2009
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Helen Cass 28th January to 1st March Wed - Sun, 11am - 4pm Shropshire born and educated at the Ruskin School, Oxford, Cass’s work is a mixture of painting and relief sculpture. From a family of farmers she describes her first aesthetic experiences as being of “Linen cupboards stacked high and deep with white starched, ironed and folded table cloths and other household items,” and “ploughed soil, furrows following the contours of the land, borders and hedges.” It is via these memories that Cass’s immaculate linen structures slowly and patiently come into being. The canvas is ironed into furrowed parallel ridges before being stretched onto stretcher bars like paintings, often with smooth curves or blocks jutting interrupting the surface from underneath, playing with light, space and texture. At first, seemingly coolly abstract these structures have a mysterious ambiguity and quiet power. Those pieces painted black have a latex like quality, the greys ones an illusion of rubberyness. Also on display are Cass’s other activities, ink drawings on canvas. At first seeming simple textured linen rectangles on a stretcher frames, closer inspection reveals that these are actually painstaking drawings made up of tiny and marks imitating the waft and weave of beautiful dyed or stone washed materials. The mind boggling patience and determination of their making again has roots in Cass’s heritage, the simple rituals of a life working on the land, the humble, unassuming day to day interaction with earth, materials and repetitive processes. 
 Educated in Fine Art at Oxford University, Helen‘s work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK, in addition to being held within the corporate collection of Calvin Klein.
“Coolly abstract and beautifully composed, Helen’s work combines a deep sense of purity with a quiet sensuality. Precise, immaculate and perfectly proportioned, her artworks display common themes of patience and spirituality.” Richard Noyce. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe
Hesketh
Wed
25th March
– Sun 22nd
April
Deeply painterly and
expressionistic Hesketh’s paintings can be joyous, tragic or full
of humour. Often monumental in scale and always rich in their colour
and material presence, her work is rigidly structured in a way that
belies its playful enthusiasm. “My
work is a construction of personal experience, colour and shapes,
representations of situations, experimentalism and chance. It is a
result of being open and effected by most things around, from the
past and up to present day.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Spring Art Fair
Wed
13th
May – Sun 19th
June
ArtsMill’s
popular open exhibition returns. Showing artists from the Yorkshire
and Lancashire regions.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prints by Ana Maria Pacheco Saturday July 4 to Sunday August 2 A Hayward
Touring Exhibition Wednesday to Sunday 11.00am to 5.00pm Born in
Brazil in 1943, Ana Maria Pacheco’s prints celebrate
a wide variety of cultural references that include Brazilian folklore,
classical myth and mystical Catholicism.
Ana Maria
Pacheco is an artist of extraordinary diversity. Her work ranges from
painting and sculpture to printmaking and draws on a wide variety of
cultural references that include Brazilian folklore, classical myth,
Catholic ritual and medieval satire. This Hayward Touring Exhibition,
Ana Maria Pacheco: Prints, focuses on five sets of Pacheco’s prints. For more information about upcoming venues for this exhibition please check: www.southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-arts/hayward-touring/current Public enquiries about Hayward Touring Exhibitions: 020 7921 0837----------------------------------------------------------------------------Miles Richmond – A Celebration ArtsMill Gallery – 13th September – 18th October “Painting has led me to question the assumption that we simply look out at the world. My research suggests that we both look out and look in, and the world is literally within the mind of our complex identity. My work sets out to plot some of the geometries of a new sense of embodiment. Inevitably these representations will hardly seem recognizable or typical to eyes conditioned by the renaissance view of incarnation which photography has made ubiquitous. But they may help illuminate some who feel old ways of seeing are outworn.” There are painters taught by David Bomberg who went on to enjoy the high profile success denied to their teacher. In his lifetime Miles Richmond (1922 – 2008) was not to be one of these chosen few, but of all those to come under Bomberg’s intense gaze, none enjoyed such a close and sustained contact with the master as he. This contact began at the Borough Polytechnic in 1946 and continued to the last days of Bomberg’s life on the artist’s final journey from Ronda back to England. Ronda had been one of Bomberg’s inspirations for the latter part of his life. Richmond, deeply in love with the area himself, sustained that contact, moving frequently between England and Spain until nearly the end of the century. His concentrated work there was an important part of his development in the practice and philosophy of painting. He completed his last paintings of the Ronda gorge and valley when he returned for a large exhibition of his work in Ronda in 2006 and in Málaga in 2008. So it is perhaps fitting that the last show during his lifetime should have been there. From the 70s onwards he worked intensively both in London and here in the north; however, he is still a seriously underexposed artist in the country of his birth, which as a young man and wartime conscientious objector, he set out to serve through his painting. This
exhibition offers a brief overview of Richmond’s career, beginning
with the dark limited palette paintings of the Borough life room.
