BEAUX ARTS, BATH | NEW CERAMICS, NEW PAINTING, NEW SCULPTURE
Mark Johnston was brought up in the north-east of England, and has lived most of his adult life in Sussex. He has spent long periods of time sketching in other parts of the country (Cumbria, for example; the Munros in Scotland) and Europe (he has lived in Greece, Andalucia and Barcelona).
He paints his landscapes in oil on canvas, but he doesn’t work plein air, trying to capture a particular scene in front of his canvas. He works in his Brighton studio, in natural light, starting with a mark, then letting the paint lead the painting, in communion with his many visual memories, occasionally referencing previously made sketches.
The results, as layers of paint build up, and forms and colour-fields and gestural strokes emerge, are rather romantic, as if Turner had gone abstract, maybe, or Rothko had turned landscapist. And expressive: these paintings are clearly landscapes of Johnston’s moods and emotions, too.
Mark Johnston, Creek, Oil on linen, 140 x 160cms, courtesy of Beaux Arts
Of his work, he says: “The smaller canvases, or sometimes boards, are much more intimate though they too can be emotional. I see these as chamber music, to be engaged with at home and close-to, in a limited setting by a limited audience. The larger ones, because the larger fields call for more assertive action, can hold their own on a museum wall and before a crowd.”
Johnston is one of three artists currently being shown at the elegant private gallery Beaux Arts, in Bath, and the only painter. Simon Allen has been described as a landscape artist, too, although he worked in a vastly different medium: gilded wall sculptures. He carves stone with chisel and power tool, then adds layers of bole, gesso and gold leaf.
The late Breon O’Casey described his work as ‘the rhythmic landscape of energy... This landscape is not the bird but the bird’s flight, not the river, but the river’s flow, not the tree, but the leaves bending to the wind.’
Jaejun Lee is a Cardiff-based Korean ceramicist who turns delicate pieces – ‘meditations on form and colour’ - in porcelain, which he then polishes, with diamond polishing paper. He spends more time on the polishing than on time spent turning, trimming and firing put together. The results are exquisite… and soft-skin smooth.
Beaux Arts will be showing the work of Johnston and Allen at Stand 44, alongside work by Nathan Ford, Paul Mount, Helen Simmonds, Harriet Porter, Beth Carter, Anna Gillespie and Anthony Scott. The current exhibition runs in Bath until October 1.