The recording floats on the swarming drone of their incessant zzzzzzhhhhhh. Watson suggested that vultures were exactly as you’d expect them to sound – like scimitar slashes of guitar feedback. He was right. It was a remarkable sound, intoxicating yet slightly nauseating at the same time. You could almost sense the overpowering stench of death in your nostrils, an understandable synaesthetic response. Watson took this recording on one of his school visits once, using it to begin his presentation. ‘This is the last sound you would hear before you died, if you were a zebra’, he told the assembly of rapt children. He wasn’t invited back, he ruefully noted. But the kids loved it.

Chris Watson and Tony Whitehead on the Exe Estuary

Other sounds were called for by Tony Whitehead and members of the audience, Watson suggesting that it was becoming like a request show. The brief grunt of a cod even received an encore. It sounded like the swinging doors in Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. There was a haddock chorus from a fjord near Bergen, the ambient hum of midshipman fish, the sonic attack of a pistol shrimp, made with its oversized claw, and the grate and scrape of grazing limpets, recorded at high tide in Batten Bay, Plymouth. The tuned percussion of a capercaillie recorded in Scotland apparently attracted the attentions of Bjork, who was so entranced by its inherent musical qualities that she got in touch with Watson and asked if she could use it in a piece of her own. She has since attended one of Watson’s sound recording workshops in Iceland. He joked that she was a useful contact given her facility with a four wheel drive in the remoter wilds of her native country.

Watson and Whitehead both have an abiding concern with the issue of noise pollution in the modern world and the psychological impact this has on people’s lives. Watson noted that the recordings of starlings he had made 30 years ago, in which they imitated the sounds they heard around them, would be wholly different today. It was a sound picture which acted as a memorial to a world whose sonic character has changed rapidly over the intervening period. He mentioned the activism of Gordon Hempton in America, an ‘acoustic ecologist’ who is attempting to create a notional sanctuary comprising one square inch of silence in Olympic National Park, Washington State. Watson played his recordings of Orcas in the waters beneath the North Polar ice, emphasising the extent to which they lived in a world of sound; practically in terms of their echo location clicks and socially in terms of their keening calls and cries. He then played a recording in which the combine grind of the approaching icebreaking ship Odin could be heard loudly approaching from some 100 miles in the distance distance. Such noise pollution must have a devastating effect on such aurally sensitive creatures, he pointed out. It has been suggested that loud sonar beacons placed in the oceans to guide submarines have resulted in the mass beachings of dolphins and whales, driven out of their usual territories by this invasive noise. Watson talked of the almost transcendental experience of standing outside Scott’s hut in the Antarctic and reflecting upon the fact that in this quietest of spots he was experiencing a soundworld unchanged since the ill-fated expedition some century before. It was an experience unthinkable in most other regions of the world.

Watson is concerned with the loss of the ability to really listen. He is disdainful of the blanket use of music in wildlife documentaries. Sound recordings would be much more involving for the viewer, who would then also become a more active listener. I wholeheartedly agree on this point. The use of sweeping string themes, combined with swooping helicopter or crane shots, amounts to a bullying emotional manipulation, akin to being grasped by the lapels, shaken up a bit and yelled at to ‘feel some awe and shed a tear at the spectacle of it all, goddamn you’. Music, humorous or sentimental, also encourages a relentless anthropomorphism which detracts from a true appreciation of the otherness of non-human species. His own observance of quietude included conducting the interview in his socks. As he explained in an interview in The Wire some years back, in which an interviewer made the same observation, he doesn’t ‘like clomping around’. Whitehead shares his interest in quietude. Quietness not as an absence of sound, as both were quick to point out. That would be a highly, well, disquieting experience, an indicator of the absence of life. But quietness in the sense of an environment in which the true spatial depth and density of sound can be appreciated, the individual elements differentiated and their variation over time appreciated. Whitehead has invited sound artists from around the world to send their recordings of quiet environments to him, and he has released some of them on his Very Quiet Records label. They range from the island of Jogashima in Japan to Jean-Baptiste Masson’s recordings of the South African bush at midnight, Kalmara Xinsekt’s night sounds in the Amazonian rainforests to Joe Stevens’ birping of spawning Dorset frogs. Together, they form an invaluable soundpicture of the quietude still to be found in the world.

Chris Watson was a hugely personable speaker, conveying his enthusiasm for sound with quiet authority. His memories and sound-illustrated anecdotes were ably facilitated by the informal and also highly informed Tony Whitehead. A marvellous evening, in the true sense of the word. Chris was here in conjunction with the sound installation currently running in the museum’s back entrance area. The sound picture here shifts from the coastal ebb and flow of the tide through the kelp beds of Maer Rocks, Exmouth, the song of cirl buntings, skylarks and greenfinches in the RSPB managed farmland atop Labrador Bay near Shaldon, Dartford warblers and tree pipits on the Aylesbeare pebblebeds and finally to the oak woodlands of Yarner Wood, dense with the calls of song thrushes, cuckoos, willow warblers, wrens, tawny owls and carrion crows. It’s a fine piece, a sonic journey which takes us seamlessly through four different environments. A little sound bleeding from the geology section below introduces a bit of ambient drone from time to time, but it’s not overly intrusive. Some might argue that it actually adds a further dimension to the experience, although I suspect Watson wouldn’t be amongst them. Natural sound is rich with its own musicality, he would point out, and needs no distracting attempts at enhancement. The sound picture will change with the seasons, offering us pictures for ears from 7 more sites, presumably including those deadly pistol shrimps from Plymouth. CRACK. So go along to the museum, stand by the balcony at the top of the stairs, close your eyes and conjure up your own pictures in sound. In this light filled interior atrium, you will soon be lost in your own interior world.

Four Southwest Wood Engravers at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter

Exeter - Pam Pebworth

There’s a fine new exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum showcasing the work of four wood engravers based in the South West. Howard Phipps was born in Colwyn Bay in 1958 and is now based on the border of Wiltshire and Dorset; Pam Pebworth was born in Altrincham in 1931 and studied, taught and worked in the arts and crafts field in Devon and the South West for many years before taking up wood engraving in 1988; Harry Brockway was born in Newport in 1958 (is there a natural connection between Welsh culture and wood engraving, I wonder?) and lives in Glastonbury; and Hilary Paynter was born in Dunfermline in 1943, moving south to study wood engraving at the Portsmouth College of Art. All of them are members of the Society of Wood Engravers. This was an organisation founded in 1920 by a group of artists including Eric Gill, Gwen Raverat and Lucien Pissaro. It was brought to life once more in the 1980s, with Hilary Paynter as a guiding light, and continues, in the spirit of those illustrious founders, to foster the art and traditions of wood engraving.

Hambledon Hill - Howard Phipps

Howard Phipps mainly produces landscapes, and his evocation of the spirit of place and depiction of hill forts, megalithic sites and ancient trackways puts him firmly in the tradition of Paul and John Nash and Eric Ravilious. He ventures into the heart of Wistman’s Wood, the atmospheric expanse of stunted oaks lining the slopes of a Dartmoor valley. The darkly gnarled trunks and twisted branches, lichenous bark and mossy rocks give plenty of scope for tonal and textural variation and contrast. The long sweep of Chesil Beach is depicted with a great sense of spaciousness and dwindling perspective. A grounded boat provides a foreground focal point, whilst weather looms in the distance. Solid shafting striations emanating from black clouds are a dramatic representation of heavy showers on their way. More black rainclouds empty over Stonehenge, with a rounded moon providing milky contrast to show up the shadowy megaliths. More ancient sites feature in Winkelbury Hillfort and Hambledon Hill, and in the old paths bordered by beech trees. Phipps seems to favour winter as his seasonal backdrop. His trees are intricate traceries of bare black branches.

