Author: Julie Chamberlain

I'm a freelance journalist and PR writer living, writing and working in Coventry. One of my interests is art, and this is my blog about the art world of Coventry, Warwickshire and beyond - and occasionally the other good things in life. Follow me on Twitter @JulieinCov

An age of dreams and designs is brought back for Compton Verney summer

Cona Rex Coffee Machine – Estate of Abram Games

A time when Britain was trying to shape a new future through stylish designs and dreams of a better life is being revisited for an exhibition.

Britain in the Fifties: Design and Aspiration at Compton Verney will be a trip back to the past for those old enough to have lived through it, and who may have their own feelings about a decade when post-war food rationing did not entirely end until 1954.

Some items will also seem familiar as they enjoy a new popularity through the retro and vintage craze. Others still lasted a long time; there is a display of the original illustrations for the Ladybird book Shopping with Mother by Harry Wingfried from 1958 but the book, with its social and gender stereotyping as noted in the gallery caption, was still popular in the 1970s.

Abram Games is one designer who appears several times. There are his original sketches for the Festival of Britain logo, and the logo itself, along with other festival souvenirs, pamphlets, a scarf and a model of the skylon, the huge structure Winston Churchill apparently ordered to be taken down as it reminded him of the socialist aspirations of the previous Labour government.

Image of Mobiles fabric ref. 220035 Image courtesy of Sanderson www.sanderson-uk.com

Image of Mobiles fabric ref. 220035 Image courtesy of Sanderson http://www.sanderson-uk.com

There are photographs of some of the new homes which were built, focusing on West Point in Allesley Village, Coventry, which still exists. One gallery is hung with beautiful colourful textile designs including influences in fruit and vegetable patterns from William Morris in one by Terence Conran. Another by Robert Stewart oddly features a man riding a fish.

Household gadgets are interesting for their innovation or not – a mechanical potato peeler does not seem to have stood the test of time. A coffee maker designed by Abram Games looks like something elegant but also straight out of a science lab. Ken Wood turns out to be a real person with an electric toaster on show and there is a toast rack by Robert Welch, whose firm also lives on today. There is a table and sideboard set with beautifully elegant crockery by firms including Derby and Midwinter.

In another room, you are invited to sit in a mock up of a 1950s living room to read the newspaper story about the climbing of Everest while watching on a replica TV the Queen’s coronation. More attractive crockery is on show including a cucumber plate.

Elegant looking cars, hiding simple designs, are celebrated through images of vehicles including a Triumph TR2 from 1953, made at Canley, Coventry.

A display of attractive dresses from Horrockses feature an unusual name as one designer; Graham Sutherland took time out from his Coventry Cathedral tapestry design to come up with a printed design dress for Liberty which showed busts of classical characters face to face, and a diagonal neckline and side-buttoning bodice.

Cathedral designer Basil Spence also created a poster promoting rail travel for British Rail, showing his design for it in 1967, several years before it was officially opened. Abram Games also designed a poster showing the shape of the country in railway livery.

Larger items on show include a Mini car, and a small caravan created as a gift for the young Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

The exhibition also draws interesting attention to social change – 90 per cent rented homes in the 1940s, to 60 per cent home ownership by 1959, and the fact that many apparently labour-saving devices actually kept women in the kitchen more. Sadly it seems design itself wasn’t enough to produce massive social change in certain areas.

*On until October 2, 2016.

Designer Sheila’s work finally given spotlight it deserves in exhibition

Wally Dogs

The dedicated life of a designer who forged a long and successful career away from the spotlight is being celebrated – and her wonderful designs receiving a new audience – nine years after her death.

Rugby Art Gallery & Museum is showing an exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Sheila Bownas, a fascinating textile designer, whose works show the different trends of several decades, and also the struggle to succeed as a woman in design.

Sheila moved from her home in Yorkshire to study at the Slade in London in 1946, then after returning home to teach she continued to do freelance designs for organisations including Liberty and Marks and Spencer. She returned to the capital towards the end of the 1950s, and produced work for the Natural History Museum and Botanical Society of the British Isles amongst others, but then she went back to her home village of Linton where she continued to work as a freelance artist.

