Alternative Visions Alternative Visions

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were added giving new narratives to the painting that are rooted in experiences of mental ill health. George J Harding.
Alternative Alternative Visions Visions

Undiscovered Art Undiscovered in the South Art West in the South West

I am an artist made of wire, string and the bones of someone else I used to be. For me, creativity is as necessary as respiration. Max Frances

Introduction

‘Alternative Visions: Undiscovered Art in the South West’ is a remarkable and celebratory exhibition bringing to light new work by 20 artists from across the region. The exhibition provides a unique insight into a wider body of artists whose voices are currently underrepresented in contemporary art galleries, and highlights their motivations for creating art. Alternative Visions was developed by Arts & Health South West*, Outside In** and Bristol Culture, in partnership with Falmouth Art Gallery, The Wilson in Cheltenham, Poole Museum and Bristol-based Artists First. To encourage participation in ‘Alternative Visions’, Outside In organised a series of 9 Artist Support Days across the South West at which artists were able to photograph their work, write artist statements and make their submissions for the exhibition. Through the open call out and Artist Support Days 310 submissions were received, from which 20 works were selected for the exhibition.

Alternative Visions

There are many undiscovered artists in our local communities. These individuals are driven to produce art for a wider range of reasons, and for different purposes, than many mainstream contemporary artists. They can find themselves facing extra barriers to the mainstream art world due to factors such as health, disability and social circumstance. What is striking about these artists is the self-belief and determination which has led them to develop remarkable art in sometimes difficult circumstances. The works in this exhibition are diverse in content and style; ranging from the highly personal through to the political, from landscapes to portraits, and from paintings to sculptures. The artists’ integrity is clear to see. Making art can be a direct and powerful form of communication. It is an accessible means of articulating thoughts and feelings which bypasses verbal language and strikes straight to the heart and brain.

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The selectors for Alternative Visions were: Alex Coulter, Director of Arts & Health South West; Ruth Hecht, Senior Exhibitions and Events Officer, Bristol Culture; Andy Hood, 2007 Outside In Award Winner; and Georgina Bolton, Assistant Producer at Situations. We would like to thank the selectors, partners, support organisations and funders of the exhibition Arts Council England. Thanks are also due to Hannah Mumby from Arts & Health South West and Hannah Whitlock and Harry Scott from Outside In for their help coordinating the exhibition and also to Jennifer Gilbert, the former Outside In Manager. Their expertise and commitment has made this remarkable exhibition possible. We’d also like to thank Artists First, a Bristol based group of artists with Learning Disabilities, for contributing their audio responses to the work in the exhibition and Karen MacDonald from Bristol Culture for facilitating this. Above all, we thank all of the artists for sharing their inspirational ideas, creativity and stories.

*Arts & Health South West is an information, support and advocacy organisation for everyone who believes in the value of creativity in enhancing health and wellbeing. **Outside In is a charity which provides a platform for artists who see themselves as facing barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance or isolation. Its principle goal is to create a fairer art world which rejects traditional values and institutional judgements about whose work can and should be displayed. Outside In is funded by The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The Paul Hamlyn Foundation, The Roddick Foundation and The George and Ann Dannatt Trust.

Artists The following statements have been written by the artists, with no additional editing

Alex Coulter, Director, Arts & Health South West Marc Steene, Director, Outside In

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Alex Newtown Abbot

An Assortment of Characters

Gavin Blench

Kaapa (diptych)

Dartmoor, Devon

160 x 80cm Oil on canvas

15 x 22cm Ink on paper

I like creating my own characters and battle scenes. I find Marvel comics very influential in the way they are drawn. I am a fan of cartridge pens and using high quality colours to finish the drawing. I would normally start with a pencil sketch, then I redraw with an ink pen and then rub away the pencil. I finish by adding colour and then final details with a fine pen. I like the creativity of art, there are no boundaries and barriers, you can create what you like and try new things. I make most of my artwork at home and I particularly like to listen to trance music whilst drawing. I find this kind of music creates and sets the scene for my inspiration. Drawing calms and relaxes me and helps me cope with my anxiety. I find it’s a really productive way to use my time. I often use animals for inspiration and I like the idea of merging animals and warriors or battle imagery. I enjoy coming up with super-powers for my characters, because you can combine animal, theme, colours and a storyline. I have recently created my very own set of Top Trump combat cards, consisting of 40 original characters with their own strengths, such as raw power, speed, intelligence and weaponry. I would like to start selling these! When people see my art work, I would like them to feel inspired to create something similar. In the future, I would like to make more storyboards and comic-based work. One of my dreams is to be signed to a major art company like Marvel.