Pam Pebworth’s prints tend to be stylised town or cityscapes with flattened perspectives. Historically significant buildings are selected and collaged together into depictions of place which might lack geographical accuracy but which summon up in concentrated architectural form the architectural spirit of the place. This approach is applied to Chester, Exeter, Bradford-on-Avon, Bristol, Bath, Dartmouth, Lyme Regis, Sidmouth and Budleigh Salterton. The Exeter print was made in 1994, and the tugboat in the foreground is a reminder of the old maritime museum which was still situated in the quayside basin at the time. Aquae Sulis, the Bath print, has a particular elegant formal composition, as befitting its subject. Bath becomes a symmetrical mirror of itself. William Beckford’s tower rises on the hill in the background, a black sun hanging to its side, and provides a counterbalancing note of intemperate romanticism. A solitary figure striding from the shingle beach in the Budleigh Salterton print, easel tucked firmly under his arm, is presumably intended to be a representation of John Everett Millais, who painted his Boyhood of Raleigh here. Pebworth has also created two imaginative and playful alphabets: The Artist’s Alphabet and Touchwood. Both set their letters out in gridded blocks, as if they’re in a typesetters tray. Objects, personages or famous works correspond to each letter – P for palette, V for Van Dyke, E for easel and so on. Touchwood is an alphabet for the worker in wood, featuring engraver’s tools, techniques and carved art. The blocks have an appropriately greater density and roughly grained texture.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Harry Brockway

Harry Brockway is a stone mason and carver in addition to being a wood engraver, and there’s a solid sculptural quality to the faces and figures which are the main focus of his work. From his initial commission to provide engravings for the Reader’s Digest Illustrated Bible, he has produced illustrations for a number of books. His depiction of characters in Crime and Punishment for a 1997 Folio Society edition, arrayed here like a pictorial cast list, show an expressionist intensity and interiority which is entirely appropriate for Dostoevsky’s novel. The psychology or inner cast of the faces shows through in the distorting grain or patina which Brockway lends them. Some seem to be afflicted with plates of psoriatic hide, whilst others are clearly and sparely engraved, simple and pure souls. The illustrations for John Prebble’s book Culloden, another Folio Edition, contrast the gaunt, grimacing and fiercely daubed faces of the ordinary Scots who fought in the battle with the self-satisfied, relaxed and beefily broad visages of the aristocrats whose orders and plans they followed. Screaming, expressionist heads set against posed profile portraits cast the social divisions outlined in Prebble’s polemical history (which were also highlighted in Peter Watkins’ 1964 TV adaptation) in artistic terms. Dulce Et Decorum Est (2007) evokes the horror of Wilfred Owen’s war poem with more wide-eyed expressionist screaming, the face of another figure in the background reduced to the gas mask’s grotesque parody of human features. The addition of colour makes the spreading yellow cloud of mustard gas powerfully palpable. It particularly leaps out at you here given that you’ve thus far seen nothing but black and white prints. The portrait of a woman titled The Pearl Necklace (2003) offers a reflective contrast, and is, I presume, an illustration to Guy de Maupassant’s cruelly ironic tale. A 2011 picture of Harlequin and Pulcinella sets these archetypal commedia dell’arte characters in Brockway’s Glastonbury environs, the tor rising behind them, thus suggesting their universal nature. There also his ten engravings for Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner made in 2010. Brockway follows in illustrious footsteps here, the narrative poem having previously been illustrated by Gustave Doré, David Jones and Mervyn Peake. He manages to elude the anxiety of influence, however, and produce something entirely his own. Swirls and curlicues abound, both in sea, sky and sailors’ beards, all converging in the culminating, ship-engulfing whirlpool. The image of the calm sea sown with the pasty rafts and fishing tendrils of Portugese men-o-war is particularly startling and original. There’s something of the psychedelic poster style to these illustrations, and you can imagine their clearly outlined segments filled in with vivid colours. In fact, you don’t have to, since there are some large blown-up panels on the far wall of the gallery taken from a British Library exhibition of Coleridge illustrations.

The Discovery at Lascaux - Hilary Paynter

Hilary Paynter’s depiction of the Discovery of Lascaux is another print which introduces an element of overlaid colour, here the yellow of torchlight and the brown of the prehistoric cave wall paintings. The cave, shown in yawning cross-section, is thus portrayed as a magical space, a world apart from the black and white reality beyond its subterranean gallery. Stones Over Avebury (1974) maps out the well-known aerial view of the village bounded by circular earthworks and bisected by crossing roads. A surreal touch is added by having boulder clouds hanging heavy over the megalithic site, though. It’s as if the stones in the circle and avenue were splinters sharded off from such hovering masses millennia ago. A playful take on the ancient British landscape can also be found in the comical depiction of the Cerne Abbas giant come to chalk-outlined life and chasing three Victorian ladies across the fields. One of them is evidently making no great effort to escape its clutches. Paynter takes a romantic view of the British landscape and the ancient structures built upon its wild spots. Her print of Hadrian’s wall exaggerates the hills it measures out into a dramatic, Tolkienesque sweep of mountains and far flung plains. Dunnottar is shown as a fairy tale castle by the sea, with a winding path leading to its door, whilst the flinty tower of Carn Brae is made all the more monumentally solid by the blank white background against which it’s set. The cobbled street of Clovelly plunges with heightened precipitation towards the sea, its winding path continued through the curve of the harbour wall and the bends of the river. More romantic sites are found in the sea bordering castle of Chepstow, the gothic ruin of the abbey at Valle Crucis in Wales, and the timbered patterning of Plas Newydd. This Elizabethan house, in which the ladies of Llangollen lived together, is loomed over by a craggy mount on top of which the jagged ruins of Dinas Bran castle stick up like a pile of bones.

Trio - Barbara Hepworth

Downstairs, a new selection from the museum’s fine art collection has been mounted. This includes two of the drawings Barbara Hepworth made of surgeons at work in an Exeter hospital in the post-war period. Her daughter had undergone an operation in the Princess Elizabeth Orhopaedic Hospital, and she got to know one of the doctors there, one Norman Capener, very well. He invited her into the operating theatre as an artistic observer to record the concentrated co-ordination of collective endeavour which took place there. It was, in a way, a means of producing images which celebrated the newly created NHS, lending it an air of bright, optimistic modernity. Hepworth’s masked and gowned figures are semi-abstracted, the bodies amorphously rounded like her sculptures. The focus of detail is all on the hands and the eyes which guide them. In Preparation (1947) we see those hands being washed, clasped together in a way which suggests prayerful ritual cleansing as much as mindful hygiene. The wash of turquoise colour, curving around in a liquid flow to convey the smooth flexibility of the upturned operating arm, extends beyond the outline of the figure to the background, creating a sense of harmony between the surgeon and his environment. In Trio (1948), the predominant tone is a neutral beige. The three figures are merged, like one of Hepworth’s group form sculptures, fused into a singular entity through a common fixity of purpose. A patch of dark blue beneath the operating table is the only hint of depth and perspective beyond the figures. There’s also the slightest daub of green, like a guiding tone to indicated the actual colour of the gowns. The drawing is all about the motion and direction of the hands and the unity of figures with background, though. Hepworth herself wrote about finding, after initial reservations, that ‘there was such beauty in the operating theatre that the whole composition – human in appearance – became abstract in shape’. She was fascinated by ‘the extraordinary beauty of purpose between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life’, and discovered that ‘this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work’.

Boy In A Landscape: Portrait of Eric Verrico - John Minton

Also newly on display is John Minton’s Boy In A Landscape: Portrait of Eric Verrico (1948). This is a poetic portrait of Minton’s boyfriend in the 40s, whom he had met whilst teaching at the Camberwell School of Art. The young and beautiful Italian is painted in glistening oils, his skin and clothes coloured in shades of olive and mossy green, a nature boy. He has a calm and contented look, and leans back in a relaxed posture against a wooden chair, one arm hooked over its back. The landscape behind him is a patchwork of autumnal colours, interlaced with the branching black lines of bare winter trees. There’s a slightly melancholic air of acceptance to the picture, with its late autumnal atmosphere; an acknowledgement that this moment won’t last, Eric will soon move on and they will inevitably part. Minton lived a fairly tempestuous life, and was something of a wild man of Soho in the post-war years. He was out of step with the avant-garde orthodoxies of the time (in particular the move towards abstraction), even though he taught some of those who forged them. He came to feel increasingly frustrated and marginalized, although he was relatively successful and well-off, partly thanks to a substantial inheritance. He’d achieved a solid reputation as a book and magazine illustrator, and had a regular job as a teacher of painting at the RCA, a position in which he was generally well-liked and respected. In the repressive climate of the 50s, his gay sexuality led to fugitive feelings of self-destructive despair, and the search for love and companionship never found long-lasting fulfilment. This lonely disconnection, combined with his depressive temperament, lapses into alcohol abuse and the disinterested reception of his new work, led to his committing suicide in 1957 at the age of 39. The title of his final painting, The Death of James Dean, suggests he might have felt more at home in the pop art climate of the 60s, although Minton seems to depict the death scene as a slum Passion worthy of a Pasolini film. But the painting on display here summons the feeling of a golden instant of time, which is captured in all its brief beauty and still repose. A moment of love, happiness and contentment gifted to the modern viewer, something to be contemplated, remembered and treasured.

