TERESA LAWTON
9 - 29 September 2023
Teresa Lawton grew up in Dorset, roaming freely with dogs and ponies, so that the landscape is rooted deep in her imagination. Living now between Dorchester and the sea, that same landscape, largely unchanged continues to inspire her. And although her paintings are an abstracted and imagined version of the landscape, the stories of Thomas Hardy continue to inspire, even in the abstract.
‘Living in the heart of Thomas Hardy country, his stories feel very familiar to me, his wonderful, beautifully detailed descriptions of the heath and woodlands touch and inspire me. Some of the descriptions are so vivid I feel his presence as I walk the age-old time-trodden paths. So it’s not surprising that my paintings, rooted in the Dorset Landscape, are also entwined somehow with the Wessex landscape described by Hardy.’
CHARLIE BAIRD
The Sea and other Stories
10 June - 8 July 2023
Much of this latest collection of work by Charlie Baird is inspired by visits to some of the furthest points of the British Isles - the Outer Hebrides, Cornwall, Pembrokeshire, as well as the more familiar landmarks of Dorset. Taken from distilled memories of place and time, they aim to capture certain atmospheres and moods of a landscape, revealed with both figurative and more abstracted images.
Although sketches are often made in situ, the bulk of work is gestated in the studio, allowing tangents in colour and composition to occur, whilst working to retain the initial response to a landscape at a particular moment.
DAVID GOMMON (1913-87)
29 April - 27 May 2023
The Art Stable is delighted to be presenting the third solo exhibition of David Gommon’s work, which will include work from the 1930’s when he spent a lot of time in Dorset, including a homage to Tess, through to his later Zen like garden paintings. What is striking about David Gommon’s work is that it consistently expresses an ecstatic joy in the visual world, in the form and colour of the landscape, in song birds and gardens. His was a life in art well lived which expressed directly his own faith in the Creation and certainty that All Shall be Well.
ALEXANDER MASSOURAS
29 April - 27 May 2023
Late Work is a book of forty-one etchings, a postcard and a stone. The etchings comprise three cycles: Midlands, Good and Bad at Waiting and Mine. Together they explore the creation of narrative, particularly aspects of deferral, continuity, and repetition (respectively). The connection between text and image is sometimes clear but sometimes more oblique, an elasticity which nods to the frailty of stories , but which also leaves gaps for the imagination to fill.
PETER ARCHER
Discovering a Friendship: Isaac Levitan and Anton Chekhov
18 March -14 April 2023
Over the last few years things that have interested me about Russia have come very much to the fore. Along with other artists I've got to know the paintings of Isaac Levitan, a 19th century Russian landscapist, who’s work seems to have been neglected in England. While he was alive his paintings, in Russia at least, were described as ‘mood landscapes’. I learnt that he was a close friend of Anton Chekhov, who’s short stories have always resonated with me. Chekhov was born at Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov which is really part of the Black Sea and so close to Ukraine and The Crimea. That friendship between such a writer and such a painter gave and gives me courage.
JAZMIN VELASCO-MOORE (1971-21)
I'm always Hungry: A Memorial Exhibition
18 March - 14 April 2023
Jazmin was born in 1971 in Guadalajara, Mexico, daughter of the famous political cartoonist Joaquín Velasco and niece of two distinguished masked wrestlers, El Apolo and El Diablo Velasco, thus establishing from the beginning her dual approach to life, the artist and the warrior. She became an accomplished martial artist, a black belt practitioner and teacher who saw art and martial art as two aspects of the same thing, the improvement of oneself and of the world around us.
By the age of 18 she was working as a cartoonist in a national newspaper, studied graphic art and illustration and moved to Mexico City where she soon established herself as one of the best-known book illustrators in the country. She moved to London in the year 2000.
Jazmin possessed a formidable talent for drawing, no doubt inheriting the expressive line from her father. She worked fast and never seemed to make a mistake, filling a sketchbook in no time with characters, ideas and stories which would surface later in other media. She had clever hands too, a born crafts-person, picking up challenging techniques with no apparent difficulty, moving from one to another with humour and quiet intelligence.
And then there was that virtue so valuable to the artist. She was fearless. She would relish as much the opportunity to batter men twice her size in the boxing ring as to take on yet another artistic medium. Stone carving for example. She once invited a stone mason to spend a day with her in the studio, bought the tools and spent the next week bashing bits of Portland stone into Mexican gods. Typical Jazmin.
