CANDIDA STEVENS: WATER & WAYS
Jean Cooke, Cave Painting II, 1965, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Candida Stevens GalleryThe latest exhibition at Candida Stevens’ eponymous Chichester gallery, Water & Ways, is subtitled ‘an exhibition of artworks inspired by Sussex, post war and contemporary’. It acts as an interesting counterpoint to the big autumn show at Pallant House Gallery, just down the road, entitled Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water (see ‘Bill Brandt’s geological nudes’, below).
Several artists are represented in both shows, including Jean Cooke, Paul Nash, Jeremy Gardiner and Ivon Hitchens: we would suggest a morning viewing of the public gallery, with an afternoon trip to the private one, especially if an artist in the former show piques your interest enough to consider a post-prandial purchase.
Jean Cooke’s Cave Painting II, for example, on sale at Candida Stevens, is a companion piece to Cave Painting I, on show at Pallant House.
Cooke was very aware of the precarious nature of the ever-eroding chalk cliffs of the Sussex coast: when her studio cottage in Birling Gap was demolished, in 1995, to prevent it from collapsing into the sea, she moved to the one next door. Her son has described how the family would light fires in coastal caves, a practice which has no doubt influenced the work. Some have pointed to the architectural nature of the entrance in the two Cave paintings, others to its womb-like qualities. Cooke’s quick brushstroke technique helps evoke the impermanent nature of the shelter: the sea water will soon fill the space.
Paul Nash’s 1941 painting, Ironmaster’s Folly, painted shortly after the Battle of Britain, has a similar lurking menace. A swallow flies across a landscape towards the building of the title, but the scene is not as idyllic as it seems. The painter, it has been suggested, is visualising his fear of Nazi invasion, the bird representing a fighter plane, the building a defensive pillbox.
The other artists on Candida Stevens’ walls include Pippa Blake, Kerry Harding, Katherine Le Hardy and Calum McClure. The only 3D work is an early one by Grayson Perry, a glazed earthenware plate entitled Essex, Middlesex, Sussex featuring two anthropomorphic pigeons, and a wintry landscape.