Recently we’ve have a bit of a clear-out of our mount stock in the workshop, and so we’re selling packs of 10 mount board scraps for £2.50 a pack – we have a very limited amount of these packs and so come in as soon as possible, as once they’re gone, they’re gone! They include all sorts of colours and finishes, in many different sizes, and so there is plenty of variety in between each pack, as each one is different from the rest.
SPRING IS LIKE A PERHAPS HAND
Jason McCoy Gallery is pleased to present Spring is Like a Perhaps Hand, a virtual exhibition featuring a diverse group of works by four artists: Mary Flinn, Dori Latman, Laurie Heller Marcus, and Andra Samelson. The theme of the exhibition is inspired by E. E. Cummings’s poem of the same title, which reads as follows:
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and
without breaking anything.
Influenced by her many years as a landscape painter, Mary Flinn also draws from her vast experience of studying Mysore-style painting in India and calligraphy in Japan. Lately, her paintings have been a meditation on softening the touch, loosening ideas and letting the fluidity of the medium become a vehicle. It is her ambition to explore how form can remain open, translucent and porous, just as “the way Spring make an appearance in our lives.”
During the pandemic, Dori Latman used the ritual of daily artmaking as a tool to cope with disorienting feelings of grief and loss. It was a means to chart her presence in the moment and to build a bridge between her internal and external worlds, allowing her to move through feelings instead of getting stuck inside them.” My practice is a form of catharsis, transforming painful feelings into something more transitory. For me, grief and loss is not something I can carry alone. Sharing with others, finding ways to contextualize a private practice, is part of the work.”
Fusing words with images that are derived from her small-scale paintings and works on paper, Laurie Heller Marcus creates stirring visuals that belong to a category all their own. Neither documentary nor narrative, her works translate as personal everyday contemplations that occasionally touch on classical mythology. She states: “Tailoring outsized stories onto small panels or canvases, I paint to locate myself in this piercing and mutable world and share my perception with others. Signs, symbols, ancient and iconic art, performances, advertisements, all are free to evolve beyond familiar associations.
Andra Samelson is a multimedia artist whose work is inspired by the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm, the celestial and terrestrial. She notes: “My artwork pays homage to the great mystery of the sky and the way microcosm and macrocosm mirror each other. I use imagery often associated with atomic and galactic systems. I often work with the circle, a symbol of infinity, perfect and endless, referencing both metaphysical concepts and circular forms in nature from the structure within a cell to the display of the starry universe. My work explores the space between things, in gaps and openings that articulate a vibrant openness as I orchestrate the compositions of my paintings to activate this empty space.”
What A Lovely Day for A Royal Wedding!
May 19, 2018
To mark this wonderful day for Prince Harry and Meghan Marckle, we have a window of lovely local scenery in order to celebrate how great and picturesque Kent is. as well as throwing in some wedding themed cards in order to commemorate the big day!
Our Kentish window features pieces from Graeme Lothian and Christopher Jarvis as well as antique re-prints of local maps of Kent, and our other window features artwork from Nigel Cooke and prints from Dirty Hans
Everyone here at the Art Shop hopes that you had a fab time watching the Royal Wedding and enjoying the sunshine, and we hope to see you soon!
Have a Heroic Summer!
May 5, 2018
Here at the art shop we’re super excited for the release of the the biggest summer blockbuster of 2018, Avengers: Infinity War, and so we decided to theme our window around superheroes in order to celebrate! Our window features prints from Dirty Hans and work from Nigel Cooke.
Avengers: Infinity War is available for viewing at the Stag Theatre now
We hope you have a great summer and enjoy all of this glorious weather too. while it lasts! However, please be aware that we’re closed for Bank Holiday Monday
Springtime Celebrations
March 10, 2018
It’s officially Spring here in the Art Shop, and we’re fully underway in celebrating it’s many festivities! We have plenty of Mother’s Day cards in stock for that last minute “panic buy”, but mostly our shop is all prepared for Easter!
Our Easter themed window, as pictured above, features art products that we sell in store in a range of Springtime colours, as well as work from Sam Toft, Debbie Boon, Graeme Lothian and Penny Lindop.