The HIVE Art Group at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

The main art gallery in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter has followed up its Gillian Wearing exhibition with a show featuring three artists whose names you’re less likely to be familiar with. Together they form the group known as HIVE, which won a competition run jointly with the local newspaper the Express and Echo. Readers voted for their favourite amongst a shortlist selected from submissions made by groups in the Exeter area. Ian Harbour was the Hive member elected to give some introductory comments at the opening. He made reference to Grayson Perry’s Reith lectures and the light they shed on the machinations of the Art Establishment and the way it sets out to determine taste and what is presented to the public as significant Art (Art capitalised in more ways than one). Ian professed to being a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut, which brought his novel Breakfast of Champions to mind. This book includes a character called Rabo Karabekian, a minimalist artist who has just sold a painting to a provincial museum for $50,000 (bear in mind this is a novel first published in 1973). His painting, entitled The Temptation of St Anthony, is field of commercially produced wall paint (‘Hawaiian Avocado’) with a vertical strip of orange reflecting tape to one side. Vonnegut, who appears as a godlike authorial presence in a diner where everyone gathers, comments ‘I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid’. However, the artist’s explanation that the day-glo strip represents an individual life as a column of light proves a revelation to the depressed author.

Ian also pointed to the Art Everywhere project, which saw works of art in British collections selected by the public appear as posters alongside the usual chaos of advertising signs, as a false example of the democratisation of taste. The range from which people were allowed to choose was preselected and fairly rigidly defined, following a familiar narrative path through the story of British art. Would there really be such a significant representation of the work of the Young British Artists if this were really a popular choice, he asked? (As an aside, I’m now frustrated that I didn’t come across some of my favourites from this selection – Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox; Samuel Palmer’s In A Shoreham Garden; Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke; and in particular, Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, whose surrealistic dream corridor would have appeared even more disconcertingly strange when happened upon in a bus shelter. I did see the paintings by Edward Burra and Michael Craig-Martin, Lucian Freud’s Girl With A Kitten – he had two pictures selected, as did Peter Blake – Henry Raeburn’s ice-skating reverend and Barbara Hepworth’s shell-like wooden Pelagos sculpture). However, through this RAMM and Express and Echo competition, he suggested, a real democratic exercise of public taste had been permitted to determine what ended up on the walls. So, what does the public choose when given the chance?

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Dorothea Tanning

The three Hive artists are very diverse in terms of style and subject matter, but there is a certain shared sensibility (a Hive mind?) which gives their work a cohesive feel when collected together. Whimsy, a playful imagination, an eye for quirky and eccentric detail and a love of the mythic and fantastical run through pictures which are otherwise utterly unalike.

The Green Queen and her Bird - Su Scotting

Su Scotting’s work is the most wide-ranging in terms of media, encompassing linocut prints and acrylics, watercolours, and drawings in various shades of ink and pencil. Her subject matter tends towards the Totnesian, a green and new age anthology of the sacred, mythic and folkloric bringing together shamen and fools, hares and foxes, reindeers and unicorns, Buddhas and angels. Her glowing, honey-coloured acrylic painting If the Bee Man’s Hive Thrives, He Thrives provides a symbolic signature for the group. A stylised figure of a man presides over the busy creative hub of his apiary, the trails of bees spinning woozy spirals around him. Some of Su’s paintings form complementary series. Four Seasonal Angels leaves its female figure eternal and unchanging in essence, but rings the changes in the turning colours of leaves and blossoms which make up her hair and clothes, and blushes and dims the bloom on her cheeks. A lino-cut Cherry Blossom Buddha is another seasonal marker from the other side of the world, imprinted in red outlines. The Green Queen and Her Bird and The Blue Prince and His Hare, with their stylised side-on figures, animal familiars and surrounding decorative symbols could be twinned Tarot cards, opposites which suggest a state of completion and wholeness when brought together. God Yul and Peace are colourful folk art Christmas messages (which would make great cards) with a Swedish and Russian flavour. The Russian scene balances an onion domed building on its snowy hillside curve, and surrounds it with more fantastical towers – a wintry Russia of the fairytale imagination.

Other pictures adapt the styles of painters and traditions of which Su is evidently fond, and which she uses for her own ends. On My Way and Dancing In My Garden both employ the vivid colours and iconography of Mughal Indian miniature paintings and wall hangings to depict women in Edenic landscapes. They’re shown side-on, with huge almond-shaped eyes, wide open, alert and fully alive to the moment.

St Ives - Su Scotting

A St Ives linocut distills the town into a representative cluster of buildings as seen through a wide-angled lens, the harbour wall flattened into curving arms extending out into the sea, and waves reduced to frilly parallel lines. It summons up the essence of the town in a few economic gestures. Su seems to have been imbued with the spirit of the ‘naïve’ St Ives artist and fisherman Alfred Wallis. This is also evident in On the Island, I Am Safe in the Rain’, with its outline fishing boat floating flatly on the sea, and its perspectiveless but protectively encircling harbour walls.

I particularly like her pictures made with white pencil on black card. The contrast is very effective, and is eminently suitable for nocturnal, ethereal or uncanny scenes. There’s an owl in the snow before a backdrop of softly blurred stars; a boobyish bird extending ungainly wings which will never launch it into flight; a friendly zig-zag monster set amongst a storm of swirls; and an emblematic reindeer at the edge of a stylised coniferous forest beneath a milky smudge of a moon. A simple pencil work called The Soul Goes Home is beautifully done. A semi-circular boat carrying a calmly recumbent figure is cradled with perfect congruity within the deep trough of flame-like waves. A sickle moon hangs above, echoing the curve of the hull.

Su also evokes the comforting familiarity of creative domestic spaces and the well-used objects which fill them. Alison’s Wobbly Kitchen is an outline sketch, the wavering lines suggesting an in the moment impression, maybe made whilst perched on a stool. This is also true of In the Greenhouse, which feels like a spontaneous sketch intended to capture a moment and the feeling which led to the impulse to record it.

Some of Sam Harrison’s pictures, mainly created with ink pens, also evoke this sense of familiar domestic spaces, comforting corners or favourite spots. Idiosyncratic details can bring an element of magic or the weird into these scenes, though. A drawing of a sofa in brown ink pays close attention to every rip and indentation, as if each has an inherent story to tell. It shows an intimate familiarity with the weathered topography of this characterfully beat piece of domestic furnishing. A bony set of antlers which seem to rise from the abyss at the back of the cushions where pennies, biros and combs disappear adds a slightly unsettling element of ritualism or supernatural manifestation to this site of easeful, lazy repose, however; the familiar and homely invaded and made strange. Stove in a Shed casts a sympathetic and attentive eye on a neglected and battered iron stove which, with its bandaged pipe, has the look of an aged but still-loved pet being cared for in its decrepitude. Continuing the theme of finding value and beauty in the seemingly obsolescent, A Serious Vinyl Addiction painstakingly delineates the closely stacked LPs, dvds and guitars which are the outward signs of someone’s musical passions, locating a distinctive personality within apparent chaos and disorder (although knowing the mentality of the record collector, those LPs will be filed according to a rigorous and rigidly adhered to system). The Old Cassette Player is another piece of obsolescent technology observed with care and affection, a loving portrait of a beat up boombox. Cassette boxes casually left lying on top are titled Loved Up and Hair Loss, old mix tapes whose contents we can only wonder at. Stars emerging from the speaker grille and sequins scattered on top combine with emphatic ‘Wows’ riding on crackling zigzags to add a bit of expressionistic pop art colour, conveying some of the pleasure that the music radiating from this old machine has given over the years.

