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So far joanna has created 26 blog entries.

An Artist Residency with Sara Dudman RWA

2022-11-18T19:20:29+00:00

Documenting ‘Unearthing’, an artist residency exploring Cranborne Chase AONB through its geology and earth colours.

Sara Dudman’s artwork explores our shifting relationships with the environment.

As well as making her own new body of work, Sara has been working with communities to create collaborative paintings and drawings that use carefully selected natural earth pigments foraged from the landscape. The rocks, soil and chalk are being collected and transformed into earth-pigment paint. The artworks will be compiled together to create ‘tapestry-style’ visual stories of Cranborne Chase’s natural environment, geology and history.

An Artist Residency with Sara Dudman RWA2022-11-18T19:20:29+00:00

Dynamic Equilibrium: Part Three

2021-02-26T14:19:32+00:00

Over the last couple of months Joanna Bryant Projects worked with Royal West Academician, Sara Dudman, to create a film looking back at the last five years of her practice.  The film is split into three bitesize parts and the third and final part, ‘Shifting Balances‘ brings us up-to-date with Sara’s practice and most recent paintings, exploring some of the conclusions and pause for thought she is currently contemplating, particularly during the COVID-19 Pandemic, involving truths about nature, the environment and mankind.

Dynamic Equilibrium: Part Three2021-02-26T14:19:32+00:00

Dynamic Equilibrium: Part Two

2021-02-26T14:14:36+00:00

Joanna Bryant worked with Sara Dudman RWA to create a film looking back over the last five years of Sara’s practice.  The film is split into three bitesize parts and the second part, ‘Patterns of Behaviour‘ looks at  the events and ideas that took her on travels around the UK from Shetland to Cornwall, studying the behaviour of migrating birds and further exploring nature, the environment and mankind.    Part three will continue her journey to her most recent paintings and the conclusions or Pause for Thought she is currently facing.

Dynamic Equilibrium: Part Two2021-02-26T14:14:36+00:00

Dynamic Equilibrium: Part One

2021-02-11T11:52:50+00:00

Joanna Bryant worked with Sara Dudman RWA to create a film looking back over the last five years of Sara’s practice.  Starting with her 2016 painting ‘Kittiwakes (Fallen Rock, Cowbar 2)‘ we uncover the drive and subsequent exploration into her subject matter.  The film is broken down into three parts and the first part, ‘A Relationship of All Parts‘ introduces us to the fundamentals of Sara’s practice and the events and ideas that resulted in the first painting that is examined in this film.  Parts two and three follow her journey since 2016, ending up with Sara’s most recent paintings and the conclusions or Pause for Thought she is currently facing.

Dynamic Equilibrium: Part One2021-02-11T11:52:50+00:00

After-Image: An Online Review of the Last Decade with Nikolai Ishchuk

2020-09-23T12:06:38+01:00

For the last decade, Nikolai Ishchuk’s work has explored photography’s ambivalent relationship with the modernist canon and how any attempt to distil the fundamentals of photography puts it in conversation with other media.  An online exclusive show on Artsy, After-Image, reviews his last decade’s work… click here to link to Artsy

Even when working with images in the past – for which he’s won an award from the British Journal of Photography and been selected for Plat(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur – Nikolai Ishchuk has always been more concerned with their structural underpinnings than the narrative specifics. From 2012, the focus of his practice tightened around the expressive possibilities of the very materials of photography and how these open up avenues for cross-pollination with other media, from painting to architecture. Since then, the artist has built up a distinctive and diverse oeuvre of understated complexity and rigour. It ranges from dense surfaces where image fragments disintegrate under a patina of chemical, mechanical and hand applied marks, to ascetic objects and compositions springing from the simplest registrations of light on the print surface. The influence of high modernism and minimalism are evident, but the work never lapses into tropes, instead updating the canon’s legacy with an admission of fragility and the flaws inherent in conjuring something into being.

After-Image is intended to take stock of the artist’s many innovations during this productive period. The term ‘pushing the boundaries’ is often used in relation to practices that seek to extend the possibilities of their chosen media, to the point of having become a cliché. But it implies recognising those boundaries in the first place, whereas Ishchuk decisively moves past them, producing work that’s irreducible to a single thing. In his practice, photography itself becomes an afterimage: an evanescent presence that gives way to something entirely new.

In the last few years, Nikolai’s body of work has been shown in New York, London and Europe, and Nikolai was showcased by us at Photo London in both 2018 and 2019 as a contemporary, emerging artist, engaging with the overlapping worlds of photography, painting and sculpture. In 2020, his work was due to appear in The Stubborn Influence of Painting at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), which has now been rescheduled for Summer-Autumn 2021.

Ishchuk was born in 1982 in Moscow, Russia, and lives in London. He received an MA in Fine Art with Distinction from the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, and previously an MPhil in Social and Political Science from the University of Cambridge, and a BA (Hons) in Economics and Sociology from the University of York. Ishchuk was the first non-documentary photographer to win in the British Journal of Photography Awards. Ishchuk has exhibited internationally, including at such institutions as Whitechapel Gallery, Jerwood Space and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. He was recently recorded for the Tate Audio Arts and has been awarded residencies at Art Omi and MASS MoCA. His work is held in several important collections.

