Circles and Tangents sounds like a show of abstract art, but actually the title is somewhat misleading. As Vivienne Light, the exhibition’s curator and author of the accompanying book, explains, the circles are intended to denote networks of artists (not the circular forms in a Ben Nicholson painting, though Nicholson is included in the show), and the tangents are really digressions. Clear? Put more simply, the exhibition focuses on art made on or about Cranborne Chase, the lovely unspoilt stretch of Dorset landscape once William the Conqueror’s hunting ground and more recently the inspiration for countless painters and sculptors. The work on show is largely figurative and much of it is landscape-based, but there is pleasing variety among the exhibits, and a stimulating range of known and unknown artists.
The visitor to the exhibition is greeted by EQ Nicholson’s fine oil landscape entitled ‘Boveridge’ (c.1949), a lucid and light-filled painting of evocative and sensuous shapes. EQ (as she was affectionately known) is one of the revelations of this show. Married to Kit Nicholson, the architect and younger brother of Ben, who designed Augustus John’s modernist studio at Fryern Court near Fordingbridge, the charismatic EQ was a talented artist. She worked as a fabric designer and interior decorator, usually in conjunction with her husband, and did most of her painting between 1940 and 1955. It was in the earlier part of those years that the young John Craxton regularly stayed with her at Alderholt Mill, between Boveridge and Fordingbridge.
Craxton always maintained that he first found himself as a painter at Alderholt. Certainly his friendship with EQ was a close one, and influence and inspiration flowed read-ily between them. This can be seen from the juxtaposition in the exhibition’s first room of EQ’s ‘Stream at the Mill House’ (c.1943) in graphite and watercolour, with two of Craxton’s watercolours. The Romantic approach to form is similar, and the emphasis on drawing, particularly in the depiction of trees. A flat cabinet contains three small unframed works — two by Craxton, one by Lucian Freud, a close friend and associate at the time. Round the walls hang a group of portraits, including EQ’s humorous profile drawing of her husband in uniform, Kit’s worried-looking self-portrait and a rather saturnine ink drawing of Craxton by Freud.
One of the other revelations this show offers is the work of EQ’s son Tim Nicholson. His large landscape ‘The View from Boveridge Farm’ (1992) hangs next to his mother’s Boveridge painting at the beginning of the exhibition, and together they set a high standard to live up to. Tim’s painting is schematised and non-naturalistic, but nevertheless a powerful evocation of the essence of landscape, composed of dramatically simplified enclosing shapes. He favours strong patterns and contrasts and has a fondness for linearity characteristic of many of the artist Nicholsons. Using dots and stripes and stencils, Tim Nicholson reinvents the landscape with wit and refreshing independence.
Among the many other good things on show are sculptures by Elisabeth Frink, who lived near Blandford Forum, paintings and drawings by Augustus John and Henry Lamb, an inventive portrait drawing of Anthony West by Frances Hodgkins, with one of her remarkable still-life watercolours, ‘Nuptial Bouquet’ (1925) nearby, a beautifully lyrical early Mary Fedden oil, strong graphite drawings by Howard Pearce and Ursula Leach’s brilliantly coloured paintings and prints. (Her abstracted landscapes have a joyful and lasting appeal, I find.)
The Circles and Tangents book offers a far fuller account of the place and the period than the exhibition can provide, but even at more than 300 pages (£30, in paperback) it is by no means exhaustive. For instance, I should have liked to see Stephen Chambers (born 1960) included here, since so much of his early work was inspired by his family’s cottage on the Chase. But Vivienne Light’s book — which really deserves a review to itself — has done a great service to the history of British artists in the 20th century. It is packed with information, mostly of a detailed biographical kind, with illuminating asides about the art, and consists of a series of enjoyably discursive essays about the main characters of interest to her, from Stanley Spencer to Ian McKeever. A related publication rather than a catalogue, it includes a number of lesser-known figures whose work I’d like to see in greater depth, Elsie Barling and Cecil Waller among them. If you don’t manage to see the show, buy the book — it will prove an invaluable source of reference.
Above the Library in Salisbury Market Place is the Young Gallery, where John Carter (born 1942) is currently showing a mini-retrospective of works on paper. Carter is a distinguished abstract sculptor who works primarily with straight lines, squares and rectangles. His chief preoccupations are with geometry, edge, rotation and interval, but within these restrictions he is a poet of meticulous phrasing. The element of colour also enters his equation, and although always subtle rather than vivid, it brings an expressive and atmospheric quality to the work that gentles its austerity. This small exhibition offers a very good and surprisingly comprehensive introduction to his work, ranging from the 1960s to now, and shows what can be achieved by inventive variations on a visual theme.
A cabinet of small sculptures and sketchbooks opens the show with a reminder of the three-dimensional thrust of Carter’s practice, but this is an artist who has always placed drawing at the forefront of his enquiry, and whose constructions exist between painting and sculpture, often in the form of wall reliefs. Therefore the two-dimensional remains firmly at the heart of his procedure, and in particular the energies generated by flat forms in reaction to one another. The walls of the gallery are hung with drawings and studies of geometric shapes attracting and repelling each other like magnets working overtime. Carter explores notions of piercing and transparency, intruding forms, regular shapes slightly knocked out of true, superimposed parallelograms that stand their ground or hover. Geometry is at once playful and completely serious: impressive and rewarding.
Meanwhile, in a further gallery are selected highlights from the permanent collection of Salisbury Library, including two large ink drawings by the idiosyncratic visionary Cecil Collins, a lovely David Jones watercolour entitled ‘Sunday Mass: In Homage to GM Hopkins’ (1948), an intriguing Keith Vaughan ‘Allegorical Landscape’ (1945) and Paul Nash’s late watercolour ‘Ghost in the Shale’ (1942). Altogether, Salisbury is well worth a visit at the moment, and that’s without even considering the glories of the Cathedral.
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