Guildhall Door, Totnes (detail) - Sam Harrison

Sam also has a liking for objects, places and details of greater antiquity, and in particular for the strange folk art and medieval craftsmanship to be found in the south west. Guildhall Door, Totnes uses finely drawn in detailing to get into the weathered warp and rift of the medieval wood and the granitic grain of the arched frame, giving an impression of character incrementally inscribed over the centuries. C16 Door, Exeter zooms in on the lion’s head carved on the grand oak door to be found in the Cathedral Close, and once again we get the impression of the aged texture of timeworn wood, conveyed through subtle shading and an accumulation of wavering lines. Sam goes into the sacred stone groves of the chapel to find sculpted and carved creatures both quirkily characterful and disconcertingly strange in its chapels and naves. A mermaid drawn from a misericord triumphantly displays her catch, and her wooden form is given vivid life with bright watercolouring. A Bird Lady is another figure from the fecund Medieval imagination hidden under the choir seats, and Sam colours her into life too, turning her fish tail into a decorative weave of Saxon knotwork.

Drawn from the original - The cathedral mermaid misericord

Hugh’s Owl is drawn from one of many such creatures populating the chapel dedicated to Hugh Oldham, the Bishop of Exeter in the early 16th century. Sam, with her Lancastrian background, may well feel an affinity for him since he was born in a village which has long since been absorbed into the sprawl of Manchester. Her owl is given a softly stippled texture, lending the appearance of stone glowing in evening sunlight. It’s quite lovely. Another Owl for Hugh adds colour, giving it pale blue eyes, beak and claws and caramel feathers and setting it against a red background. It gives it back the vivid colouring most of the statues and carvings in the cathedral would have worn in their medieval heyday.
There’s a further owl painted in oils (an oil owl) on a small block of unframed canvas which looks like a squared off boss. A characterful portrait of someone called Dave Warren, a man with wild hair and a pleasantly lived-in face, is also painted in oils, a medium with which Sam is also evidently comfortable and adept, and is maybe looking to explore more extensively.

Hugh's Owl - Sam Harrison

The piece de resistance as far as her pen and ink work is concerned, however, is After A Portrait of Elizabeth Flaye, which carries the further explanatory inscription ‘by an unknown artist – possibly James Gandy c.1625-1630’. The original oil painting, whose subject was an Elizabethan businesswoman, can be found in the history galleries below. The drawing technique here is fine, relaxed and assured. Gentle stippling of the nose, mouth and eyes gives her face a soft and kindly look, whilst a combination of concentrated, compressed curves and subtle shading delineates the spread of ruff and the lacy puff of sleeve cuffs with great delicacy. The black dress is inked in with many carefully directed strokes which suggest the texture of the material and the way in which it hangs. Sam’s pictures may be smaller in number and size than those displayed by her Hive cohorts, but they’re no less impressive for all that, and make an impact out of all proportion to their modest scale.

Ian Harbour’s paintings are the ones which immediately grab the attention when you walk into the gallery, partly because of their eye-catching colour contrasts and boldly outlined shapes, and partly because a number of them are simply larger than anything else in the vicinity. A wall of miniatures form a prefatory bloc to the right of the entrance, introducing us to the alien landscapes, pink and purply blue shades and amorphous, microbial creatures which constitute his imaginary worlds. Flat bottomed sugar mice and pac man jellies indicate a strong element of playfulness and whimsy, but the elements in the paintings are carefully ordered, the amusing fantasies presented with formal rigour. A racing scene involving the aforementioned mice and some curiously unaerodynamic hovercraft (indicating a planet with low gravity and a thin atmosphere, perhaps?) set off along plane broken up by arcades which could come out of a de Chirico painting (if they weren’t pink, of course). Holes in the ground bring to mind the architectural collisions of crazy golf courses to mind, too.

Pink Planet also features a surrealist plane, this one populated by semi-abstract shapes reminiscent of Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy. Blue Dinosaur and Pink Balloons maroons a diplodocus which looks like it’s been fashioned by a balloon folder with a surrealist bent amongst the linear skyways of a futuristic metropolis. The Riddle has pink snakes sporting bizarre headgear emerging from their purple urn dens, pinwheel eyes making them look a little dazed. They’re adjacent to a hole opening onto blue depths and the wall of a maze above which the perky light-blue ears of a rabbit peek. Figure that one out.

City Limits - Philip Guston

The influence of Philip Guston is an abiding one, but comes through particularly in two ‘conehead’ paintings. Coneheads Rally and Coneheads Meet both bring Guston’s klansman pictures of the 70s to mind, odd works in which the hooded figures go about everyday tasks, maintaining a permanent anonymity, as if the masks have become their true identity. Ian’s coneheads are in fact cone bodies, white geometrical beings with beadily blinking eyes and furiously flapping arms which allow them to hover, as they do in the first painting. Despite their rallies and meetings, there are none of the sinister overtones of the Guston paintings, with their sense that deep rooted hatreds lie close beneath the surface of the modern American psyche. These coneheads exist in their own self-contained world, and whatever they’re doing, it’s strictly their own business.

Fish Slide - Ian Harbour

They could be part of some notional computer game. The colourful, simplified forms of the paintings certainly have something of the look of old games graphics. They are filled with a sense of motion, which is particularly evident in the paired Alien Fish Slide and Endowment pictures. Both also share a sense of transformation, of circular or cyclical processes in action. In the former, squared off glaciers floating in translucent seas are carved with steps on one face and a slide on the other. Oval tadpole forms swim underneath and shoot up onto the steps, at which point fins become dancing flipper feet. A gleeful slide back down into the ocean and they turn back into fins, ready to start the joyful process all over. The Endowment paintings feature a pink tower rising against a purple sky, with arcing skyways leading into and out from dark arches. Hopping Weebly eggheads (egg bodies) make their way into one and exit from another with a new pair of skittering insect feet. Their swift motion, signified in comic strip style by bouncing and rushing lines, suggest that this is some sort of conveyor belt, hurrying through a mass evolutionary process of instant transformation. Another Vonnegut novel comes to mind: Galapagos, in which the remnants of the human race, watched over by the immortal ghost of the son of Kilgore Trout (the imaginary science fiction writer who is a recurrent Vonnegut character), devolve over the millennia into simple simple seal-like beings, and are much happier for it.

Ian furthers the evolutionary theme in his largest painting, Bird Tree. The tree here is a snaking purple and pink striped variety transplanted from a Dr Seuss book or a Tim Burton animation, with green leaf splodges like waving hands at the end of the branches. Curious and diversely weird birds take their places in the tree, one to each branch, as if acting under direction to demonstrate the variety of forms which the evolutionary process can create.

Jellymen Watch the Drop - Ian Harbour

Other pictures inscribe colourful outline objects and creatures onto backgrounds of abysmal black. In Jellymen Watch the Drop, the eponymous beings supervise a rain of purple and green jellybeans (instantly reminding me of Harlan Ellison’s story “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman) from their promontories as they plummet into a deep chasm. The multi-coloured arrangement of beanshapes suggest that Miro may also be an artist for whom Ian has a liking. Again, there’s a sense that this could be taken from a frozen screenshot of some imaginary computer game. Press an invisible button and it will all be set into floating motion once more. A series of paintings of aliens on wilderness planets feature stripy snail-like creatures struggling up a challenging slope, and amoeboid space bugs with chirpy antennae encased in the circles of their encompassing pods, which float and land like hardy soap bubbles.

So what do these pictures say about the tastes of the public? They like bright colour and bold forms; the exercise of a vivid imagination; whimsy and quirky humour; the close observation of place, and of surprising and unusual local detail; the depiction of corners of comforting familiarity, but also of the familiar inflected with elements of the strange; folk art and emblematic or traditional images of the spiritual or the fantastic; but above all, pictures which delight and bring a smile to the lips. The HIVE contains all of these elements. It’s sure to thrive.