She did not however give up hope of getting a job in a studio, as a 1959 letter in the exhibition tellingly quotes: “With reference to your desire to obtain a position in our studio, the director feels that should an appointment be made at all, a male designer would be preferable.

Bownas (below) was ‘discovered’ by Rugby-based Chelsea Cefai who bought an archive of 210 textile design prints from an auction while looking for items to decorate her home, and then set off on a quest to find out more about Bownas. Her research has discovered lots of letters and pictures, loaned from the artist’s cousins and god-daughter, as well as more of her work.

sheila bownas

Some early design works show her Linton, its buildings depicted without perspective. There are portraits, carried out to make money during the Slade years, still lifes which she excelled in, and one painting of her mother and cousin which made it into the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.

Early textile designs used plant and fern motifs, and there are some beautiful detailed flower paintings. Some items are also borrowed from the Natural History Museum, where Bownas was commissioned in 1962 to make a series of micro-studies to go with a particular exhibition, and these detailed and delicate works show her skill.

Bownas’s sketch book shows the development of her work which often began as a doodle then got advanced into a sketch on baking parchment paper, then a painting.

There are three large walls of the exhibition showing her works from different decades; the 1950-59 section includes patterns, and lots of floral motifs, plus ‘wally dogs’ designed to show the popular mantelpiece ornaments of the time, with increasing use of abstracts and a bus scene, probably inspired by trips to the capital. The 1960s works include very bright colours, and still floral, with the 1970s introducing more geometric patterns and bold colours, and then a set that were just black and white gouache.

It’s a fascinating and well researched exhibition showing the creativity and talent behind a life full of making items that were seen in public, but with the designer staying in the shadows.

*On until September 3, 2016.

Sculpture in city church is a poignant return for Coventry artist George Wagstaffe

A Coventry artist has returned to a church where two pieces of his work already stand, to create a new sculpture which was blessed today.

George Wagstaffe has made a new water stoup for St Mary Magdalen Church in Chapelfields in Coventry, the ‘church with the blue roof’ on the corner of St Thomas Whites and Hearsall Lane.

An exhibition of his recent work including preliminary drawings for the design of the stoup, plus some older pieces, were put on show at a cheese and wine evening in the church’s Magdalen Centre, where George was also present to talk to parishioners about his work.

His works already in the church are a tall stand for the Paschal Candle, and a Mary Magdalen sculpture, which was dedicated on September 28 2003. George was working on this when the Twin Towers were attacked in New York on September 11 2001, and this influenced his work, with the bronze cast to reflect the light to appear as if she is weeping. A personal tragedy influenced his planning for the stoup, as during the 18 months he was working on it he was caring for his ill wife, and then mourning her loss.

Some of his paintings from this time reflect this, with previous motifs of a woman and horse returning, but now with the waters of separation flowing between them, and a trinity of trees on the hill, in one piece called Atonement.

George said the eventual design for the stoup, which is cast in bronze, represents the wood of the Cross, the sun and the moon which are a constant, and when worshippers dip their fingers in they are touching the thorns of the crown of thorns from the crucifixion. The design includes the constant flow of water, and laurel leaves.

The design is detailed and meaningful, and comes from deep personal feelings and a lifetime of work in Coventry, and fits in well with George’s two other sculptures in the church. It was blessed in a service at 10am today.

Visiting Professor explores travellers through distance and time in exhibition

A Professor of Fine Art from Madrid University is exhibiting in what is now being called the Lanchester Research Gallery

The gallery, which is inside Coventry University’s Graham Sutherland building on the corner of Cox Street in the city centre, is showing Transits and Crossings: New Works on Paper by Pilar Montero, who is currently Visiting Academic Fellow in Visual Arts Research at the university.

The works are divided into three sections, and “explore the aesthetic potential of the contemporary nomadic condition”, with Montero apparently looking back to travellers in eighteenth century Europe: Pasavant in England, Ponz in Holland, England, France and Belgium, and Goethe in Italy, to look at the alienation and pursuit of knowledge that travelling artists confront.