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Each of my paintings is rooted to a particular place in the landscape where I live on the edge of Dartmoor. I’m primarily concerned with the tension created between enclosed space and open moor. Here there is a transition from one state to another, from cultivated lowland to high plateau and the escarpment between these. This inquiry demands an acknowledgement of time, with the landscape possessing a temporal aspect in relation to human habitation. Often boundaries laid down when we first demarcated tracts of land as early farmers, (up to 5000 years ago) which are still visible today.

It is an immersion into the places where civilisation butts up against wild space. The marginal space where those two states meet is what interests me; the slight difference from one topological plane or angle to another, a change in colour or texture, or a change in the flora of the landscape. This is done through extensive drawings made in situ which are then extended into the studio and the painting process. The physical act of painting itself partly informs the abstractions, as a record of movement in time and place (in front of the canvas), in colour, gesture, application of material, composition etc. captured on a flat surface.

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The title ‘Kaapa’ refers to Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, one of the first aboriginal artists to share “dreamtime” imagery with the outside world. His mixing of a subjective horizontal viewpoint with an aerial objective view is one that fascinates me as a landscape painter. My current painting practice was born out of the onset of my disability, (I have progressive MS). I drew and painted places as they became more inaccessible to me. I guess I’m connecting to larger frameworks of place and time as my physical engagement with the world diminishes and my approaching mortality becomes more apparent. The act of painting allows me to dance with these losses with more grace.

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Steve Burden

Abbatoir

Roger Davison

born in Greenwich, London and moved to Somerset in 2014.

200 x 160cm Oil on canvas

Mousehole, Cornwall

Growing up in an urban jungle, surrounded by out-of-scale concrete fortresses, has inevitably informed my development and visual aesthetic as an artist. Inspired by my own experiences growing up on the Pepys Estate in Deptford, south London, my paintings investigate dystopian themes and ideas associated with British housing estates. I’m interested in exploring the social issues that arose from the creation of this estate – security, isolation, control and gang culture – as well as its design and architecture, and the history of the site. Pepys Estate’s past, as well as my own experiences, has also fed into my paintings. From medieval times the site of the estate was an important dockland development with several wharves, a large cattle market and associated abattoir. My painting ‘Abbatoir’ began with a 1913 photograph taken in the abattoir and obtained from the Pepys Archive in nearby Lewisham Library. I wanted to reconnect with these long-gone figures in black and white, and examine their personas – one of the reasons I chose to place myself in the painting – to understand better the gangs of men that once worked there, while introducing the street-gang members that the estate had become known for in later years.

Helpers – Mysterious Beings 98 x 82cm Oil on canvas

Little known artists like me who do not exist in the public eye can experience crushing isolation so I am extremely grateful to Outside In and Pallant House Gallery for including my painting in this exhibition and for championing the cause of all excluded and marginalised artists. I live in West Penwith, Cornwall, a peninsula governed by the elements which has attracted artists for centuries. Unlike those artists who paint the everyday scenes and environments I like to experiment and engage in forms of expression which from the point of view of normal description might seem quite crazy.

I believe in the autonomy of art and found a sanctuary in it at an early age where I could create my own world away from the requirement for me to conform and other pressures on me. Sometimes I still paint to get myself out of mental stress and confusion and at other times not. Whatever motivates me when I work I am energised by spending time alone, painting and drawing without any thought of the end result, with no preconceived ideas at all and I like to use a variety of materials to do this such as oil and acrylic paint, but I have used house paint, tea bags, bitumen, collage, even drawn with dripping Evostik glue, and pencils and charcoal taped to the end of long sticks, I’ll try anything that keeps the picture fresh and alive and moving.

For me the act of painting and drawing is fundamentally primitive and intoxicating, it connects me to something greater than myself, and in this state of mind the symbols, shapes, faces, and figures which inhabit my pictures seem to come from a place which is best described as intuitive, magical, and entirely relevant, incorporating elements which I sense are timeless, inventive, and hopefully imbued with more than personal appeal.

‘Brutalism, with its rough-hewn rawness, always was a vision of future ruins’ (Hatherley, 2008: 42)

The issues of population growth and associated density are ones that continue to increase and cause tension, with no sign of a slow-down or solution. The ‘sink estates’ are gradually being demolished, an expensive failed experiment. But what is going to replace them?