Samuel Palmer, Simeon Solomon and the Camden Town Group at RAMM, Exeter

Samuel Palmer - Self Portrait

The new selection from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum’s art collection on display in the downstairs gallery includes some paintings which will be familiar to Exeter citizens who have visited regularly over the years. But there are also some new acquisitions which are being displayed for the first time. Chief amongst these is Samuel Palmer’s After the Storm, a late watercolour from 1861. This was painted on the North Devon coast, with a perspective looking out from Lee Bay. The mountainous outcropping of Castle Rock rises above the sheer cliff face in the middle distance, like a shattered tower keep at the foot of the Valley of Rocks, which leads up to the clifftop town of Lynton. The jutting headland of Foreland Point protrudes in the distance, a more solid echo of the clouds hanging above. These provide an element of Romantic sublimity, a touch of Alpine awe found closer to home. Palmer uses magic hour tones to lend his seascape a stained glass luminosity, the deep blue of the sea contrasting with peaches and saffron yellows of the after sunset horizon with which it is edged. This colour saturated seascape has a melodramatic narrative imposed upon it, as if Palmer were trying to bring his work into accord with Victorian pictorial conventions. A ship has foundered on the rocks, and a lifeboat is being heaved across the shore towards the sea, its crew preparing to row out and rescue any survivors still clinging to the wreckage. One of the lifeboatmen is embracing his young son as he is called by another young man whose hand is raised, summoning him to join the vessel as it is launched into the breaking waves. His wife stands to the side, body tensed with anxious anticipation, hands nervously wrung or firmly clasped in fervent, supplicatory prayer.

1861 was a terrible year for Palmer. His 19 year old son Thomas, to whom he had devoted all of his attention after the death of his daughter at the age of three, and in the face of his own stagnant artistic career, died after a short period of consumptive illness. It’s difficult not to see this tragedy reflected in the emotional parting of father and son which is the dramatic focus of After the Storm. The magic hour sunset light was typical of Palmer’s work, along with atmospheric moonlit night settings. There is, indeed, another late watercolour from 1865 with the title The Golden Hour. After the Storm, in common with the rest of his watercolour work from his middle and late periods, lacks the visionary intensity and sense of numinous presence characteristic of the paintings he produced whilst living in the North Kent village of Shoreham in the seven years between 1827-34. The Darent Valley, or the ‘valley of vision’ as he called it, provided him with the perfect stage backdrop for the realisation of his ideal spiritual landscapes. From it, he projected an Arcadia protectively bounded by the soft, feminine curves of sheltering hills and the rounded, piled up ranges of cumulus clouds, and lit by the silver sickle of a harvest moon, the copper disc of a lowering sun or the warm evening glow emanating from welcoming cottages and churches. These Edenic settings are peopled by figures languorously working in the fields, sheaving and bringing home the golden harvest or lounging about beneath bountifully burdened apple trees. It was a dream, of course, but a glorious one, a landscape suffused with what Palmer saw as a divine spirit. Unfortunately, his non-naturalistic, visionary paintings found no more favour with the public, patrons or the art establishment than had the work of his friend and inspiration William Blake (who came down to visit him in his Shoreham house towards the end of his life).

Scenes from the valley of vision - The Magic Apple Tree

Palmer saw his rural idyll as a retreat from the industrial expansion of the London on the outskirts of which he’d grown up. His solution was to look back to an idealised past, as it would be for the Pre-Raphaelites some years later. It was a past which included a reverence for old masters like Durer, Fra Angelico and Leonardo, soundtracked by Elizabethan English composers like Purcell, Tallis and Gibbons, and with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as its key literary work. But the ideal world which he constructed in his imagination and superimposed on his magical valley clashed badly with the distinctly unromantic realities of the rural labourer’s life in the early nineteenth century, which was a matter of grinding poverty and backbreaking toil rather than mystical communion with the cyclical progress of the seasons. The Captain Swing riots of 1830, a spontaneous reaction across Southern England to a failed harvest, depressed wages and the threat of widespread unemployment posed by new agricultural machinery, punctured Palmer’s dreamworld. Its radiance was already waning as the economic reality of his own commercial failure led to increasingly desperate poverty. An inheritance, which had sustained him for some time, had eventually dwindled away. Frustrated that visionary imagination, intensely personal artistic activity and spiritual idealism were turning out to be forces insufficient to transform his life and the indifferent world about him, he grew increasingly reactionary, retreating into narrow religious conservatism and judgemental hellfire condemnation. The 1832 Reform Act, which took tentative steps towards widening the voting franchise in the country beyond the landowning class, raised his ire and led to him proselytising for the Tories in apocalyptic ‘death of England’ fulminations which were dismissed, if they were noticed at all, as the ravings of a crank.

A Letter from India (1859)

He calmed down once he got married in 1837 to Hannah Linnell, by which time he had left the valley of vision and returned to London, having reluctantly relinquished his Darent dreaming. Hannah was the daughter of John Linnell, a successful and wealthy painter who was also a friend and patron of William Blake. Palmer had got to know Linnell in 1822, when he was still a teenager, and the older, well-established artist had guided him towards forming his own individual style and tastes. He was to prove something of an ogre as a father-in-law, however, loudly voicing his strongly held views and never forgetting to remind his son-in-law of his failure as an artist, both commercially and, in his opinion, aesthetically. Palmer remained humiliatingly beholden to him financially, and it was Linnell who funded a journey to Italy in the wake of the marriage. He steeped himself in the art of the area, consciously adapting his landscape painting to a more classical style, shorn of visionary stylisation, in an attempt to gain wider acceptance, and to hopefully earn a living with which he could support his family and gain some degree of independence. His watercolours from this point onward still have a vivid eye for the numinous qualities of landscape, but they are of a different, more prosaically Romantic tenor to those of the Sharpham period. In later years, he would look back with nostalgic yearning to his days in the magic valley of vision. His regular travels to Devon and the West Country, which began in 1833, suggest that here more than anywhere he managed to recapture something of the enchanted spirit which had illuminated those fast receding days. Paintings such as Mountain Landscape at Sunset (1859), The Good Farmer (1865) and The Dip of the Sun (1857) set the shadowed contours of Dartmoor landscapes before rubescent sunset sky backdrops. The Brother Home From the Sea (1863) and Robinson Crusoe Guiding His Raft Into the Creek (1850) locate their dramas of arrival or return in front of the limestone cliff arch of Durdle Door in Dorset, the jutting spar marking the furthest westward cusp of the curve of Lulworth Cove beyond. A Letter from India (1859), meanwhile, places another narrative within a North Devon landscape. Castle Rock and the Valley of Rocks are viewed from the opposite direction this time, and from an inland perspective. The sun sets below the ocean’s rim, setting the clouds on fire, and the crags of Lundy Island protrude above the watery horizon like the phantom city of Ys risen from the depths.

Simeon Solomon - Night (1890)

Another new painting on display is Simeon Solomon’s Night, a small watercolour painting from 1890. Solomon was born in 1840 in Bishopsgate in East London, on the edge of the Spitalfields area which was home to a large Jewish immigrant population in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Solomon was the youngest of 8 children born to orthodox Jewish parents. He clearly grew up in an environment which encouraged artistic expression, since his brother Abraham and sister Rebecca also had successful careers as painters. Night features a dreamy face in profile, eyes gazing outwards but lost in inner absorption. It is garlanded with light blue poppies, and a bird’s wing of the same colour sweeps back above the ear in a streamlined suggestion of flight. Liquid, light-blue swirls seemingly exhaled from nostrils or mouth, or inhaled from the intoxicating incense curling from the poppy’s dark stamen, are like the vapour trails of dream, and the contours of the billowing grey cloak the expanding shadow of night which this mythic figure trails in its wake. Solomon signs his picture with his characteristic serpentine double S transfixed with a straight line topped by a downward curve. Short strokes rising from this curve are suggestive of radiant flames or beams of light, as if this is some sort of ceremonial torch. It’s a signature symbol which looks like a tattoo. Night bears a definite resemblance to the work of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, both in the androgynous appearance of the dreamer, and in the poppy motif. This recalls Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, his memorial portrait of his dead wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s muse, in which the poppies carried down by a bird alludes to her opium addiction. This is no incidental similarity, and certainly not a case of stylistic copying. Solomon had met Rossetti back in 1857, and through him got to know Burne-Jones and the poet Algernon Swinburne. All four were very close and in the early 60s were pioneers of the Aesthetic style, both in their art and in their lifestyles. The flow of influence and ideas between them was mutual and benefited all in finding their own individual style and thematic preoccupations. Burne-Jones may have partly derived the pallid, androgynous subjects of his later work from Solomon’s sensual dream figures. Of these figures, the poet and art critic Arthur Symons commented that ‘these faces are without sex’ and that ‘they have brooded among ghosts of passions till they have become the ghosts themselves’.