Mirrors is along one wall, a series of attractive photographs of the surface of water from different distances, with something red reflected in it.

Variations of Vocabulary is a selection of pictures of poppies with words flying through, plus dozens of scraps of cloth with words on piled on the floor. Other scraps with words are seen hanging on a washing line.

Little Shoes on Paper is a huge wall covered with what look like tiny, fragile shoes, again with different words written in them, showing a huge attention to detail and craft. Another wall features four large black and white paintings.

It’s an exhibition which makes you think, and it’s good to see the gallery space open again. The exhibition is on until August 19.

After 50 years, Pickford is a worthy successor to update the Warwickshire Pevsner

The definitive guide to the buildings of Coventry and Warwickshire has been revised after 50 years – and was launched at a venue chosen with some significance by the revising author.

The Buildings of England Warwickshire, by Chris Pickford and Nikolaus Pevsner was launched at the Governor’s House at the Chamberlaine Almshouses in Bedworth.

Mr Pickford, formerly Bedfordshire archivist, who has spent six years revising the 1966 original by Pevsner, said he had considered many grand houses for the launch before deciding on the almshouses just off Bedworth’s pedestrianised precinct (above).

He said: “Some of you who knew the old book will understand why. Pevsner called Bedworth a ‘depressing small town’ and dismissed its buildings in 16 small lines. He gave two lines to these wonderful Almshouses.”

He said many more buildings had been included in this revision and he aimed to right wrongs where necessary – Bedworth now has three and a half pages, including an engraving of the Chamberlaine Almshouses from 1839, and a suggested perambulation around the town to take in the sights.

Mr Pickford said Warwickshire had many places such as Warwick and Stratford to attract tourists, but he added: “One of the other reasons we have come to Bedworth is the north is less well known than the south. This is a county of immense richness and what we are saying is don’t ignore the north.”

He grew up in Warwickshire, and said he first explored the county’s buildings with the original Pevsner volume as his guide. A sixth form work experience at Warwickshire’s county record office set him off on a career in the archives.

Speaking at the launch, Charles O’Brien from Yale University Press (below right with author) said Chris Pickford had helped him with the Bedfordshire revision, which led to him being asked to revise Warwickshire. He said: “We were keen that we confound people’s expectations by finding buildings people knew nothing about and we think we have fulfilled that aim amply this evening.”

The 801-page book explores the county and Coventry in depth, commenting on the history and architecture of buildings. It covers churches, public buildings, plus other structures such as folly towers, toll houses, railway viaducts, mansions and other houses. There are walks around towns included so readers can use it to explore places.

Artworks and memorials inside buildings are also described and commented on, with an index of architects and artists so you can locate work by those you are interested in. The new version is also two and a half times the size of the first, so is a thorough guide to the buildings of the county. Information from the original Pevsner remains and is expanded on where Chris has more to say, though of course many buildings have been or gone since the original. Some of Pevsner’s more waspish comments have been questioned and challenged.

At the launch, Pickford added: “I have been revisiting many places from my youth. I was treading in my own footsteps as well as Pevsner’s and it was great fun meeting people who’d met him on his first visit. They said ‘he was a very rude man’!”

Someone he met at a remote farmhouse told how they had let Pevsner in, then wondered if they should have done, it being just a few days since the Great Train Robbery.

He said he hoped he had brought to the new book 50 years’ knowledge of the county and its buildings, and he in particular wanted to include more information on local architects and their buildings. Having road tested the new volume at various places in the county, it’s certainly true that it now answers many questions about who was the architect or firm behind various buildings.

There are also of course many new buildings included; in Pevsner’s day Coventry University as such did not exist, and there are references to Lanchester College of Technology and the College of Art, but in the new volume it has three pages to itself. Similarly, the University of Warwick had less than a page referring to the plans, but now it also has nearly three pages. Many other new buildings are also of course included for the first time.