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Sam Emm Art Bristol

Pattern Man’s Edible Hill

Lisa Fay

MTROPOLIS

Poole, Dorset

100 x 100cm Photography printed on board

30 x 38 cm Ink on paper

I’m a young artist living in Bristol, specialising in psychedelic pattern making. I work mostly in paint, lino print and drawing and have a deep interest in visionary art and outsider art. I have recently had a very difficult time in my life and have struggled to maintain my artistic commitments due to suffering from anxiety and depression as well as dealing with addiction issues, but am regaining inspiration and developing new works. I currently work as a postman but have also worked with learning disabled adults for many years and enjoy collaborating with many clients. I make my print work out of Spike Island Print Studio where I worked as a member’s print tech for a year in 2015-16. My lino print practise consists of multiple stripes of colour being layered in a sequence with different patterns that creates a rhythmic vibration on the eye. I work on a larger scale for this practice and have ambitions to create installation rooms in the near future. My drawing and painting work is more personal and is often developed out of doodles with the direction of pieces taking their own natural course in their own time. I rarely plan much when starting pieces and let ideas form as I work, which then directs the outcome of a piece. I use patterns and multiple combinations of colour throughout my work and have always been drawn to this way of working.

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As a child, I spent time staying at my grandparents’ home in a small Wiltshire village called Easton Grey. The tiny village was beautiful, had an old bridge over the river Avon and I used to sketch the cottages, old black and white photos that my nan had, and her small dog Toby, the slow pace of life was very calming, my nan kept fabric in an ottoman and I was interested in the designs on each individual piece, I would make things out of the fabric, we also used to look round an antiques barn, I was interested in the weird wonderful furniture and objects. It fed my creative mind I guess. I studied fashion and textiles design at Salisbury, I like to sketch, to work with clay, I enjoy drawing psychedelic patterns, and love to work in black and white. I also use photography to create images. I am interested in exploring patterns and shapes within everyday objects or scenes. Hopefully after seeing this exhibition other people may become interested in taking up art, or re-visiting their creative side. It may help others to reduce anxiety, depression and bring some calm into their lives too.

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Max Frances

Hidden

George J Harding

Pink rain and pain

Gloucestershire

18 x 36cm Mixed media

Bristol

36 x 58cm Oil on board

Art is like alchemy: the transmutation of lead into gold was a physical metaphor for the refinement of the alchemist’s inner being. In like manner artists create items of interest and beauty from ordinary things; and this artist has learnt, grown and begun to heal in the process. Mystical too, is the way in which art uses illusion to reveal different truths and perspectives.

All my work is emotive looking at the self and its relationship to others and the world. Thoughts surrounding the mind, perception, faith, belief, reality and illusion are touched upon making an internal dialogue external.

Works of creativity reflect the cosmos from the point of view of the individual, and change both, however minutely. Images conjure ghosts of the past or the spirit of the moment to confront the viewer, evoking joy, fear, revulsion and in the best cases thought, reflection and perhaps some new understanding. In my work I hope to draw attention to the unending diversity of worth and beauty. I find beauty in the soaring flight of vultures and the comic horror of their feeding; in the delicate, glittering abstracts drawn by snails and in the grey hair and scars that are the visible trophies of survival. As I create, I am rebuilding myself, sketching in traits, mending emotional rips with masking tape and holding it all together with wire and string. Creativity is life, it is hope. My gratitude to the people vultures and other beings who have helped me to reach a point where I feel I have a future, is infinite (and thus, according to current thinking, bigger than the universe).

I enjoy the act and discipline of painting. It is a form of self-therapy where the state of mind for its creation is meditative and focused. The painting’s abstract figurative sources where there is a yearning for transcendence within them. Whether this is achieved or not is up to the individual, but to me the very act of painting and creating is a mode of transcendence and escape in itself. The human expression of paint puts feelings and thoughts surrounding the human condition into visual form. I am trying to experience and understand myself better through the imagery I create. Every image is something to solve in my mind, to try to accept, understand and enjoy, and I hope others will relate to this and see what I am trying to see in themselves too. ‘Pink rain and pain’ is an experimental painting about existential pain and delusion. It was a further abstraction on from previous paintings seen through rippled glass that distorts the initial reality. Other signs and symbols were added giving new narratives to the painting that are rooted in experiences of mental ill health.

I am the freak victorious. I wish a joyful future upon all despised creatures.