Solomon photographed by David Wilkie Wynfield

Solomon was particularly close to Swinburne, and illustrated two of his most controversial works, which remained unpublished until after his death: Lesbia Brandon, his erotic novel and The Flogging Block, his mock epic poetical paean to flagellation. Swinburne in turn wrote two more restrained poems inspired by Solomon: Erotion and At A Month’s End. It was Swinburne’s work in particular which was the object of a swingeing and hugely destructive attack on Rossetti’s circle by the critic Robert Buchanan in 1871, in which he decried what he described as ‘the fleshly school of poetry’ for its moral turpitude. The ruling powers, both cultural and political, were determined to clamp down on such liberal expressions of desire. The Paris Commune was enjoying its chaotic and brief anarchist ascendancy over the channel, and the Victorian establishment was not about to tolerate the assertion of individual liberties beyond those which were endorsed by the state, which might in turn expand into demands for greater political liberty. Burne-Jones had already experienced censorious ire over his painting Phyllis and Demophoön, which had been exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society and attacked for indecency. The dreamy homoeroticism of much of Solomon’s work, and the suggestive androgyny of his subjects (sometimes dressed in priestly robes) made them another target for the repressive forces of conservatism. His alliance with the flamboyant Swinburne, who was recklessly liable to flaunt his transgressions, increased his vulnerability to attack. In 1873, he was arrested for soliciting in a toilet near Oxford Street, found guilty of illegal homosexual acts, and sentenced to 18 months hard labour. Fortunately, an acquaintance managed to use his influence to suspend the sentence, and he got away with a period of police supervision. The man who he’d been having sex with, a 60 year old stablemaster, was not so lucky. He had to serve out his 18 month sentence, as well as facing the ruinous social repercussions.

Simeon Solomon - Self Portrait (1860)

The echoes of Oscar Wilde’s martyrdom in his 1895 trial are inescapable. Wilde espoused an aesthetic brand of utopian socialism in which the transformation of society would free people from the strictures of time and narrow convention and allow them to express themselves in whatever artistic manner suited them. The wide reporting of the details of the trial, and the repugnance which was stirred up destroyed his public persona as the spokesperson for Aestheticism, and left the movement, with its potentially radical worldview in ruins. Wilde served out his sentence, at least partly involving hard labour to which he was utterly unsuited, and it broke him physically and spiritually. Solomon may have evaded imprisonment and labour, but he still had to face the social opprobrium, verging on hatred, with which any gay man, designated a sexual criminal, was burdened at the time. He fled to France, but was arrested again for having sex with another man, and on this occasion did serve out a three month prison sentence. The year of 1873 opened an unbridgeable fissure in his life, and effectively ruined him. Galleries and patrons were no longer interested in his work, and his friends, the fickle and self-interested Swinburne included, turned their backs on him. Only Burne-Jones, outwardly less of a flamboyant rebel than Rossetti and Swinburne, stood by him. He turned more and more to alcohol, and fell into destitution, until finally he was obliged, in 1884, to take up residence in the St Giles Workhouse in Bloomsbury. At he lowest ebb, he was reduced to begging on the streets. But despite such desperate circumstances, he continued to work, producing small scale visionary paintings, and chalk sketches and pen and ink drawings of angelic heads. Night is one such. The artistic spirit simply refused to be crushed. A lot of the works from the 90s have a melancholy air of escaping into interior dreamworlds. Dreaming sleep is a recurring theme, retreating from harsh reality into blissful imaginative reverie. This is reflected in titles such as The Moon and Sleep, the Healing Night and Wounded Love, and Night Looking Upon Sleep her Beloved Child.

Solomon's grave in Willesden Jewish cemetary

Solomon’s art fitted in perfectly with the Decadent phase of the Aesthetic Movement, the fin-de-siecle 90s of the Yellow Book and the Savoy, the Picture of Dorian Gray and Salome. Solomon anticipated the spirit of this age, with his dreaming androgynes and blurring of the rigid parameters of sexuality. His influence can be seen not only in the palled figures of Burne-Jones, but in the limpid and dandyish fops and angels of Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley. Solomon was something of a cult figure to this new generation of aesthetes. He was collected by one of the chief intellectual forces behind Aestheticism, Walter Pater, and by its public figurehead, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was particularly upset to lose his Solomons in the sale of his belongings made necessary by the personal and cultural disaster of his trial. Solomon may have fallen on hard times, but his work retained a devoted coterie of admirers. There were tow major retrospectives in the immediate wake of his death: an exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London in 1906; and a book, Simeon Solomon: an Appreciation by Julia Ellison Ford, published in New York in 1908. It’s clear, therefore, that the value of his work was recognised at the time, even if it would subsequently fall into obscurity once more, eclipsed by his better known contemporaries, whose scandalous activities provided more colourfully and acceptably entertaining versions of the wild bohemian life. Obviously, such appreciation would have been of immeasurably greater use to Solomon had it been forthcoming whilst he was alive. But the lingering taint of scandal, together with his slow plummet into the netherworld of underclass destitution, meant that people were reluctant to be publicly associated with him, particularly after the Wilde trial. He died in 1905, still in the workhouse, five years after Wilde’s passing. It’s strange to think that his last works were produced whilst the first stirrings of twentieth century modernism were making themselves felt on the continent, currents which would first be recognised and drawn upon in nearby Bloomsbury and Fitzroy Street. Although Solomon had long since moved away from the Judaism which had formed the subject of many of his early paintings, he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Willesden, where you can seek out and lay a poppy or sunflower upon his grave.

Walter Bayes - Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front

Another new picture here is Walter Bayes’ large scale 1915 painting Victoria Station, London, Troops Leaving for the Front. Bayes was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, which formed around Walter Sickert, its presiding elder. It replaced the Fitzroy Street Group, which had met and exhibited in the house and studio space of 19 Fitzroy Street in Fitzrovia, the area of narrow Georgian streets north of Soho. Bayes was the intellectual of the group, writing art criticism for the Athenaeum magazine and supporting himself by teaching at the Westminster School of Art. He was less in thrall to the colourful stylisation and formalism of the continental post-impressionists than the other Camden Town Group members, and painted in a more conservative academic style. He did follow his friend Sickert’s example in choosing unusual and sometimes counterintuitive perspectives for his subjects, however. But his Victoria Station might as well be in a different world form that portrayed by Camden Town fellow Charles Ginner in his 1913 painting Sunlit Square, Victoria Station (this produced in the same year as his Clayhidon, also on display in the RAMM gallery). Bayes’ palette is muted, in keeping with Sickert’s dark, smoke-stained non-primary colours from his dimly lit music hall and Mornington Crescent interiors. The stone arch beneath which the soldiers pass forms a foreground frame within a frame. It’s brooding mass, topped with an ornamental keystone, has the heaviness of ceremonial architecture, and there is a fateful sense that these men are filing through a gateway of doleful significance, a presentiment of memorial monuments later to be erected in their collective name. The drab olive khaki of their uniforms makes of them a largely unindividuated mass. Only the red coat of a woman walking arm in arm with her man and the small red circle of a cap which hangs on the barrel of an erect rifle stand out, adding defiant touches of distinctiveness, reminders of the world beyond military uniformity. The cap on the barrel is a poignant variant on the traditional nursery rhyme image of the knotted pack on the end of a stick thrust over the shoulder of the innocent traveller heading out into the world for the first time. The interior of the station into which the men are trooping in their haphazard group is dark and wreathed with ragged palls of locomotive steam. A suspended bulb provides an angular cone of dim illumination, which fails to penetrate beyond a narrow radius. Although perhaps viewing with the benefit of historical hindsight, there seems to be a highly symbolic dimension to the painting. These men are entering the baleful shadows of a netherworld which will carry them with regimented and timetabled efficiency beyond the land of the living.