After-Image: An Online Review of the Last Decade with Nikolai Ishchuk2020-09-23T12:06:38+01:00

Studied Simplicity with Laura Jane Scott

2020-03-04T18:42:33+00:00

until May 2020

Aviva HQ, St Helen’s, 1 Undershaft, London EC3P 3DQ

Aviva, the multi-national insurance corporation, has commissioned Laura Jane Scott to complete a body of work for its corporate art collection and is currently showcasing the work in its London Headquarters until the end of May 2020.

Studied Simplicity with Laura Jane Scott2020-03-04T18:42:33+00:00

The Female of the Species with Deborah Lanyon

2020-03-04T19:06:21+00:00

In the 1980’s Deborah Lanyon graduated from art college just as abstract painting was being ridiculed by the art world.  She had a respectable pedigree, having studied under the likes of Frank Bowling and Ken Kiff, growing up on the bohemian Kings Road in the 70’s and living amongst communities of artists – her grandmother had even been drawn by Augustus John.  Yet, despite the scepticism towards what had gone before, her paintings sold well.

In reality, and despite the cynicism of the art world, abstract painting never really went away.  Today a new generation of artists is continuing to pursue abstract painting in even more experimental ways.  It is perhaps because we want to avoid being affronted by disturbing, offensive or intrusive content.  In the technology era, the colour of paint is an antidote to the colour of pixels, and so it grounds us in a more textural reality.  The lack of content in the abstract, except for the materials themselves, allows us a freedom to interpret – a luxury that we are increasingly denied in our media-fed world.  An unstable economy is made stable by pigments of the earth that we can touch.

Historically, the act of painting big paintings was a male expression of genius, whilst women’s artistic creativity was tempered to the pursuit of leisure.  ‘Why are there no great women artists?’, asked art historian Linda Nochlin in her seminal essay of 1971.  Though the tide is finally beginning to turn, we still seem to be asking this question and continue to fight for women to be taken seriously.  Male selection by our institutions and by our taste makers continues to muffle the female voice.

Yet, like other women artists breaking through, the seemingly ‘male’ traits of dedication, devotion to practice and physical endurance are strong in Lanyon’s practice.  Whilst working on the edge of both intellect and vision, Lanyon permits the paint to develop its own identity within her paintings and her large, vibrant and energetic works on canvas are painted on the floor and wall, for which she uses her whole body.

“Painting for me is very physical and I endeavour to exploit it fully.” 

Lanyon joined St Martins when the punk movement was in full force – in fact Johnny Rotten had been a student there. The general attitude was anarchic and rules were to be broken.  Women in the colleges were expected to express feminist angst, using more experimental media such as photography or performance, but certainly not paint. St Martins took a non-pastural approach towards Lanyon, pointing out that because her father had died suddenly when she was 15, she should be well able to cope emotionally with the difficulties of going to art school.

Clearly she had not suffered enough, nor had she much to say in the eyes of the institution, and at the end of her foundation year she was not accepted to continue there. “Perhaps they were right,”she says, “however it did not prevent me from toughening up and reapplying to Byam Shaw a year later”, where the painting department was a lot more experimental and progressive, run by artists like Ken Kiff and Frank Bowling. In defiance, Lanyon adopted the ‘masculine’ attributes of single-mindedness, concentration, tenaciousness and absorption in materials for their own sake.  To be so lucky and to be introduced to colour in such a monumental way, set Lanyon to pursue life as a painter of abstraction.

Through the 1990’s, Deborah Lanyon’s work was shown across London, at the art fairs which were coming into fashion, and in various London galleries including Bruton street, Albemarle and New Bond Street, and by Geoffrey Bertram in Cork Street who also takes care of the Whilemina Barns Graham foundation Trust.  Now, coming back again with a new body of work, Lanyon is showing at the Foundry Gallery in Chelsea, drawing upon four decades in pursuance of abstraction, to give us a feminine version of the enquiry.

‘Inner Landscape’ with Deborah Lanyon

November 19 – 24th, 2019

39 Old Church Street, Chelsea London SW3 5BS

 

The Female of the Species with Deborah Lanyon2020-03-04T19:06:21+00:00

The Female of the Species

2019-11-24T15:01:42+00:00

‘Inner Landscape’ with Deborah Lanyon

November 19 – 24th, 2019

39 Old Church Street, Chelsea London SW3 5BS

Abstract painting continues to endure and seems to be resonating even more today than it did 10 years ago, despite constant attempts by the avant-garde over the last 50 years to quash it.  Deborah Lanyon’s large abstract paintings come from a generation of artists, mostly men, including John Hoyland, Frank Bowling, Howard Hodgkin and Sean Scully.  Like those artists, she works rapidly and physically with canvases positioned on the floor, letting the paint have its own voice.  Yet the feminine subtleties give the work interest and difference from those of the male painters in this genre.  The paintings are the voice of a woman and a reflection of her personality: physical but effortless; dynamic yet soft; harmonious and rhythmic. They have something else to say that gives them a place in the evolution of abstract painting through the last four decades.

Read more…

The Female of the Species2019-11-24T15:01:42+00:00

City of London exhibition highlighted displacement and loss in our transient urban communities

2019-11-03T17:25:24+00:00

The magnificent church of St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London played host to Exiles, a body of work by London-based Italian photographer Matilde Damele (17 – 24 September 2019).

The exhibition was on show during the Open City weekend (21-22 September 2019). Open House London is the world’s largest architecture festival, giving free public access to 800+ buildings, walks, talks and tours over one weekend in September each year.  St Stephen Walbrook opened its doors and took part in the weekend.

Read more…

City of London exhibition highlighted displacement and loss in our transient urban communities2019-11-03T17:25:24+00:00

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