• The Buildings of England, Warwickshire, by Chris Pickford and Nikolaus Pevsner is published by Yale University Press at £35.

Strong Rooms are a powerful experience of history in the making

Strong Rooms have come to make their mark in Coventry this week, and call in for an illuminating experience

And enjoy them from what you find out, rather than focusing on the slightly confusing story of what’s behind them.

After a week in Rugby, two shipping containers are in University Square, opposite the cathedral steps, until Monday, July 18, for a project called Strong Arms. They seem to be part of a number of different things though – a leaflet describes Strong Arms as a new project by artist Mohammed Ali and Soul City Arts, developed by Archives West Midlands and Arts Connect, the Bridge organisation for the West Midlands and Arts Council England Lottery Funding.

It’s also described in a press release from Crisis Skylight Coventry and Warwickshire as a project delivered with The Herbert Museum and Art Gallery as part of Art in Crisis 2016, with work by Coventry-based artists who have experienced homelessness.

However it is defined it’s an interesting dip into history and art in one go, with research carried out at West Midlands archives.

On the outside of one container, Ali has painted, in his graffiti, street art style, Dorothie Feilding, who was born at Newnham Paddox near Rugby, a child of the Earl of Denbigh, but who went on to drive ambulances in the First World War.

Inside one of the containers, he has painted six portraits of people from the West Midlands, some well known and others not. They include Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the composer who had an African father, and Coventry-born Colonel Wyley who is well known for leaving the Charterhouse to the city, but I didn’t know he was the founder of the Coventry and Warwickshire Society of Artists in 1912. There’s also Emma Sproson, born in West Bromwich, who became a suffragette, and Scottish-born Mary Macarthur who led women chainmakers in Cradley Heath in a fight for a fair wage in 1910.

The floors and walls are covered with old, detailed maps of parts of the Midlands, and there’s also atmospheric sound effects, and a film of a poem being read in a field.

The other container shows works by Midlands artists who have experienced homelessness. There’s some ‘Lost’ posters, featuring various places on earth, including the Temple of the Sun, Baalbek, Syria, marked as “Destroyed”, and the Sphinx of Giza.

A desk has been beautifully customised with cut outs of tiny feet, flowers, with letters sticking out of the drawers and what look like fezs hanging from the ceiling. A huge collage of people and artefacts also brightens one wall.

There is a work, The Book of Known Thieves, 1895-1910, inspired by an archival document which contained information on 1,400 people from Aston in Birmingham who came before the courts in Warwickshire, and were recorded in it.

As a project to promote use of the archives it make a good point of what of interest can be found there; it’s a shame that (in Coventry at least) the opening hours and days of archives are being continually cut back to make it harder to visit and explore.

The Art in Crisis Coventry project continues with an exhibition at the Glass Box in the city centre from July 18-28, by Crisis clients who have worked with photographer Jamie Gray to explore the city, and Pride & Perusal at The Urban Coffee Company at Fargo from July 18-29, a mixed media exhibition celebrating the work of Crisis clients in Coventry in 2015-16.

The New Art Gallery has a trio of great reasons to visit now

The Garman Ryan Collection at The New Art Gallery in Walsall means it’s always worth a visit, but the temporary exhibitions on at the moment make now an extra good time to go.

The Humble Vessel on the top floor looks at the symbol of the simple boat as depicted by various artists through time, and made relevant now by sights of refugees fleeing so often by boat.

It includes a newly-commissioned work by Pakistani artist Fazal Rizvi, a three-screen video installation of what looks like a small fishing boat from anywhere in the world bobbing about on the water. There are concrete boats which will be going nowhere, by Bob and Roberta Smith, and in an 1873 painting by Jules-Ėmile Saintin a woman in black looks sadly out to sea, a reminder that the waters have often taken lives.

Eric Ravilious’s Storm is a wonderfully blowy, colourful work, and there are other appealing depictions of boats and harbours from the past century. The exhibition ends on July 24, but is worth toiling up to the top floor to visit.