Charles Ginner - Clayhidon

Two more familiar works from the museum’s collection on display are from fellow members of the Camden Town Group, the aforementioned Charles Ginner and Robert Bevan. Both are connected with Clayhidon Farm on the Blackdown Hills in Devon, near the Somerset border. Both stayed there in the years before the war, sketching and painting the farm buildings and routines and the surrounding landscape. These paintings are displayed in their centenary year, both having been created during a 1913 visit. Charles Ginner’s Clayhidon exhibits his carefully measured and meticulously built up technique and style. Fields, trees and the roofs, walls and chimneys of the farm buildings are marked out with thickly layered lines of paint, the whole composition divided into strongly distinct ‘pieces’; it’s like a stained glass window or a surface of ornamental marquetry. The oil paint is applied with careful evenness, and the overall impression is of static order, a gelid atmosphere, as if the scene were filtered through the heavy, humid air of a long summer afternoon. With such solid and firmly girdered construction, it’s not surprising to learn that Ginner trained and for a while practised as an architect, before devoting himself to his art. He was born in France, growing up in Cannes, and was educated in Paris, so he could claim a close connection to the source of the post-impressionism which the Camden Town Group aimed to translate into an English idiom. Quite the opposite of the stereotype of the wild bohemian artist, he was a quiet, self-contained and rather conventional batchelor, who kept regular working hours throughout his life. He was very close to his fellow Camden Town Group members Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore, and was deeply affected by their early deaths. He nursed Gilman through a bout of influenza, which proved such a killer after the war, but both subsequently caught pneumonia in the early winter months of 1919. Ginner survived, Gilman didn’t. Ginner lived alone from then until his death, in his house in Pimlico, in 1952, a man increasingly out of his time. He never stopped working, however (and received a commission as a war artist in the second world war). Indeed, his life seemed to have been his work.

Robert Bevan - Devonshire Valley No.1

Robert Bevan’s Devonshire Valley No.1 similarly divides the landscape into discrete blocks of colour, although they are not so firmly delineated here. The characteristic Camden Town colours of muted mauves and magentas and light and dark olive greens are prominently used. Bevan is more free and expressive with his brushstrokes than Ginner, particularly in the wavering lines of the foliage to the left of the frame. His composition is a lot less rigidly controlled, edges allowed to blur into that which they outline. The impression is less of a heavy summer’s day than a hazy spring one. If Ginner’s work shows the influence of Van Gogh, then Bevan’s is more in tune with late Monet (who was still painting at the time, of course) and Cezanne. Bevan had also studied in Paris, and had stayed for a while in the artists’ colony at Pont Aven in Brittanny in the 1890s. This was a hugely fulfilling time for him, during which he met and got to know Gauguin, producing several sketched portraits of him in his books. Unlike Ginner, who was principally an urban artist, Bevan preferred the rural life and the depiction of rural subjects. He painted on Exmoor between 1895-7, and after marrying a Polish woman, Stanislawa de Karlowska, in 1897, made a number of trips to her home country in the early twentieth century. Here, he sketched and painted rural life in and around the villages in which he immediately felt at home. He was quite mature in years by the time he hooked up with Sickert and his circle. Sickert invited him to join his Fitzroy Street group after seeing some of his pictures exhibited in the first Allied Artists Exhibition in 1908. It was the first time he’d received significant recognition for his art. An inward man lacking in self-confidence and belief, he’d frequently doubted his talents and the worth of his endeavours. His wife, Stanislawa, was firm and constant in her encouragement, however, and it was largely due to her support that he persisted in his artistic career. He was a founder member of the Camden Town Group, and his subjects whilst in London generally centred around cabs and omnibuses, and horses and the world of the stables on the periphery of the city. This was a world in its twilight years, the era of horse drawn transportation already increasingly supplanted by the spread of electricity and the insidious invention of the internal combustion engine. Bevan’s choice of the stables as a subject for his urban art suggested that his heart lay beyond the boundaries of the city. He felt particularly drawn to the farm at Clayhidon, and returned on numerous occasions throughout the 1910s. Eventually, he bought his own cottage nearby – Lychetts in Bolham Valley in the Blackdown Hills. Devon was his own version of Palmer’s magic valley. And it was in Devon that he passed away in 1925. The paintings he produced in the area which he made his home remain amongst his most personal, and his best.

There's an excellent archive site providing extensive information on Simeon Solomon, with plentiful illustrations, over here, as well as a good general article (with pics) at the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture site over here.

Volkhardt Müller’s Any High Street at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter

Volkhardt Müller’s exhibition Any High Street at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter is a mix of old and new work. Of the latter actually, some has actually been created in the gallery, in a small enclosed workshop corner fenced off to the public but completely open to close view. The old works include Cell from 2009 and a filmed record of his Pastoral from the same year, and same project. Both are derived from prison holding cells once housed within the old Georgian Exeter Crown Court buildings within the Norman walls of Rougemont Castle. The Court, its original structure built in 1774, was closed in 2003, and Müller was given permission to use two of the old cells for his art installations before they were, eventually, converted into toilets. Cell reproduces the surface of the walls of one of the cells, which were essentially used as ready made, in situ printing blocks. Their markings and indentations, whether made by human agency or by the steady erosion of time, were imprinted onto delicate Japanese paper. The resulting prints were hung from a frame in order to reproduce the approximate dimensions of the cell. These new and insubstantial walls are fragile and translucent, lit from within by a pendant strip light. You can see the frayed fibres of the paper around the edges of the doorless entrance and at the angles of the room’s corners, where the walls don’t quite meet, leaving cracks of empty space which merely imply a continuity in the imprisoning structure. The whole is suspended airily a few feet off the floor, lending it a feel of floating weightlessness. The loosely tethered paper wafts and wavers gently in the lightest of drafts or air-conditioned exhalations. It is more like a monastic cell, its elevated position and its transparency, which verges on immateriality, symbolic of a spiritually enlightened state.

Such a pious impression is immediately belied by a closer inspection of the graffiti printed onto the paper from the walls, all testament to an adherence to a latterday outlaw mythology. ‘Fuck da Law’ stands as a basic statement of position which, though anonymously carved, could be the motto of any or all of the others who have marked their brief transition through the Court holding cells in necessarily truncated form (a matter of time and the crudeness of the tools available). These include: Clinton ov Brum, who seems happy at the outcome of his trial (Exp 4 Got 2½); Billy P ov Xmuff 6/3/08 (from just down the estuary in Exmouth, a local bad boy); Maggot Faggot ov PSV (not Eindhoven, surely); Charlie ov Truro 2002 7 yrs “A Truro Psycho to the Max” (the quotation marks presumably indicating that this is the manner in which he would like others to see and refer to him); and Simo, who ‘waz ere on tour once more 97/98’. Someone else pledges allegiance to WHU (that’s West Ham United), with their fascistic crossed hammers symbol etched above. Doyl, meanwhile, takes a more aesthetic approach and is rather more painstaking in his execution, the elaborate curved and trailing tails of his D and Y finished off with outlined arrows and the whole etched with a sure hand and sense of graphic design. These graffiti, with their offhand bravado and defiant sense of pride in outlaw status, were clearly originally carved out with fairly crude tools – whatever was close to hand – and as a result have a jagged violence which conveys a sense of angry young men trying to fight their way out of confined lives. They are recorded here on fragile, delicate art paper, which such fiercely wielded tools would have torn through. This lends the writing an oddly delicate character, an aestheticisation of violence and macho f off attitude. The ease with which the inmates could punch and kick through these diaphanous walls suggests that this is a prison cell of the mind, whose confines are not so easily breached.

