Balloons and 'This Weekend' posters were put up all along The Grove, Station Plaza and Brook Street.
Billboard fame:
The first of today's guest experiences is from:
Ruth Wightman, oil painter at VENUE 13:
(Did he go through the submissions process?!...)
Hi all
A strange coincidence happened on
Wednesday. As I was leaving Christ Church (VENUE 13 - late, I thought it was 5 and it was
actually 6 ) the wonderful stained glass window on the stairs caught my eye,
the words "Children" at the bottom of the first shield
particularly drew my attention.
The window had been given to the
Church by the Children of Frank and Mary Elisabeth Suddards in their memory in
1940.
After reading this I really looked at
the window and noticed what beautiful drawing and colours make up this
window and remembered that it was once at the front of the alter before the
church gained a floor. The last shield reads "He that was dead came
forth " with rather a creepy image of a bandaged figure shinning out of a
deep blue background.
I'm not religious but those
words kept going through my head on the drive home.
As I neared my house I saw my
neighbour who for a combination of reasons I only see about twice a year and so
I stopped the car to catch up.
When she heard that I was exhibiting
at Christ Church she told me that some of her relatives had given the church a
stained glass window and she was amazed when I knew their first names and what
really astonished me was that Frank was an artist and an Royal Academist ...so I can't help
thinking he came forth!
Regards Ruth
The second Guest reflection is from:
Chris Smith (VENUE 10) on Gillian Gilroy's work at VENUE 13:
One of my favourite works in the trail is this cup cake (as
we seem to be calling them these days) by Gillian Gilroy. It looks painterly
from a distance, but starts to loosen into fragments, strips and flakes of coloured
paper as the eye closes in. The colours are well-judged with each of the three
main complementary pairings present: greens and reds, blues and oranges and
most pleasing of all, a few fragments of grey which hint at purple, surrounded
as they are by yellows and greens.
This might seem fanciful (I am sure it is), but I caught a
sense of ambiguity in the work; between the thing it evidently is, i.e. a cake
in a domestic scene and the possibility of something more monumental. Here is
the case (ahem) for the fanciful idea of the monumental. Firstly the background
is rather map-like, particularly with that curling archipelago form in the top
left corner. There is a horizon line which joins a surface plane containing
fragments of patchwork green. Then there is the cake itself: solid and circular, topped by icing and supported
strongly by those column-like flutings of alternating dark and light. Before
you think me totally mad, I remembered what it was that fuelled these thoughts
in my sub-conscious; a painting by William Nicholson of the view of Malaga from
a hillside in 1936.
This has been the last blog of 2012 Art Trail. I hope you have enjoyed it!
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