The St Leonards Four

The St Leonards Four at the Kave Gallery

There are many ways in which you might experience an art exhibition.  You may feel overwhelmed by sheer technical brilliance, moved by a depth of vision on the part of the artist, or challenged by work which is beyond your comfort zone.  All can be rewarding experiences.  However, every now and then you get to visit a show where you WANT all the pieces on display.  This is one of them.  HOT reporter Cathy Simpson comments on the current exhibition at the Kave Gallery.

The observation has been made that: “This is not Art for the furrow brow crowd.  This is Art for the mischievous lovers of life.”  All the work is full of humour, or colour, or just pure delight.

St Leonard’s and Hastings are rightly celebrated in Scott Garrett’s work:

This is just a very small sample of Scott’s work, which is colourful, humorous and ranges from prints and paper cutouts to pebbles and post-it notes.

Sarah Janes has some beautiful mixed media pieces including her delicately decorative alphabet blocks, collaged together from carefully selected bits from an old animal encyclopedia. As important are her ‘Quality Portraits’, which originated as ‘Crap Portraits’ and were in much demand in Brighton;  she has a very distinctive style and approach to pictorial layout which is truly unmistakable and guaranteed to raise a smile.  And you can commission your own!

Sarah Evans: 'Here's Mine'

Sarah Evans has a range of brilliantly colourful canvases for sale;  these are very illustrative in style and utterly charming – sort of ‘Beryl-Cook-meets-Jean-Dubuffet’ in feel.

They range from postcard size, with  correspondingly intimate images, to the more monumental 3′ x 4′ painting on display.

These are works you really need to see ‘in the flesh’;  the sumptuous use of paint, layering, scraping and building up vibrant colour, cannot be appreciated via a web image.  Naive art this most certainly is not!

Finally, Thad Skews’ work includes a range of charming, circular lino prints of animals, and some interestingly crafted volumes of the New Book of Knowledge, where the books have been cut up and reassembled to create these small-scale tableaux reminiscent of toy theatres.

There are other, musical, events taking place during the exhibition, too.  The show is a truly delightful experience, and the art is really affordable.  There are plenty of small pieces and cards for sale, very reasonably priced prints and paintings, and accessible to most of us – which makes the temptation to take it all home with you even worse!

More information about the show can be found here; you can also visit the websites of Scott Garrett and Sarah Evans.

The St Leonards Four is at:

Also in: Visual Arts