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Meadow Sward, Oil on Gesso Board Floral Landscape Painting by Ffiona Lewis, 2023

2023

Ffiona Lewis was born in London but grew up in Devon, now dividing her time between her studios near the River Debden in Suffolk and London. She studied at the Polytechnic of Central...

Buildings and Lamp, Oil on Board Painting by John Christopherson, 1977 Additional information: Medium: Oil on board 35 x 44 cm 13 3/4 x 17 3/8 in Signed with initials; signed again and inscribed verso; further inscribed on an Artist's label attached verso John Christopherson was a painter of small dreamlike townscapes and abstract paintings that combine an almost naïve intensity with great sophistication. Born in Blackheath, London in 1921, Christopherson began his working life at Shell-Mex House in 1938, the period when Jack Beddington, the manager of the publicity department was pioneering the use of modern art in advertising. After a wartime illness, Christopherson worked at County Hall in London, choosing for his office wall a print of Paul Nash's Wood on the Downs and Nash's primeval landscapes and magical moons were later to have a lasting influence on Christopherson's own paintings. In 1950, while working as a civil servant at the Geological Museum in South Kensington, he became interested in the French Art Brut movement and corresponded with Jean Dubuffet, who offered encouragement when Christopherson himself began to paint. John Christopherson felt that his life in art did not really begin until 1950, when he met Jacob Epstein and started to visit West End galleries - he said that it was a revelation that 'such a magical world co-existed on the same level and at the same time as the boring, prosaic one of rationing, coupons and the civil service', and he determined to enter it. He said that his annus mirabilis was 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. This was the time when his tastes and interests were moulded and when he found his vocation. In 1959, he resigned from his appointment in the civil service at the Geological Museum and became a full-time painter. From boyhood he was fascinated by the idea of antiquity. He was always interested in ancient stones, pavements, mosaics, archaeological sites, walls and buildings which had gradually changed and been eroded by time. Walls with faded posters and graffiti particularly attracted him - he treasured and identified himself with what he described as the 'forlorn poetry of the unregarded'. Christopherson's pictures linger in the memory. His image world is a distillation of cultural debris sifted with poetic intensity. His pictures are a microcosm of his tastes and obsessions. Each small painting is haunted by a sense of déjà vu, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The subtle depths of layers of glazes are incised with the mysterious markings of a private language. Terence Mullaly once described how his works 'convey the impression of a world frozen in a dream'. George Melly...

In this ninth decade of life, and as a working artist for nearly70 years, Suzanne Benton has become interested in the concept of Late Style as described by the literary theorist Edward Said. “Each of us can supply evidence of late works, which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor,” Matisse had it with his renowned paper cuts. While nearly blind, Monet created the water lily paintings as his final legacy to the history of art.  Benton's Late Style arrived as a surprise during the Covid pandemic. The resultant aloneness from sheltering in place brought her to an uncanny level of solitude that only painting could voice. She reached for the purest of colors, and entered a celebratory world to create the Neo-Transcendental paintings titled All About Color. The disappeared narrative came as a surprise. It had been the mainstay of the masks and mask tale performances, monoprints and paintings. This time though, the artist needed to bring a vibrancy to canvas, and to make tangible this sense of sheer essence that had pressed into her inner self in that time of stillness. Well educated in color by John Ferren, the abstract expressionist painter who’d taught the year’s color study at Queen College. The sensitivity developed further through four lengthy art-working journeys to India, starting in 1976-77, continuing with a 1992-1993 Fulbright, and additional South Asia residencies in 1995, and 2011. Those and others in Africa brought an ever more attuned palette to decades of monoprints with Chine collé that featured imagery from world culture, as well as her Americana of 19th and 20th century women writers, educators, suffragists, and feminists. These Late Style artworks explore the cosmic realm. Its deceptive simplicity reminds Benton of Buffie Johnson’s late work. She, an early celebrator of Great Goddess imagery turned to circles in her latter years. similarly, Benton had drawn on rich Goddess imagery since the 1970’s...

"Vivid Bloom" is a contemporary impressionist floral painting showing the ephemeral beauty of a blooming waterlily as it unfolds in mesmerizing detail. In this impressionistic compos...