We’ve also decided to dedicate a whole window to the increasingly popular Quentin Blake illustrations; being nostalgic and full of humor, they would make a perfect gift for Mother’s Day or Easter.
We’d love to see you in the shop sometime soon, so why not come and take a look at the amazing pictures that we have in the gallery?
The Romantics found a potent symbol for the experience of standing on the threshold between an interior and the outside world – Sabine Rewald
For the next five centuries, Western art adhered to the concept that a picture functions like a window onto the world. The painting’s frame replicates a window frame; the flat picture plane becomes an illusion of a real scene. And works that include representations of windows within their constructed realities allow for even further play upon this illusionism. In Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c 1433-34), for instance, the artist’s skilful articulation of space helps to persuade the viewer that Rolin’s audience with the Virgin and Child could actually have taken place. The room and the figures look real. This realism is furthered by the vista through the arched windows, which reveals an adjoining garden and far-reaching, exquisitely detailed landscape. Aside from its symbolic meaning (and the painting is suffused with Christian symbolism), the triple aperture allows light and air to fill the room. It also draws the viewer’s eye, aided by the two observers on the balcony, to the bucolic surroundings.
In Van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, the window and the flat picture plane create an illusion of a real scene (Credit: Getty Images)
While the window appears in paintings throughout the early-modern period, it was at the beginning of the 19th Century that it took on a more self-standing role and new meaning. As Sabine Rewald writes in the catalogue Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century, published to accompany a 2011 exhibition at The Met, in the open window motif, “the Romantics found a potent symbol for the experience of standing on the threshold between an interior and the outside world”. Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was Germany’s most renowned Romantic painter and the first to capitalise on the motif’s poetic potential. This power of suggestion is embodied in his Woman at a Window of 1822.
The painting depicts a figure looking out of an open casement onto a river, which, aside from a brief strip of blue, is indicated by the masts and rigging of two boats. Art historians have identified the room as Friedrich’s home studio on the River Elbe in Dresden, and the model as his wife, Caroline. Situated with her back to us, the woman’s slight figure and the softness and sheen of her dress emphasise the stark vastness of the architecture, just as the interior’s dark hues are balanced by the light and vitality of the natural landscape. Though even in this instance, the small strip of bright-green foliage and row of poplar trees, visible through the casement’s modest opening, are contrasted with the expanse of blue sky seen through the large glass panes above.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at a Window (1822) was the first to realise the symbolic possibilities of the open window motif (Credit: Getty Images)
These pictorial contrasts, combined with the enigmatic image of a figure with her back turned to us, have meant that the work has elicited multiple interpretations, from connoting religious passage, to expressing confinement and longing. Certainly, the not-unpleasant yearning for another place or time was characteristic of Romanticism, as was the belief in individual expression and subjective emotion. The mastery of Friedrich’s work is that it allows for all these readings. Perhaps most relevant for our current times is that, in its representation of a woman looking through a window to the outside world, this image of pensive quietude also evokes a profound sense of possibility.
Painters of modern life
This feeling of possibility is even more acute in Gustave Caillebotte’s Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann. Painted in 1880, the view depicted is from the artist’s apartment in Paris, and is representative of the Impressionists’ impulse to portray scenes of contemporary life. Man on a Balcony records the new, modern metropolis following Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of the old city at the request of Napoleon III. Characteristic of the Haussmann style are the stately, cream-coloured apartment buildings, with their mansard roofs and balconies, which line the boulevard named in honour of the urban planner. The scene’s incredible vibrancy is, in part, achieved by the contrast between these grand facades and the trees’ sparkling greenery. And even though there are no people visible on the street, the work captures the thrill of city life on a beautiful spring day. It recalls, in pictorial form, part of the opening of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925):
“And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.”
But Caillebotte’s work doesn’t transport us to Mrs Dalloway’s London, or to her family’s country home in Bourton. Instead, it takes us to the Impressionists’ Paris. Our interlocutor to the city is an urban onlooker, a flâneur, as described by Charles Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). This solitary spectator revels in the bustle of the crowd but remains apart. As does the viewer of Caillebotte’s painting. The open window is our mediator between these private and public spaces, just as the balcony unites its occupant with the wider, modern world.
Man on a Balcony (1880) by Gustave Caillebotte portrays the thrill of city life on a spring day (Credit: Getty Images)