This was all cut short by her tragic and untimely death in 2021. But those of us who were fortunate enough to know her will cherish her memory as a true example of how an artist should live.
Colin Moore
ROBERT MEDLEY RA (1905-94)
Paintings, Drawings and Prints
10 February - 4 March 2023
In June 1994, I had the great pleasure of curating Robert Medley’s last solo exhibition, before he died later that year, a year in which he was also presented with the Charles Wollaston award by the Royal Academy.
This exhibition will include a selection of work from the last twenty years of his life, including some straight edged abstract work of the early 1970’s, collages and screen prints relating to the portfolio illustrating Milton’s Samson Agonistes, published in 1978, a wonderful large oil painting from 1988, as well as drawings from all periods.
As a young man Robert met members of the Bloomsbury Group including Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Grant was particularly encouraging to Robert as an artist and in the 1920’s, when Robert spent time in Paris, he often went sketching with Grant in the Louvre. In the 1930’s, with the ballet dancer Rupert Doone, Robert became involved with the innovative ‘Group Theatre’, working with W.H.Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Benjamin Britten.
After the war, during which he was a camouflage officer based in the Middle East, Robert began to paint again, exhibiting regularly including major retrospectives at the Whitechapel in 1963 and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1984. He was awarded a CBE in 1982.
“What makes Medley’s work so rewarding and unusual is its dexterity. Dexterity in its strict sense refers to an inborn or acquired skill in dealing with, or being at home with, the tangible. Something close to the fingertips. Dexterity also implies panache, a quality of gesture. One can think of the cast of a master fly-fisherman. The stance of a prodigious violinist. The aim from the shoulder of a champion billiard player. Medley’s paintings have the concentration and elegance of such performances.” This was written by John Berger, the art critic, poet and novelist. While selecting this exhibition we found in the estate, a wonderful drawing of John Berger which we have included in the show.
CHRISTOPHER RIISAGER
4 February - 4 March 2023
Through 2021 and 2022, Christopher Riisager has continued his search for new subjects with which to challenge his working practice as a landscape painter. As well as continuing to revisit favourite old haunts at home, looking for new compositions and fresh insights into the familiar, his travels to Sicily and Northern Ireland have provided new vistas to extend his exploration of old motifs.
The peace of ruins, be they the Tonnaras and abandoned, crumbling canning factories in the inescapable noonday heat of Sicily's north coast, or the melancholy sleep of Antrim's castles Dunluce or Dunseverick.
Cliffs and mountains, the ruins of nature's ceaseless war, also continue as a strong and rewarding theme. The studies of the cliffs and stacks at Whiterocks, near Portrush, complement and extend those of Portland's bluffs and quarries.
And there are echoes too, inland. The baking fields of the farmland of Piano Neve, and the big silent wheatfields of the Wiltshire Downs. The dry hot summer of 2022 seemed to extend the experience of Sicily's sunshine and colour. The brown and pink fields of Southern England never looked so Italian, or the trees so black at midday.
Whatever the intensity, where there is light there is colour, and a subject for painting. The self-illuminated streets of Trapani or Fortuneswell, the cool greens of Ireland or Dorset woodlands, both home... and away.
CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION
A Mixed Exhibition of Gallery Artists
Paintings, Prints and Ceramics
26 November - 17 December 2022
C20th PAINTINGS DRAWINGS AND PRINTS
22 October - 12 November 2022
Including work by Eileen Agar (1899-1991), Frank Graham Bell (1910-43), Elizabeth Blackadder (1931-2021), David Bomberg (1890-1957), Dorothy Bradbury (1913-80), Robert Bradbury (1912-2011), John Buckland Wright (1897-1954), Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002), Prunella Clough (1919-99), Michael Cullimore (1936-2021), Mary Fedden (1915-2012), Elisabeth Frink (1930-93), David Gommon (1913-87), Spencer Gore (1978-1914), Albert Irvin (1922-2015), Mary Jewels (1886-1977), Michael Kenny (1941-2000), Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970), Theo Mendez (1934-97), Robert Medley (1905-94), Bruce McLean (b.1944), Paul Nash (1889-1946), Ben Nicholson (1894-1982), Henry Rayner (1903-1957), John Ridgewell (1937-2004), Elliott Seabrooke (1886-1950), Peter Sedgley (b.1930), Peter Snow (1927-2008), Adrian Stokes (1902-72), Rowland Suddaby (1912-72), Fred Uhlman (1901-85), Keith Vaughan(1912-77), Carel Weight (1908-1997).