The more recently opened Land, Sea and Air takes as its starting point artists who have used maps as their source material. The exhibition brings together works by seven international artists using maps in very different ways.

You can get pleasantly lost in Frank Bowling’s huge colourful Map Paintings, made between 1967-71 – if you step back parts of the world can be seen through the vivid and attractive colours.

Cornelia Parker’s works show a series of London street maps with burns in them from a meteorite which came down in Namibia in 1836, which has been heated and then burnt over the various locations.

Tiffany Chung’s mixed installation includes photography, a map on the wall showing a timeline, and pieces from history to tell the story of her father, shot down in a mission during the Vietnam war and held prisoner for her entire childhood. It’s a moving and intriguing work.

Shilpa Gupta’s There is No Border Here is very relevant because of recent and ongoing events. It’s a poem on the wall talking of battle, conflict and love, beautifully written in tape which reads “there is no border here”.

These are the highlights of a fascinating exhibition.

Finally, if you think you’ve seen the Garman Ryan collection enough times, think again. As part of a three-year partnership, there are interventions in the collection from the Tate. A total of 16 works from the Tate have been paired with the gallery’s own pieces, related by either artist, theme or subject matter.

It’s fascinating to wander around and read the interesting booklet which investigates the ideas behind these links. Sometimes it’s similarities in theme – there are two paintings of Suffolk with different sky scenes, by John Nash and John Constable, for example.

In other cases it’s the same artist – an oil and a watercolour landscape by Camille Pisarro, and a bronze sculture and ink drawing by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. There are also other big name artists featured – Picasso, Braque, Rodin, Modigliani, Degas, Gainsborough, Freud, Epstein, Eric Gill, and Odile Redon. One comparison puts a Bernard Leach fruit bowl from 1955 with a Solomon Islands fruit bowl from the nineteenth or twentieth century. My favourite is the huge Raoul Dufy painting of The Wheatfield from Tate paired with a much smaller Harvest Scene watercolour from Walsall.

It’s a great set of exhibitions to enjoy and explore in one building.

Summer is here for artists at Deasil gallery in Leamington, anyway

The Summer Exhibition at Deasil in Leamington brings together some artists from their stable of regulars whose works are shown in venues such as restaurants around the Midlands, plus some newer artists.

With pieces by about 14 people on show there is quite a variety of themes and styles of working.

Coventry-based artist Nancy Upshall has three pieces here, including the oil painting Twisted Flax, a small work with a concentration on the turns in a material, and a larger work, Motley.

Susannah Rourke’s April Showers (above) are four paint and mixed media works of splashes of movement and colour, which can be rearranged into a different pattern if preferred, as can another set called Here I Am.

Chris Putt’s large digital print of St Ives is recognisably the resort, with colour added to the buildings. Stuart Ellis’s Sea Moon (top) has a gold base, with purples, oranges and golds going up into the sky, and is very effective.

Sonia Bublaitis’s works are very colourful, with vivid paint patterns on Perspex. In contrast, Mark Allan is showing close-up wildlife photographs to make the keen amateur envious.

Paul Jordan’s City Limits (above) is a mixed media piece, with buildings drawn in black lines over a board on which newspaper has been stuck, and painted over white. You can tell it’s recently done from the headlines about Johnson and May visible underneath.

It’s another enjoyable and varied exhibition from the gallery which changes its exhibitions every three weeks.

Coventry University art degree show preview – don’t miss this year’s exhibition

It’s that time of the year when the studios and classrooms are thrown open, and Coventry University final year students welcome in their guests to see what they’ve created after several years of study.

This year I’ve had a sneak preview of what’s on offer ahead of the Friday opening night, and there’s some interesting stuff (in the top floor and basement anyway – I confined myself to just the two floors).

On the top floor a warning about content unsuitable for the young or easily offended is the first thing you see. The works nearby of Cheuk Man Li, from Hong Kong, are quite shocking and vivid in their depictions of strange human-like people contorting their naked bodies and interacting unpleasantly. Scenes of torture come to mind. For once the warning is valid!