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Anthony Hill

Shredded Nerves

Joshua Howlett

My friend at school

Bristol

A1 Pastel and wax crayon on paper

Portsmouth

A1 Coloured straws

I love drawing and painting portraits and also creating more abstract pieces of work. Because I have suffered from clinical depression I find drawing humorous or more light-hearted images helps to lift my mood. I find by focusing on an image of someone smiling for a great length of time helps me to achieve this, especially when I begin to shade in an outline I have drawn and gradually start to see the face materialise and finally smiling back at me. I have drawn all my life, which seems a long time now as I am now approaching my fiftieth year. I am mainly self-taught but have spent a number of years studying at art college and university which sadly I have had to give up before I could complete due to having health issues at that particular time in my life. I do create work at times that reflects my mood, it does help to get certain thoughts and feelings out of my system and use art to express this, but I mainly use art these days as an escape from the depression by working with more bright and cheerful images. With my more abstract work I love working with layers of colour, applying them on top of each other and smudging and working them in to each other and just applying whatever marks on the page that feels good to me at that particular time and just seeing wherever it leads me. I find looking and concentrating on work like this, for lengthy periods of time, helps to lift my mood, which in turn helps to make me a more content and cheerful person.

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(Josh created his statement with his parents) Josh is Autistic, has learning difficulties and a language delay. He is a visual person, learning from watching other people and copying their actions and repeating words. His skill at art is a fairly recent discovery for us. Although Josh has always enjoyed drawing film characters and making junk models out of cardboard at home, his talent was only recently exposed during a parents’ evening at school. Over the last year, Josh has produced a small portfolio of some amazing pieces of art. Art, being purely visual, allows Josh to be his creative self and successfully express how he is feeling or relating to people in his life. Josh produced this piece of large artwork about a year ago, aged 15. The picture is of a friend at school. The facial outline was drawn onto card first, using a photo as a guide and then defined with white straws. The background and highs/lows of the face were created with individual coloured cardboard straws glued directly to the backboard (which took about 10 hours during his school art sessions to complete). Josh’s favourite colours are yellow, blue, red and green – hence the selection within the piece. Josh is really delighted that his picture was selected and it is going ‘on tour’, as well as being seen by lots of people. He is hoping it will make everyone happy when they see it and perhaps it may inspire someone to create something similar with art straws.

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Emma Louvelle

Back of Beyond

Dorset

30 x 42cm Paint, charcoal, chalk, pencil, pastel and ink on paper

To say my art has saved me is not a grandiose exaggeration but a rooted reality throughout my existence. Even when the sky is blackened by ferocious storms or the land shudders violently from earthquakes below it has offered me shelter, purpose and a voice. Sometimes it is a solitary singular strand that resolutely refuses to give and send me toppling, other times the roots are as strong and as many as the largest of Oak trees. If no-one was ever to bear witness to my Art, I would still create, it is as essential to me as breathing. I joke that I am a post-discipline artist but there is also truth here. I dabble with disciplines; I paint, dance, write, sculpt and perform, gleefully mixing them all up as I go. Then there is the fact that any form of discipline when it means rules, authority and set ways of being seem impossible for me to follow, uncomfortable pairs of shoes that I refuse to put on. This tendency to balk at the official has caused difficulties when seeking to share my art with others, for these channels of order are perplexing landscapes that I loathe to enter. I have been lucky to encounter people who believe in me and who offer a hand to guide me through these complications, fellow artists, teachers and health and social service professionals; without these ‘others’ my art would not exist for anyone but myself.

Jeremy James Lovelady

35 x 46cm Collage on canvas

Cornwall

It’s just between me and you I like what you do You took me a part And put back together my heart Art is a love affair Is starts in the womb wondering what materialism is I think it ends in heaven yes I’m quite sure yeah End in heaven Pure electric blue I see as a canvas To paint a picture on The gift of art comes from the atmosphere, heaven This is a complicated thing where I think whatever it is you see To hold on to love like Keep it for yourself It’s also very therapeutic And can bring about healing God loves it, art And that’s why they said God who art thy in heaven That’s why they say it I started on photocopy paper The end of the show the end of the show It’s easy to get started it’s fun it’s therapeutic yeah I decided when I was 6 years old I was going to take up art as a career but I realised I would never get paid until I was dead. So I didn’t know what that meant to me so I enjoyed it. The window on the house during the day, the sun was coming through, the light was coming through, I put pictures on from magazines and trace them.

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Crytical Mass

I’ve done commercial things too, textile designs for coaches and trains. I did the one for great eastern trains and record sleeve designs in Manchester.

