Pick a Postcard

February 23, 2011 at 6:14 pm · Filed under Reviews

Mini Art Show Review by Jenny Drewery.

Mini Art 2009 was such a success that curator Angela Chalmers decided to do it again. This time she threw out a wider net to pull in amateurs and beginners as well as established names like Andrew Cheetham and John Thornton, and she caught 90 artists.

900 pictures were submitted. All are postcard size and cost £20, with £1 going to St Catherine’s Hospice. When Angela makes a sale she fills the gap in the display with another picture from the stock room, so the kaleidoscope shifts and the colours fall into ever-changing patterns.

Where on earth does a reviewer start? The subjects are, in a nutshell, everything under the sun. Gnarled old trees rub shoulders with elephants, ripe tomatoes and the Angel of the North. Materials and techniques jubilantly cover the entire art spectrum. All the pictures speak in different voices, some loudly, some in a quiet seductive whisper.

I looked for mood and found it in the shadows beyond Tracy Himsworth’s half-open stable door and in the deep dark colours of Jon O’Connor’s seascapes. Faces stared back at me from the windows in Mariel Borst Pauwel’s sombre buildings. What were they looking at, with those piercing eyes?

The landscapes made me wonder how an artist can get such a huge painting onto such a tiny piece of paper. My favourite, by Kate van Suddese, showed a pallid moon sailing over endless fields. A windy night, by the looks of it, when you might expect to hear Mr Rochester howling for Jane Eyre in his loneliness.

If you want something to make you smile, you’ll find plenty. I saw pretty jellyfish that looked far too cheerful to give anyone a vicious sting, and a bird strutting about like a pompous cleric lecturing his flock. Then there was a lovely fat-tummied cherub, dreamily painted by Rosie, of Rosie’s boudoir next door.

‘These are such great little pictures,’ said one visitor, trying to narrow them down to the three she would eventually buy. It’s a treat to see so many masterpieces in one room, without getting footsore traipsing through the vast halls of a major city gallery.

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Christmas Exhibition Review

December 9, 2010 at 10:47 pm · Filed under Reviews

Review By Jenny Drewery

In the bleak midwinter, the gallery glows with light, warmth and seasonal associations. As you stamp the snow off your boots and push open the door, you’ll find yourself thinking about geese a-laying and partridges in pear trees – there are birds on the wall and birds in the tree on the table. There are sublimely crafted waders, made by John Thornton from driftwood and other materials washed up along the Yorkshire coast. They stand on slender legs looking balletic and elegant, eyed with suspicion by Rodney Wilson’s beakily bossy metal crow.

Looking at Douglas Hill’s affectionate oil studies of Malton, you can imagine a crowd of carollers in period costume singing under the old streetlights. Then, as you lose yourself in Andrew Cheetham’s incredible little watercolour of an isolated farm, you’ll probably hear those lovely lyrics ‘snow had fallen, snow on snow’ playing quietly in your head. I love Art that makes me hear music.

Poetry, too – Howard Carr’s brooding charcoal moorland symphony reminded me of the highwayman poem we all learned at school. I pictured horse and rider thundering along the track at dead of night, churning up the mud. Howard has left the sky completely blank; all the weather of centuries is concentrated in the ancient earth of the moor.

Steve Dove’s richly coloured acrylics of Scarborough and Whitby have always put me in mind of stained glass windows, while there is a highly decorative Christmas-card feel to Sharon Winter’s oil-and-collage works. My favourite is a picture of the countryside under the stars, where the quiet world of the night comes down to a boy and an owl, and two pairs of staring eyes.

This is arguably one of the gallery’s finest ever exhibitions.

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