There are a great number of these, often double-sided, seemingly done
quickly with a sustained and passionate attack. Exploring the
relationships between light, mass and the artist’s imaginative
contact with the subject (a give and take osmosis that evolves and
intensifies with time) one can sense in these paintings the youthful
vigour and excitement of young artists together on a shared quest for
what Bomberg famously called “the spirit in the mass.” One can
sense in these angular forms, with their mixture of structural
imposition and the thrill of chance discovery, the basis for this
research that, along with an interest in the human figure as a motif,
Richmond continued to pursue uncompromisingly until his death last
year. An important self-portrait from this period is on show,
together with the last self portrait Richmond painted in the final
months of his life. In
the early seventies a crisis emerged evolving from a sense that his
vision was part dominated by the achievements of his friend and
teacher, and the question familiar to artists over the centuries:
does what I see exist as I see it or do I only see it as it exists in
my imagination, as I have learned to see it? Returning to England and
building himself a studio in Camden town, Richmond was determined
that through painting the true spirit of the external world and the
internal spirit of the artist could become one. This series of still
lives represented
a departure from Bomberg and led to a painting where Richmond worked
for three days on end without putting down his brushes until he was
convinced he had penetrated beyond the conventional appearance of the
subject to the spiritual radiance it contained. As Plato, in his
famous argument for the dismissal of painting, turned to the humble
table to explore our removals from truth, it is natural that artists
over the years have turned to the still-life and the table to
reinvestigate the problem, Cezanne most profoundly, and Richmond has
added his own contribution.
Selected Exhibitions: 1946-50: Borough Group: 7 exhibitions 1951: Four Painters, Parsons Gallery, London 1952: Four English Painters, Stockholm, Sweden 1974: One man exhibition, Palacio Mondragon, Ronda, Spain 1978: Morley Gallery, London 1979: Warwick University Gallery 1989: Cleveland College of Art, Middlesbrough 1992: Park Grosvenor Gallery, London 1994-95: Middlesbrough Art Gallery and Newlyn Art Gallery 1997: Myles Meehan Gallery, Darlington Arts Centre 1998: A.I.M. Gallery, Middlesbrough 1999: Land, Sea and Sky. Group exhibition, Myles Meehan Gallery, Darlington Arts Centre 1999: Executed large millennium celebration painting, London from the South Bank, for South Bank University, London 2000: Executed large painting, Teesside from Eston Bank, for the Virtual Reality Centre, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough 2001: Bartley Drey Gallery, London 2003: Imaginative Substance. Group exhibition, Highgate Gallery, London 2004: Bomberg and Pupils, the Borough Group 1946 – 1951, Boundary Gallery, London 2006: Convento de Santo Domingo, Ronda, Spain 2008, Galeria Italcable, Málaga, Spain 2008, Robin Katz Fine Art, London 2008, Boundary Gallery, London
Exhibition runs 11-4pm, Wed-Sun 16th September - 18th October. ArtsMill Gallery, Linden Mill, Linden Road, Hebden Bridge, HX7 7DP -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ArtsMill Winter Art
Market
A selling exhibition of work by artists living and/or working in the region, including; Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Textiles and Photography.   |
