Ray Atkins
dal 22/10/2003 al 22/11/2003
Segnalato da
22/10/2003
Ray Atkins
Art Space Gallery, London
Paintings 2003. Best known for his huge landscape paintings, Ray Atkins is also a painter of the human figure. In the new enlarged Gallery, for the first time, we are able to bring together these two aspects of his practice.
Paintings 2003
Best known for his huge landscape paintings, Ray Atkins is also a painter of
the human figure. In the new enlarged Gallery, for the first time, we are
able to bring together these two aspects of his practice.
Atkins' extraordinary method of painting in the landscape by erecting
structures to hold the large boards in place is well known. In the studio,
painting the figure, his methods are equally unique and demanding and the
works declare the same remarkable ambition in terms of their scale and the
evident physical commitment in their making.
For this exhibition he has produced a series of paintings based on yoga
positions, positions so physically strenuous that the model can only hold
the pose for a minute or two, so that the paintings are made in a series of
short explosive burst of energy as an impulsive response to the
extraordinary poses. Describing the process, and the demands of working in
this way, not just on one but a on the whole 'yoga series' of paintings,
Atkins say that ...'I prepared eight different surfaces, one for each pose,
and when we worked we moved from one painting to another to give her a rest.
During the course of a morning or the day, I was working on three or four
different images. Physically moving the boards was bad enough but the mental
strain of chopping and changing from one painting to another was incredible'.
Outdoors, Atkins continues to reveal the beauty and emotional power of a
landscape scarred by human activity. His sites include his own garden with
its gorse and bonfires, the slopes of Carn Marth outside Redruth, and
Littlejohns Pit, a working china-clay pit on the highest point on Bodmin
Moor, which he describes as ...'spectacular, yet disturbing in its vastness
with so many points of activity which are always changing,... The shifting
light, the changing form, the bursts of activity in unexpected places with
no likelihood of ever discovering any focal points.'
30-page catalogue is available.
Art Space Gallery
84 St Peter's Street N1 8JS
London