Installation shots of 'Home Ground', Malvern Library Cafe Gallery, May 2022
In May earlier this year I had a solo exhibition, ‘Home Ground’, at Malvern Library where they have a generous exhibition space in the café downstairs. With it just being a space in the café, rather than a traditional gallery, I thought it might be wiser to use the opportunity to hang a lot of my smaller paintings that I don’t have the opportunity to exhibit very often and show a wider range of work, but also with the hope that I may sell a few as these smaller pieces as they are obviously cheaper and therefore might appeal to the casual viewer using the café.
On the advice of an artist friend, however, who lives in Malvern and had exhibited there herself some years before (which is how I knew of the venue), she thought that with the walls being big and the light good from the skylights above I should exhibit some of my larger paintings instead. I eventually decided to go for broke and hang a range of big and small pieces in a ‘salon’ type hang and ended up showing a lot of work. I was also able to present a wider range of my work and interests in different types of landscape, which was very rewarding. I thought it was the best exhibition of my work I had done to date, despite it not being in a proper gallery setting as such, not that I thank that is all that important these days.
I’m always on the lookout for different venues that I think might suit my work and exhibitions in galleries can be very hard to come by, unless they are artist-run ones. Commercial galleries can also be very limited in what they show too. The space at Malvern seemed a good opportunity for a few reasons: my friend’s exhibition had looked good there and she had sold lots of work; the space offered me a rare chance to show a large collection of work, and as I make so much which never has the opportunity to be shown, this appealed, and finally, being based in Malvern, a beautiful town with a lot of culture, history and people interested in the arts, I thought the exhibition might attract more of an audience than other exhibitions. It was also up for 6 weeks, which was great too.
And all these feelings played out and I ended up selling quite a few paintings, particularly some of the large ones which was a nice surprise. But Malvern has some big houses with big walls where some of these ones would have looked great. And I discovered they did when I delivered them to the house of one of the buyers, who bought two, including my favourite painting in the exhibition, ‘The Scent Of Rain’, a landscape beneath Spaghetti Junction, and she kindly sent me some photographs of them hanging in her home later. Another large one. ‘The Island’, was also sold when I wasn’t there, but I never met this buyer.
'The Island', oil on canvas, 70 x 90cms, 2022
'The Scent Of Rain', oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2021
At the end of the exhibition when I went to take it down, I spent an hour or so looking at the work. I felt a bit unsettled by the paintings, especially as there were so many. As I looked over them, with their painterly gestures and mark-making which are directly applied and all on the surface I became so overwhelmingly aware of my own physical presence, my body, my hands and arms and movement, across all the work. They all seemed as much a portrait of me as of anything else. I guess it may seem an obvious point to some, but nonetheless I found the experience somewhat painful and upsetting, as if the paintings were a mask for my internal self.
