I wrote this post during lockdown but didn’t post it at the time…. but in the wider context of my work it feels relevant to place it here as Robyn Denny was the catalyst for returning to my art practice after shying away from it for 20 years. A journey that I began during that weird time and now after 3 years I’m producing and creating and going a bit wild! I thank Robyn Denny for getting me started, but there are definitely some significant other artists who I will write about here from time to time.
March 2021
Like most people in the world at the moment, I am craving the outside world and most specifically going to exhibitions and drinking in the works of artists past and present. To me, there is nothing quite the same as being in front of a piece of work and feeling it.
My obsession and love of abstraction led me to the door of the Bernard Jacobson gallery in October 2019 to view the work of painter Robyn Denny. It was a chance encounter walking past the gallery on my way to the RA and so his work was fresh to me. The gallery space is remarkable - a converted car park that’s now a huge salon underground and with a smaller viewing area in the reception.
Converted Car Park : The Bernard Jacobsen Gallery
Halfway around the exhibition I was starting to float - like the feeling of having met a new love. Although these works on paper were fairly small in comparison to his other large scale huge works, I wanted to just climb in to the paintings and bathe in them. One of the slight let downs of the exhibition was that the frames were glazed with reflective glass - but as I am reflected in the photos I also feel a part of them. It was one of the best afternoons and still feel the buzz from it nearly 18 months later. That’s what I’m talking about - the real feeling you get from seeing Art - rather than something that you may save to your pinterest and move on to the next thing.
I found this quote in a book my husband subsequently bought for me about Denny which resonates for me in terms of how I’m approaching my own practice and thoughts on the matter….
“Colour then becomes a vehicle for recording, not abstract ideas (it is too sensual and, as Baudelaire said of it, too visible for that), but sensations and experiences which have no other material counterpart. It becomes a way of touching the intangible or seeing the invisible, and if such phraseology smacks of the metaphysical that ultimately is what it has got to do: art that does less, doesn’t do enough’….A painting by Denny firmly but subtly refuses that surrender of self. It is capable of evoking mystery but anchors it in an image that appeals to the ordering intellect and is brought within reach of our own physical scale. Lucid, unemphatic, symmetrical, it is about preserving a certain necessary balance within us between the claims of the knowable and the unknown. ”
My absolute favourite
Denny was a gesturalist, but he was quite clear that abstract painting was not about paint in the abstract: it was about meaning expressed in abstract imagery.
I will write more about Robyn Denny in due course as he’s been a massive influence on me. Other artists I will be writing about are Barbara Kasten, Sandra Blow and Barbara Hepworth - not because they’re women artists but because they are very inspiring to me.