EXHIBITION
Things being various
James Anderson’s exhibition is named after a line from the poem Snow by Louis MacNeice: “World is crazier and more of it than we think, …incorrigibly plural …The drunkenness of things being various.”
These lines evoke the suddenness of the poet’s realisation of the contrasts and diversity and plurality of the life around him; of life itself.
James’s work – large, painterly, colour-dense carborundum abstracts, delicate etchings and graphic, layered wood-cuts – suggest a very literal expression of “things being various”. But the joy of the show is not (simply) in this display of printmaking craft, it is in the artist’s ability to tease out a scatter of moods and images that visualise a world within: his world. These are works that seem to capture the most fleeting of inspirations – the colours of the Atlas mountains, a view seen through the inside of a friend’s house, the fall of a shadow under a tree – interpreted through the solidity of print.
MacNeice’s poem begins with the words, “The room was suddenly rich”, and there’s a sense of that suddenness, that ephemeral shock of memory/joy/excitement/drama in much of the work. James’s strength is his ability to create images that reflect that suddenness; they feel as though they’d just burst into his consciousness; the prints shout, “see what I see, feel what I feel”. He has the craftsman’s ability to work with, and create work, born of the studied carefulness of printmaking (layer upon layer of ink and chine-colle paper and acid eating into metal and hard steel gouging into slabs of wood) that has been coaxed to yield rich emotional immediacy.
James has said that it was only after his introduction to printmaking that his innate creative sensibility was able to express itself; that, as he puts it, “the possibility of art could exist”. He is an artist for whom the idea and its execution are so closely interlinked that one could not exist without the other or to retreat to an old cliche, “the medium is the message”.
And herein lies the tension that electrifies all his work: the synaptic spark of ideas. The work is grounded in the cerebral, philosophical truths of a poem (akin to Gombrich’s reference to “the possibility of metaphor [in art]”). And at the same time, as the visual reality of the work– the “ocular truth” – suggests, it is effortlessly free, “lively” (his word) and expressionistic.
In his inner world, of things being various, the cerebral is merged with the celebratory.
– text by Lee Johnson
Selection of work
Brushworks 2
This is one of two prints (Brushstrokes 1 and 2) which differ only in the colour range. As the title suggests I was interested in the way brushstrokes have their own emotional and expressive language; in this print influenced by the different colours and printmaking techniques.
Blue Green March 2023
This print is one of a number of recent prints exploring and exploiting the expressive potential of the printmaking technique known as carborundum relief printing. This was developed by the French American artist Henri Goetz (1909 – 1989) in the 1960s who introduced it to a number of other artists notably Joan Miro. Miro wrote to Goetz saying ‘the results are fascinating and very beautiful. The artist can express himself with more richness and freedom…which gives a beautiful substance and a more powerful line’.
More Exhibitions
All exhibitionsThe light sees the paper
Kristen Nelson’s prints and photographs explore memory. A feeling of nostalgia and visual references to a remembered landscape connect with home. Using aquatint, a painterly, tonal technique and black and white photography, Nelson’s work illuminates the idea of returning home through the interplay between light and shadow.
To carry a feeling
An exhibition of monoprints. A mark feels like a letter in the landscape of encoded things. It is an archaeology of feeling and locating through the process of making.
Peripheral Vision
Lucy Annan’s prints explore what is on and beyond the the edge of the block or plate, the areas that are in your peripheral vision. They work up to, or blur the edge, they introduce half discernible shapes beyond.