Two art exhibitions in Hastings and St Leonards

Hot reporter Joe Fearn attended a private view of the work of local artist Bruce Williams at The Kave Art Gallery down the Kings Road in St Leonards. Bruce, who lives and works in St Leonards-on-Sea, was happy to chat to everyone who attended and to discuss his work. In attendance was Hastings artist Ben Browton, who later discussed his current exhibition at Martel Colour Print.

Bruce Williams at The Kave

Williams is primarily interested in the artistic process as a learning experience. He uses big sash brushes to create large bold paintings with an intensity and depth that can surprise both the onlooker and artist. A wide range of subjects are explored that ultimately invite the viewer to move in and out of the artwork in search of shape and salience amidst complex ambiguity.

Influenced by artists such as Kossoff, Bacon and Chaim Soutine, Williams constantly scrapes back the painting in a chaotic free reign of risk and chance, sometimes involving a change of medium, in an anxious search for truth, value, and matter of fact. The paintings acquire layers of ‘skin’ in a long process that finally gains more structure as Williams stretches the materiality of the paint, pushing on through to arrive at an intricate and intense point of aesthetic communication. Bruce told me:

“It is like the struggle with faith, something we can’t see or touch yet nevertheless sense is there.”

Bruce paints a diverse range of everyday objects such as a child’s swing, a ladder, a chicken brought home unplucked from the market, two garden bins, a self portrait. He does not see himself as an abstract artist, but rather as a part traditional, part contemporary, figurative, expressionist painter. His paintings reference, and the subject matter is directly confronted in a process to either create, or locate and uncover, some special aspect that allows it to be seen in a new and exciting way.

Bruce Williams’ artwork currently on show at the Kave includes portraits, and he told me that his future work will include more portraiture. The paintings will eventually be larger, more analytical and personal, as he pursues and explores familiar themes, now matured and intensified by the passage of time.

I found The Kave to be an interesting space, it is a new and independent art gallery managed by artist Mark Orbell, whose work was the first to be exhibited. It opened to the public at the end of May this year.

By the way, Bruce Williams has persuaded your intrepid HOT reporter to sit for him, so the next time he has an exhibition, I may be part of it!

Bruce Williams at The Kave Gallery, 8 Kings Road, St Leonards-on-Sea

 

Ben Browton at Martel Colour Print

“In the beginning, Brahman knew all that was, all that is and will be, or perhaps did not.” The Rig Veda.

The current exhibition at Martel Colour Print, 32a High Street, Hastings Old Town features digital collages and occasional objects that form part of the larger ‘TOXIC’ art project of Hasting’s artist Ben Browton. The pop-up art show, called ‘Preaching to the Inverted’, has freaky pointy-hatted dolls in the window that are only visible at night. In the daytime there is some striking inside the premises. I met up with the artist in Franks Front Room, the newly opened pub across from Hastings Train Station, to talk about his work.

Browton, a graduate of Goldsmiths College, is more used to working with 3D objects than the two-dimensional flatwork produced in collaboration with Martel manager Paul Thomas. The art on show makes bold use of the colour orange, which itself ‘colours’ the recurring theme of ‘TOXICity’. I asked Ben to elaborate. He told me:

“I saw a pair of orange overalls in a charity shop just after I’d gone through some personal crises, and at the time was reading ‘SynchroDestiny’ by Deepak Chopra. I regarded this ‘clue’ or coincidence as that suggested by synchronicity, a concept I find fascinating. When I re-entered education in 2008 I studied both Eastern and Western subjects at Hastings College, namely Indian head massage and Counselling, two subjects that emphasised both healing and health. I came across the book ‘Agent Orange’ “Collateral Damage” in Vietnam’ by Phillip Jones Griffiths, which records the mutationary effects of the horrific use of defoliants by U.S. forces in Vietnam in the late 1960’s, and these cumulative experiences now inform my artwork. The entire work on show at Martel Colour Print has a certain narrative and contains symbols that are ‘clues’ that attempt to reveal what the overall project is about. The piece entitled TOXIC ‘one small Noah’ for example, has ‘swarms’ of upside-down skull and crossbones printed on it, which appear to descend like the old 1970’s arcade game ‘Space Invaders’. Look closely and the crossbones could be interpreted as rotor-blades, making them look like attacking helicopters.”

I laughed at TOXIC ‘Penny for the Guy’ that has a child version of Ben’s image of himself in orange overalls in a cave (TOXIC Visionary Smoke), now sitting in a pushchair found on the street in Hastings. I suggested that ‘TOXIC’ is not all about ‘doom and gloom’.

“That’s right. TOXIC ‘catalyst’ for example, was inspired by seeing a label on a box of caustic soda used in soap manufacture, which I use in a positive way as a ‘nod’ to the alternative health industry. The artwork of a clock on the wall features skulls, two of which have chakras printed on their foreheads, (the 2nd or Swadhisthana chakra) borrowed from Hindu and Buddhist tradition, as does one of the skulls in “one small Noah”, here intended to hint at some potential enlightenment, or at least the thought that some individual can lead the way to a solution.”

Since Ben Browton started working on the theme of toxicity, it is a word that has found common currency, whether referring to the foundering financial system that has led to ‘Toxic Debt’, or pollution such as the Louisiana oil spill, which was called ‘Toxic Soup’, or the toxicity which seems to pervade our human relationships, resulting in the tabloid newspapers bemoaning of ‘A toxic family life’.

The public can pop into Martel Colour Print and view a careful selection of works from the output of Ben Browton that attempt to unravel the rebus that is the TOXIC Project.

Preaching to the Inverted exhibition of a selection of work from the ‘TOXIC’ Project by Ben Browton at Martel Colour Print, 32a High Street, Hastings Old Town (9.30am to 5pm Monday to Friday) until the end of July.

 

 

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