amanda banham christopher gee & Rosemary Vanns
16th - 31st May 2020
This exhibition ‘Our House’ was conceived well before lockdown was in common parlance but how apposite now. These three artists have painted, drawn and thrown houses over the past few months for an exhibition planned to coincide with the Hay Literary Festival.
With artists unable to travel, framers unable to get supplies and the Festival cancelled I have had to put the show wholly online. So take a look at this exhibition, celebrating our houses which have never seemed so familiar and so safe to us, and enjoy!
amanda banham
Amanda is an Essex Girl from Saffron Walden, or as her Father would have succinctly put it “North-West-Essex-Suffolk-Borders”. Born in 1972 she has had a variety of adventures over the years such as floristry, milking cows, teaching horse riding and raising four children.
Having gone to school in the 1970’s pottery was ingrained in the curriculum and was something Amanda had always enjoyed and had continued to learn through evening classes and eventually working at Rachel Dormer studio in Cambridge. By now Amanda had completed a degree in Illustration at Cambridge School of Art but, much to the consternation of her tutors, preferred a more 3D approach and was combining Illustration with Ceramics and screen printing on clay.
Her houses were inspired by the streets of Saffron Walden and a love of storytelling and dog walking. When her daughter was small and the dogs needed walking Amanda would entice her daughter out for these ambles by suggesting they ‘Go and see what the people of Castle Street are doing...’ Castle Street is a beautiful Street in Saffron Walden lined with colourful, wonky timber framed cottages and their windows are very enticing to peer through....... Amanda and Anna would make up stories about the people of Castle Street and their day to day goings on....
Eventually these houses were made in clay and were accompanied by the many stories about Castle Street and beyond!
christopher gee
MA Drawing UAL Wimbledon College of Art London 2012
BA Drawing UAL Camberwell College of Art London 2010
Fine Art Foundation UAL Byam Shaw School Central Saints Martins London 2007
Christopher is a British artist born in Portsmouth, England in 1987. He lives and works on the Thames Estuary, Essex. His small scale works on paper explore stillness and isolated scenes. His paintings are informed by historic houses and landmarks, often forgotten or overlooked sites of familiarity and intrigue. Walking and collecting are key to his practice. His graphic yet naïve-looking paintings, conjure places both historical and imagined, taking us on a fragmented journey through forested landscapes, vernacular architecture, and archaic towers. The intimacy and execution of these paintings convey themes of silence and solitude. His influences include Northern Renaissance painting, Folk Art, the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and the paintings of Alfred Wallis. He also takes inspiration from the novels of Hermann Hesse and W.G. Sebald. Gee has sold his work to clients such as Paul Smith and Liberty London as well as showing at Paris fashion week in 2019 in collaboration with menswear brand UNIFORME-Paris. His work is also held in private collections around the world.
‘Elsewhere, in the quiet provinces the artist can easily find himself surrounded by melancholias. Lost in thought he sits at the secluded windows of his medieval digs, a strange twilight flowing all about him, and without so much as stirring he sends his daydreams out onto the sweeping landscape. No one comes. Nothing disturbs his reverie. An inexpressible silence rules the surrounds.’ Robert Walser
Christopher undertakes portrait commissions so please contact me at the gallery to discuss this further.
rosemary vanns
Rosemary was born in Nottinghamshire in 1960 and originally trained and qualified as a registered nurse in Sheffield. A year into further midwifery training in Harlow, Essex in 1983 she gave up her studies to undertake an Arts Foundation Course and then went on to gain a B.A (Hons) degree in Textile and Fashion Design at Winchester School of Art (1984-1987). In both 1988 and 1989 she was awarded places at the Royal College of Art in London to study for an M.A. in Fine Art Printmaking but the birth of her daughter and then her son in those years meant she was unable to attend.
She spent the next 20 years initially as a successful freelance textile designer for the international bedding and furnishings market creating designs for, amongst others, Sanderson, John Lewis, Jeff Banks and Vymura and numerous print and weave companies across the world. For the latter 6 years she returned to work as a surgical staff nurse in Sheffield and then as a district nurse and her local hospice. Her art making continued spasmodically during this period including a couple of minor awards but it was not until 2009 that she was able to commit herself to life as a full time artist.
Printmaking she feels has been instinctively her focus (she won the Printmakers' Printmaker Award at Printfest in Cumbria in 2013 and was awarded the Galleries magazine award at the R.E. National Open Print Exhibition in 2018) but painting has become an equally important part of her work. Mark making and colour continue to predominate in both disciplines and her love of still life and landscape is depicted in either semi abstracted or in more illustrative form.
Rosemary prepares and prints all her own small edition screenprints in her studio in the Derbyshire Peak District and exhibits regularly in several highly regarded galleries and art fairs across the UK.
The majority of the work included in this exhibition has been made since July, 2019 and during a period of transition which marked for me as an artist, the end to what had been a period of several years of producing almost entirely semi illustrative, representational paintings and prints. Feeling limited and hemmed in by both internal and external factors I needed a fresh start. Scale was questioned, subject matter, technique and motivation. My need to please was replaced by a focus to be wholly me and then hopefully to find a common empathy with the viewer.
Although I yearned for it, it would be impossible for any of us to shake off our personal histories and experience and completely reinvent ourselves. Murphy’s Moon and Tree of Life were the first attempts to do this but echoes of a previous life are always there and as an artist these can never be erased and I am belatedly starting to feel comfortable about that. Mark making will always be my major means of expression and evident especially in the charcoal drawings of plants and cottages and the mixed media pieces. My love of colour seems to lie dormant for varying periods and I have come to accept that some days are going to be about black and others the gaiety of Tree of Life. The same way that the minimalism of Murphy’s Moon (inspired loosely on Samuel Beckett’s novel, Murphy) will make way to instinctive, energetic charcoal drawing.
To be true to myself ie. authentic as a person and as an artist means acceptance of these quirks, changes of direction, varying energies and interests, otherwise, to me, using art as an honest means of self expression would be meaningless