THANK YOU

Hearty thanks to everyone who came along to the opening on Saturday evening, and especially to the three artists whose work so finely adorns the gallery at the moment – Bobbie Russon, Beth Carter and Paul Wearing.

If you would like to come and see the exhibition, it will be in place until 15 July. To whet the appetite, and answer the question ‘Why all the minotaurs..?’ you could watch the short film on sculptor Beth Carter here.

Obvious from the film is the influence of Beth’s Father Roy on her work.

Beth and the late Roy Carter, a seated minotaur, at Beth’s degree show, many moons ago…

And with Father’s day passing on Sunday last…

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away

Follower by Seamus Heaney

 

Beth’s Giant Standing Standing Minotaur and Giant Crouching Minotaur in the garden of the Notre Dame de Vie Chapel, Mougins.  The church is next-door to the villa where Picasso spent the last dozen years of his life.

In my father’s wallet
we found
one small sheet
torn from a notebook
folded and re-folded
sliced through in the crease
and in my father’s careful hand
were all his children’s names
and birthdates
and  our spouses names
and their birthdates
and the grandchildren
and their spouses
and in shakier letters
the great grand-children.
The conspiracy of years
schemes against us
but my father
refused to forget
and carried with him
the names and numbers of his immortality.

The List of Us by Nancy Roman

 

 

Bobbie Russon’s paintings have more of a solitudinarian feel to them.

 

 

Yesterday, against admonishment,

my daughter balanced on the couch back,

fell and cut her mouth.

Because I saw it happen I knew

she was not hurt, and yet

a child’s blood so red

it stops a father’s heart.

My daughter cried her tears;

I held some ice

against her lip.

That was the end of it.

Round and round: bow and kiss.

I try to teach her caution;

she tries to teach me risk.

 

Gregory Orr Father’s Song

 

 

And finally….two landscapes of a sort.. with the summer solstice today Ruth Brownlee up in Shetland will be getting a decent 17 hours of daylight. Well deserved I think given the length of the winter darkness.

 

 

Paul Wearing’s ceramics, with their multiple glazes, have the look of a roiling sea…