CHRISTMAS EXHIBITION
Paintings, Prints, Ceramics and Sulpture
by Gallery and C20th Artists
25 November - 22 December 2023
TOBIT ROCHE
28 October - 18 November 2023
We are delighted to be presenting the sixth solo exhibition of paintings by Tobit Roche at The Art Stable. It is always wonderful to have Tobit’s romantic paintings covering the gallery walls, conveying so well his passion for nature and beauty. In this exhibition, the colours are heightened, and the focus will be on the mountains of India, as well as our own smaller, but much loved, Hambledon Hill.
As a teenager growing up in India, I was often exposed to magical mountainscapes, particularly when journeying to the Himalaya, and its foothills or travelling by train through the Aravalli Range in Rajasthan. These memories have stayed with me, inspiring many subsequent visits, and not least turning India for me into a kind of spiritual home.
In these recent paintings, I’ve tried to reconnect with this landscape of memories, and it is within the hills and mountains of India, that I find a compelling vehicle for self expression.
JOHN RIDGEWELL (1937-2004)
28 October - 18 November
John Ridgewell was an Essex native, who studied alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj at the Royal College of Art, before leaving to become a professional artist and occasional tutor. From an early, successful show at the New Arts Centre in 1962 (from which the Government Collection bought Deserted Harbour) Ridgewell exhibited widely during his lifetime. He and his family moved around England, from Yorkshire to Suffolk, via Dorset, his surroundings creeping into and influencing his paintings. From the gestural, heavier treatment of paint in his student days, inspired by the solid clay cliffs of the Yorkshire coast, his works became lighter in terms of colour, but more intensely intricate in their subject matter. Their delicacy was built up with brushes and a palette knife, and one can see the marks of his working in the paint itself.
DOROTHY AND ROBERT BRADBURY
Spanish Landscapes
9 - 29 September 2023
The Art Stable is delighted to be presenting a third exhibition of work by Robert (1912-2011) and Dorothy (1913-80) Bradbury, the last one being in 2020, paintings that are full of energy, colour, and the warmth of the Spanish Sun. They moved to Deia in Mallorca from the United States in 1950, and their work portrays that wonderful landscape of olive trees, rugged mountains and the beautiful sea. Some winters were spent in Alicante, and paintings of that town also feature in this exhibiton.
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