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Arthur Mactaggart

On the Act

Peter Matthews

North Cornwall

40 x 50cm Acrylic on canvas

Bristol

A Distant Echo over the Atlantic Ocean #3 92 x 61cm Oil paint, dinosaur bone matter and rust on un-primed canvas

I feel that I came to art late. After a series of mistakes, I had a couple of periods in prison where I first began to take art seriously. At first, it was simply a way of recording moments and faces. I then took part in a basic art class and I was able to research artists that were unfamiliar to me. Gradually, art became much more than documentary – it became an outlet for my confused feelings of anger and guilt, impotence and inhibition. On my release and back on the straight and narrow, I felt a sense of duty to speak out on the issues I saw within the prison system, and art seemed to offer that opportunity. Moreover, on a personal level it was a way of stabilising aggressive thoughts and externalising them to a place where they were less harmful. With an anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress, painting has become a critical part of my recovery and rehabilitation. ‘On the Act’ (the term given to inmates on suicide watch), is a direct statement on the catastrophic levels of self-harm in UK prisons, growing year on year. My paintings often have a bleak and hostile feel, portraying the raw emotion of the experiences. And while there may seem to be little redemption within, there is also a muted sense of calm, and of course the act of painting in itself is an attempt to overcome. If the current state of prisons is anything to go by, it looks like I will have inspiration for many more paintings to come.

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I make my work between the liminal spaces and places that I find between the upper intertidal areas of the beach and out in the open ocean.

We feared our entering of the caves, Our dwelling in eternal night, Worried as we were by dreams in which the darkness stole our sight. Curiously, now it seems The only thing that blinds us is the light.

My practice as an artist working in and with the ocean explores the experiences of time and place, nature and the environment and the sublime and spiritual. I work in an ever expanding range of media from drawing and painting to moving image and sculpture. I am intrigued and motivated to push and explore the nature of making an image and object while being physically immersed and exposed to the natural world and landscape.

There is a performative element to my practice as I subject myself to the forces of nature, such as the weather, being suspended in the ocean and occasionally pursuing new directions in my work by free diving to the ocean floor. The physical intimacy, immersion and direct relationship and dialogue with nature is central to my work, and my practice is shaped by an eclectic and diverse set of interests and inspirations which I learn about from travelling, such as mediation, astronomical investigations, geological explorations, shelter making using nomadic ways of living with nature and ritualistic ceremonies which connect to Native American practices and beyond.

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As I work outside in nature, directly and personally with the ever changing environment and conditions that I find myself in, I am always aware of being present in a time and space which is constantly in motion and changing. As much as my work is about going out into nature to make a painting or drawing, it is also very much about learning about nature and how we as humans today coexist with nature and the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions. I am drawn to the poetic mystery and unknowns of the ocean.

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Darryn Michael

John

Oonagh Fox

Salisbury, Wiltshire

40 x 40 cm Acrylic on canvas

Bournemouth, Dorset

My influences come from observing people, especially those that have something on their minds; those who may be experiencing hardship or difficult feelings that we can all relate to.

I am Oonagh and I am an artist who has autism and wears glasses. I want to capture concepts and feelings by any medium possible. My art usually meditates on the subject of introspection and trying to communicate what it is like to interact with the world from behind my eyes.

I like to employ bold lines and keep my colour palette small. I try to keep my work simple but maximise the emotive effect.

Migranious Internalisation 23 x 30.5 cm Acrylic paint and blood on board

This is not easy, and I have not perfected it, and it will take a lifetime to do right. However I am determined not to become bogged down or pretentious, and I take pride in putting a surreal humour and a great deal of life into my artworks, even if it’s only a casual sketch. I love hyper-realism and the idea of painting things as they Are rather than literally copying how they look. In this way I look up to René Magritte and the Cubist movement. Right now I particularly like portraiture, being influenced by Frida Kahlo and Tracey Emin. Capturing a person’s spirit – as they are rather than how they look – is an exciting and rewarding challenge for me. My painting ‘Migrainous Internalisation’ is a part of a series about the many different and strange sensory symptoms of migraines, though this one in particular is more personal and directly talks about my struggles with dermatillomania and overwhelming feelings of void.

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Pinn

Wish Pond

Peter Sutton

St Ives, Cornwall

42 x 60cm Acrylic on canvas

Cornwall

Trip to National Portrait Gallery 80 x 100cm Acrylic on canvas

I have no set pattern to my work I don’t really want one. I enjoy watching it unfold into its own reality you can see so much within the colour of the paints that merge together to form patterns out of shapes casting their own shadows over the canvas.

