British painting at the new Heong gallery: Is it abstract?

There is a new gallery in town.  It is the Heong Gallery.  Where is it?  Go to Regent Street in Cambridge; opposite Parker's Piece and across the road from the Pizza Hut, is Downing College.  Walk through the main entrance across the gravel path and past the Porter's Lodge; turn left.  And there it is.

Heong gallery, the entrance façade

It's in the old stables and was wonderfully re-purposed by Caruso St John Architects.  It opened on 6 Feb 2016 with an exhibition of British painting in the 50s and 60s.

I visited as part of the  symposium Generation Painting: Abstraction and British Art 1955-65, held at Downing on Sat, 5 March.

Now, the concept of 'abstraction' is interesting in the context of the current exhibition.

Detail from Patrick Heron's Soft Vermilion with Orange and Red: April 1965, 1965 (oil on canvas)

Above is a detail from a painting whose very title shouts "Hey, I'm abstract! Look at me! No figurative content in me!  No illusion to be seen here! Just plain old real paint.'  Except not quite, perhaps?  Because why is the vermilion 'soft'?  And why is the word 'April' part of the title?

As was pointed out by one speaker during the very interesting symposium, these 1950s/60s painters from Cornwall (Patrick Heron lived in Cornwall when he painted this) remained attached to the light and sea and atmosphere of their landscape.

And David Hockney's absolutely wonderful Hollywood Garden (1965) is definitely not abstract.

Detail from David Hockney's Hollywood Garden, 1965, pencil and watercolour on card

There are some witty references to abstraction, and there is a play with the tension between surface and depth, the horizontal line and the vertical shapes, like starlings on a wire, the drooping umbrella, the bush like a boulder.  At the symposium, Martin Hammer (University of Kent) was brilliant on Hockney:  "our involuntary urge to recognise."

Allen Jones, Parachutist, 1963 (Fitzwilliam Museum)

Detail of the preceding

Allen Jones's Parachutist (1963) is a wonderfully witty and juicily 'painterly' juxtaposition of the overtly figurative and the ambiguously abstract.  Are those vertical shapes stripes of yellow, green and blue, like the stripes in a painting by Morris Louis?

Great sky lights at the Heong Gallery

A picture window onto Downing lawns that looks like a literal picture, next to an actual picture by Roger Hilton, January 1962 (tall white), 1962.  Below is the same picture window viewed from the outside in.

Heong gallery, viewed from the Downing lawn

Visit the show! It's fantastic!  And so is the gallery.  Totally free, too.
The catalogue costs £12.

Open:
Wed 10 am - 8 pm
Sat, Sun, Bank Hols 10 am - 6 pm

Exhibition: Generation Painting 1955-65
British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness

Ends 22 May 2016.

Two paintings by Justin Hawkes. Landscape? Or abstract art?

Two paintings by Justin Hawkes.  Seen at the Williams Art Gallery, Cambridge on 25 Nov. 2012.

1.  Landscape Tension

Justin Hawkes, Landscape Tension (red glow), acrylic (behind glass), 40 x 68 cm.

Landscape Tension is aptly named:  there is a tension here between abstraction and the illusion of a 'real' landscape.

On the one hand, we see a landscape.  The horizontal format encourages us to see one.  (Not for nothing is this format known as 'landscape format' by computer printers.)  We read the dark scribbly line in the bottom quarter as the horizon.  With bushes and trees (and perhaps the spires of buildings?).

Above the horizon is the deep orange glow of a sunset.  (Or sunrise?)  And above that is the strangely opaque sky.

Justin Hawkes, Landscape Tension (detail)

On the other hand, however, we see five rectangles, stacked one above the other.  The top rectangle is a matt teal; the two below are a dirty dark orange and a jewel orange; there follow a dark brown and a dark brownish-blue one.

Between the dark brown and the jewel orange rectangles (or broad stripes), there is an uneven line that blurs the boundary between brown and orange.

There is no depth here, just flat rectangles of colour.

Landscape or abstract shapes?  Duck or rabbit? 

The point is:  every painting is both at once.  At once an illusion of three-dimensional space.  And a reality of colour shapes on a flat canvas.

2.  Montage

Justin Hawkes, Montage watercolour composition, 14 x 8 cm.

Montage.  A tiny watercolour.

A vertical format.  Also known as 'portrait format' but we don't see a format.  We see a landscape.  Or what we think may be a landscape.

It's also two rectangular pieces of drawing paper, stained with orange-brownish watercolour.  The pieces of paper are separated by a torn edge and pasted onto a mount.

Justin Hawkes, Montage (detail)

The white uneven line is reminiscent of the horizon in Landscape Tension.  But here it is not only an illusion of a boundary: it is a real boundary.  A real bit of torn paper.  The white colour is the colour of the paper mount underneath.

The motif of torn paper reappears in the artist's sketchbooks.

Justin Hawkes, page from sketchbook 

Williams Art Gallery

I saw these paintings last November.  (I know... it's taken me ages finally to get this post together!)  They were part of an exhibition by the painter Justin Hawkes at the Williams Art Gallery on Gwydir Street.

Williams Art Gallery on Gwydir Stree with Justin Hawkes exhibition, seen from Hot Numbers Café

Meet the artist

I was also lucky:  I met the artist and asked him some questions.

•  I asked Justin Hawkes what got him started as an artist.  He said that he was inspired by Cézanne when he was around 15 years old.

  

•  And what did he think were the differences in painting in acrylics and in watercolours?

Justin Hawkes told me that the challenges of the big acrylic canvases lies in resisting the masculinity of the kind of colour-field painting produced by Ellsworth Kelly. 

The challenge of the watercolours, by contrast, lies in resisting their prettiness.

Justin Hawkes does not want to fix a moment, like a photographer wants to do, but wants to allow for time.

From Justin Hawkes's artist statement:  

'The relevance of late Mondrian remains important to me.  I work to avoid my paintings becoming a mishmash of styles because as well as responding to this influence I feel a need to develop a direct line to nature.'

'Paintings evolve from a consciousness that is aware of what they are and what they are about -- simultaneously.'

How about you?
What do you see first?  The landscape or the abstract shapes of colour?

Find out more:

Justin Hawkes' website, incl. upcoming and past shows, and an image gallery

Related posts:

Patrick Thurston: exhibition of photographs at the Williams Art Gallery

Alison Litherland: paintings of cows

Paintings © Justin Hawkes.  Images used with permission of the artist.

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/01/two-paintings-by-justin-hawkes.html