For the second cell which he used, Müller etched a pastoral scene in the manner of an 18th century etching onto the walls, his far from precision tool a screwdriver. This scene draws on a nearby Georgian house, depicted here with surrounding trees and parkland and a small white bridge across which a figure strolls, dogs in tow. The scene, carved onto three sides of the cell, offers a panoramic escape from the cramped greystoned prison space - a landscape of the imagination to retreat into. It reflects the historic origins of the Court buildings, and also offers an ironic contrast between old ideas of aristocratic, landowning wealth and the mainly lower class status of the men who have passed through the cell. The figure taking his constitutional in the perfectly proportioned grounds would far more likely be the judge. For this exhibition, the three walls have been reproduced via a projected collage of filmed sections in a work entitled Pastoral II. We see one wall for a period of time before the next replaces it. The projection, formed of different ‘tiles’, square sections filmed with a hand-held camera, fit together to create the whole picture. The wavering, slightly woozy nature of the resulting image creates the impression of a provisional landscape, transitory and subject to change and dissolution. The tiles are like the elements of a theatrical backdrop, which can be taken down and packed away at short notice. If this is a landscape of the mind, a retreat into a fantasy of an easeful, bucolic past, then it only takes the rattling of a set of keys, the clank of a metallic door and a call to court to dispel it instantly. It never wholly succeeds in erasing the present, either. Look closely and you can see the graffitied names of previous inmates inscribed behind the tremulous clouds.

The original Pastoral cell

Opposite the Pastoral II projection, an array of colourful yellow plastic children’s TV toys are affixed to the wall like so many identical lunchboxes. These are the kind of old-fashioned (the 70s now warranting such a term, I suppose) mechanical wind-up devices which unspooled a picture loop whose unwinding images, illuminated from behind, were accompanied by a jauntily jingling music box tune of the Row Row Row Your Boat variety. Thhe offered the simple, repetitive pleasures of the pre-digital age and they were, in their time, enough. The sunny promise of these picture boxes, which the visitor is encouraged to play with, fails to correspond with the drab, black and white reality of the scenes depicted within their bright frame. Müller has provided his own paper spools, strips printed off in thickly outlined black ink from woodblocks. They depict scenes of stasis, stagnation and inactivity, the pauses and the waiting moments in life, presented as if they are in fact its major components. The motion of the winding strip merely accentuates the unchanging and repetitive nature of the different scenarios. In the little side window to the right of the main screen, Müller has inserted printed titles which supply an ironic or caustic commentary on the unfolding tableaux. So a parade of indistinguishable terraced house facades is called Progression; Weary old folks hunching down at bus stops are Regulars (referring neither to the frequency of the buses or to pub habitués); A roped-off queue of shivering, ill-clad women waiting to get into a club is Heaven; Staggering post-clubbers are having Low Larks; Shoppers bent under the weight of their bags or talking into their mobiles, none of them looking at each other, labour under the prescriptive title Fun; A row of cash-point with attendant withdrawers is headed Divine Wind (the translation of the Japanese kamikaze), a line-up willing rushing towards self-immolation; A traffic jam has the title Corso, perhaps a reference to beat poet Gregory and the movement’s valorisation of the open road; And the endless expanse of a fast-food counter is simply Limbo. There’s also an edgeland landscape of abandoned petrol stations, empty, weed-cracked sites and aging for sale signs. The tunes which the boxes play are cheery enough. But they are set at different speeds so that, as they are played (and people inevitably move from one to another, so that the tunes are overlaid to Steve Reich phase-shifting effect) there is a feeling of winding down, of the gradual leeching away of energy. This sense of entropic decline is built into the very nature of the exhibit. As time goes by, the small boxes are wound and wound until they wind no more, and one by one they fall silent, the light inside extinguished. Behind the optimistic banana yellow plastic casing it all provides a rather melancholic reflection on social and personal stagnation and decline, dissipation and eventual disappearance. The bright promise of childhood fades away.

The central work of the exhibition is a triptych of new, large scale woodcuts which depict three times of day in three different parts of Exeter High Street: Morning, Afternoon and Night. This has been a work in progress, created during Müller’s residency at the museum. Visitors in the early days were greeted with three large and disappointingly blank spaces on the wall, their empty white rectangular windows waiting expectantly to be filled. Rather than put up prints taken from the woodblocks he carved and chiselled, however, Müller has put up the wooden plates themselves. Or two of them, at least, the third laid flat in the workshop area, ready for prints to be made from it. From these three blocks he has created prints which extract selected squared-off segments or plates – thus relating it to the Pastoral II projection. It offers a similar sense of a constructed, modular landscape (or cityscape) which can be packed up and rearranged according to the demands of social and economic trends. This selective printing also creates contrasting areas on the wooden blocks, with geometrical patterns of darkness chequered across the brown grain. The printed off segments hang up on a rack in the workshop corner and can apparently be purchased for a small sum. The promise of specially commissioned works given in the museum brochure offers an illusion of choice since most of these prints are identical, and the range of images which have been copied limited. It seems like a symbolic gesture. The virtually identical reproduction of a particular detail of the larger composition – a shop sign or a discarded Coke can – is possibly intended as a comment on the identikit nature of many town and city centres, and a reminder of Exeter’s shameful topping of a league of clone towns (places with high streets comprising a high proportion of chain stores) in a survey carried out a couple of years ago.

The artist with the Day woodblock

The pictures themselves take the bleak and run down vignettes of the yellow cases and blow them up into large scale tableaux of weariness, anomie and incipient violence. There might appear to be an element of condescension or patronisation in this relentlessly downbeat view. Part of me thought ‘oi, this is my flipppin city you’re painting as some soulless limbo or Dantean circle of Hell’. But the pieces fall under the title Any High Street, so the actual locale could be said to be more symbolic than particular, a stage upon which to arrange universal dramas. Müller offers an outsider’s view, having grown up in Swabia in South West Germany, although he’s been here ten years or so now, so has probably got used to our ways. He has been on hand at the museum on several days to answer any criticisms from irate or bemused citizens who completely fail to recognise the city which they inhabit. On the wall opposite the triptych a film is projected, a survey of the central axis of the city taken by Müller as he cycled up and down Fore Street, High Street and Sidwell Street. At various times during the exhibition this depicts either morning, afternoon or night, thus reflecting the works displayed opposite. It serves as a corrective to their distorted or heightened realism, and shows that Exeter is, after all, a fairly ordinary city, and not a German expressionist film set. The films also present incontrovertible evidence that he was cycling on the pavement, but perhaps he was granted special artistic license.

There’s a certain repetitive circularity to the pictures, which suggests that this is a sequence which could be repeated, with little variance, over and over again. This links it with the yellow TV case installation, with its repeating loops. Morning, set in the lower part of the High Street, is littered with the detritus of the night before. The Stead and Simpson and Ann Summers shopfronts prominently display 50% and 75% off signs, indicators of deep recession, as are the two homeless people sleeping in the doorway of Ann Summers. They lie beneath two models which offer the allure and promise of the night, but which look a little out of place in the blinking morning light. Afternoon looks at lower Sidwell Street through the transparent screen of the bus shelter. The hunched figures of two old folk squat uncomfortably on the minimalist bench, another standing wearily waiting beside them. A younger woman leans against the advertising hoarding, completely separated off from them by a pillar and the frame of the shelter, and by the fact their her attention is wholly directed towards the screen of her mobile. The sign for the Hospicecare shop over the road is a reminder of mortality. On the pavement, in the street and standing sentinel on the roofs, crows, pigeons and gulls pick over rubbish and discarded fast food containers. At Night, the tableau becomes ominous and threatening, even a little demonic. A group of men are gathered around a small, almost childlike female figure. She is faceless and featureless, naked like an unclothed shop window dummy (from Ann Summers?) Her stance speaks of panic and fear, and a frozen inability to spring into action. The men move to surround her, and tower over her so that she appears to shrink in the shadow of their menacing presence. Something terrible is clearly about to happen. On the other side of the street, a woman stands under a partially obscured shop sign which reads ‘Go’. Her legs are set at crooked angles, her arms flop limply at either side, and her shoulder seems weighed down by the bag hanging from it. She has an open-mouthed gape of weary vacancy, and a brow furrowed with worry and care. To her left, a round-headed bin opens a wide and devouring maw, looking like a ravening robot about to swallow her up. Pools of illumination from overhead streetlights spotlight the pavements as if they were a theatrical stage. Which, in a way, they are. Müller is using the high street – it could be any high street, but it happens to be in Exeter – as a set for his own expressionist dramas. These pictures seek to project the dark subconscious of the consumer society of which the High Street (or its adjunct malls) is the locus. At the lower borders of Night, an oily, oleaginous shadow is oozing up on the prowling group, its fringed edges suggesting sentient feelers. Perhaps it stands in for a spilt pool of printer’s ink. But once it has spread, all will be engulfed in impenetrable darkness.