Children may also need to be kept away from the collaborative works by Ryan Williams and Liam Pattison who are also showing individually in the basement. Described here as Pat and Willy, with the work called Ourinal, it features five urinals on the wall, with film of them together above. One holds a heavy tool over the other laying on the floor, they pass the tool to each other endlessly, they play a game in their underpants and more – it’s daft and fun.

Less shockingly, there are some good paintings. Emma Phillips’s acrylic paintings are all about atmosphere and show empty rooms and settings seemingly waiting for some action to appear.

Renata Juroszova’s work concentrates on femininity and domesticity, with scarcely-formed or glimpsed women dressing or bathing.

Decay features quite strongly, with Amelia Horton rescuing a rotting chair for part of her work, and designs on tiles coming away to add to the distraught look of the work. Natalie Seymour has created a digital photo collage of falling down and rotting buildings entwined in an attractive and impressive display which makes you want to keep looking deeper.

Cheuk Hin Li (brother of the first artist mentioned) has followed his sibling’s interest in political matters but less obviously shockingly, doing a number of attractive, sympathetic portraits of a young woman who is apparently a student leader in Hong Kong.

Rebecca Stansbie is from the Black Country and has created some small watercolour and fine liner works depicting buildings in Cradley Heath; some are homely but many are showing wear and tear, or outright dereliction. They’re very attractive works.

Daniel Smart’s large paintings show people, scenery and large areas of dense painting; they’re intriguing and make you want to linger. There’s one at the top of this blog, and one here.

Zoe Harwood has termed herself a walking artist, and uses ‘socially engaged practice’ to explore areas with her father and record them in pictures and documents.

In the basement, the sight of the first work makes you think you’ve wandered into the wrong room. Rob Hamp’s massive installation, which you can walk around, is in some ways a woodworker’s studio, with benches, clamps and tools, but some boards are bent over in a very stress-inducing way. It’s called All He Wanted Was a Garden.

Ryan Williams has created another installation of a small child, his sides filled with home DIY filler, staring up at a climbing frame which is painted with anti-bill posting paint. Gillian Dixon’s work is a contrast, small ceramic forms hanging over a pattern in seeds.

No one’s going to walk off with Liam Pattison’s work (above) easily. There are two walls, with hands reaching out from each to shake, and more filler, plus a model of himself naked entombed in a concrete block. I hope someone’s worked out how to lift it upright by Friday!

Bethany Jones has memorialised her grandmother with old photos and text, and a recreation of a comfy sitting room, with ceramic balls representing thoughts. Abigail Dixon has refashioned her room as a lot of metal frames, removing all the material in between to strip it down to basics.

I was privileged to have two expert guides on my quick sneak tour of the exhibition which might have enhanced my experience more than the plastic cup of wine I usually tour it with on opening nights, but these two floors anyway seemed to offer a really good mix of works, with lots of different and interesting ideas.

Don’t miss it!

Á lui le pompon!

“My first painting in 30 years!” says Gérard Mermoz, with an enigmatic smile, referring to Paysage, which has won the Coventry Open 2016, now on exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery.

In fact, Mermoz – artist, curator and provocateur – has subjected the notion of painting and the aura of the individual work of art to multiple levels of deconstruction, with the crucial involvement of the exhibition’s organisers at Culture Coventry.

The work is an appropriation – a ‘found’ painting complete with indecipherable signature, subjected to some interventions by Mermoz, chiefly with a sharp implement. For the exhibition poster, and the brochure, the gallery has severely cropped this rather small painting, converting it from landscape to portrait format.

Then, in his speech at the opening Chris Kirby, director of exhibitions at Culture Coventry, called the work ‘Passage’ – a term freighted with significance. This is not so much a work in the Coventry Open, as a work involving the Coventry Open.

The neo-conceptual project, with its subversion of the art object, is widely regarded as having long ago run it course. This splendid collaboration suggests that there may still be just a flicker of life in the genre.

(This was an intervention in the landscape of this blog.)

Private View II

A look at the art world of Coventry, Warwickshire and beyond by Julie Chamberlain