I’ve created over 400 pieces of art and would like to exhibit them all. It is of great enjoyment doing my art and of great interest as well because it makes me feel so good. All the different materials you can use: acrylics, inks, watercolours, oils, pastels. It excites you because of all that comes out of it. I get power out of it - and I feel I could do it forever and ever. I get a great excitement out of it. When I was 5 years old, I dreamt of being an artist.

Working mainly in acrylic allows me to layer in thin washes, building depth and a richness of colour. I also enjoy working straight on to wood, building up layers of paint, sanding and varnish continuously, this gives a translucent effect with a wonderful early mystery to it. I feel that when I paint a part of me is being drawn out and into the painting, so many thoughts and feelings emerge I become one with my work. I believe each painting represents a short story, a journey through a world of the imagination merging with the reality of my existence. I would like my work to take the viewer deep in thought, to travel into their subconscious, to dance in their imagination if only for a few short minutes, separated from their own reality. The world is so full of natural beauty both in and out, we just have to be able to see it, to breathe it in and to live it. Diamonds in the rain Diamonds in the rain Shimmering cracks through the trees Shapes and dancing shadows Bringing reality to its knees Where eyes no longer see where time has no place there lies an abundance of imagination and adventure Transforming a dark and empty space

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John Taylor

Phantom Limb Pain

Widow Twanky

The Pam Sisters

Bridport, Dorset

36 x 25cm Watercolour and crayon on paper

Somerset

32 x 19 x 18cm Mixed media

When I was a child I loved Turner and Dali, I liked drawing but never really pursued it, as I suppose I looked at their work and thought ‘can’t produce ought like that’, at school I was put off from art because I remember drawing little old men with snail’s shells on their backs sort of dali’esque, and my art teacher told me I was very disturbed!! Anyway horses were my love, still are.

I took up drawing after a working life in academia. I lost a leg when young and have a constant phantom limb pain. This piece depicts my pain and how I feel that I am falling apart. My subject is people. My drawings, though fanciful, are about something real, such as pain, groups in flow, with people of all ages weaving around one another, sometimes with one purpose, other times not, or with no purpose.

There are so many current 3D artists I love, I suppose one that comes to mind is a chap called ‘Mr Finch’ who produces such beautiful textile pieces.

My earliest drawings were in pencil, then in pen, and later I began to use, water-soluble ink, watercolour and acrylic, which I like to spray with water and get effects that I could never plan. Chance is very important. The drawings in indelible ink alone are also full of chance. I have an idea of a group and begin with it, possibly two men squabbling, or trying to catch something – and from that beginning the other figures grow and spread out across the paper, with me trying to create a feeling of energy and flow in the struggling crowds or groups. Often there are children looking straight out at us, as if to say ‘I have no idea what is going on here with these adults – do you?’ There is often a sense of menace and always a sense of confusion in my drawings.

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I start with a rough sketch, can decide on positions, size, colours and textures. The materials are combinations of paper, fabric and fibres, inks and acrylics. I try out new techniques, sometimes resulting in colour changes, I like variety. I do small pieces due to working space and cost. I only having working space over the summer - this has limited the time I can spend. Soon I will have all year working space.

Difficulties in life have arisen from having a mental health condition, I left art colleges because of this. I would like to thank Outside In for this opportunity.

So hopefully can get all the ideas I have stored up turned into something. Someday I would like to ‘go large’ with my figures, you can get more effective textures and have to find new materials to work with.

Many people think they know what they are doing, though to outsiders it may seem ridiculous or pointless; some people seem to be living a little apart from their bodies, in a reverie, or absorbed in something or other incomprehensible, and to me at least they seem a little lost, or quite at a loss. I like Dutch 17th century art of everyday life, and the fantastical art of those times.

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Bristol Museum & Art Gallery 3 June – 10 September 2017 www.bristolmuseums.org.uk

Falmouth Art Gallery

Tour Schedule

25 September – 10 December 2017 www.falmouthartgallery.com

The Wilson, Cheltenham 7 January – 11 March 2018 www.cheltenhammuseum.org.uk

Poole Museum

#AlternativeVisions www.ahsw.org.uk/ alternative_visions www.outsidein.org.uk

Please note all image copyright remains with the artist. 26

Front cover: © George J Harding, ‘Pink Rain and Pain’. Back cover: xxxxxxxxx Design: Steers McGillian Eves

29 March – 20 May 2018 www.poolemuseum.co.uk