Messum's 2019

peter brown peter brown Messum’s 2019 Messum’s MESSUMS www.messums.com www.messumswiltshire.com peter brown at home and abroad 2019 MESSUMS MESSUMS LONDON 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG +44 (0)207 437 5545 www.messums.com 1 Playing FIFA: Ollie, Toby, Ned and Ellie oil on board MESSUMS WILTSHIRE 30 x 25 cms 12 x 10 ins Place Farm, Court Street, Tisbury, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP3 6LW +44 (0)1747 445042 www.messumswiltshire.com foreword Back in 2012 Peter Brown made a large oil painting of the Victorian cast iron fireplace in his studio. The mantelpiece is loaded with paints and brushes and jars, whilst the floor is littered with books, boxes and audio equipment. It is a deceptively simple yet quietly beautiful painting, a study (almost) in black and white. It is an eye-catching moment of calm contemplation that contrasts with the paintings of bustling streets in Bath, London and Paris that have, over the past twenty-five years, made his name. Brown recognizes and enjoys this contrast, and since moving into his new home in the Bath suburb of Weston in 2006 he has painted more and more intimate interiors like this one. The youngest of his five children was born there, its walls are filled with his paintings and those by artists he admires, and Brown acknowledges that this comfortable, extensive family house has become ‘a great source of inspiration.’ His first-floor studio is only a few yards from his children’s bedrooms, and the daily life of home surrounds him as he works. There are various other paintings he has made of the studio – empty at different times of day and in different states of light – as well as views up and down staircases or through doorways into rooms where his children gather. 2 Gap Year oil on canvas 51 x 76 cms 20 x 30 ins These works are, he suggests, ‘an antidote … to plein-air street scenes and landscapes. I can paint the spaces that I find interesting and record the family growing up. An utter indulgence, but then being allowed to spend my life painting this beautiful city and wherever else my travels take me is indulgence too.’ Together with a series of landscape paintings from the long hot summer of 2018 which he spent working out of doors around Suffolk, Norfolk and London, these interiors form the gently beating heart of his new exhibition – the latest in what has been a series of very successful shows at Messum’s. It is also Brown’s first solo exhibition since he was elected President of the New English Art Club last year. The NEAC (or ‘New English’ as it is affectionately known) has had an important place in British painting since its foundation in 1885, when it quickly emerged as a significant and radical alternative to the classical, more conventional art to be seen at the Royal Academy. Its early members included some of the key British painters in the appearance of both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in this country – important names such as John Singer Sargent, Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Sickert, Gwen and Augustus John and Robert Fry. 3 The Studio, Late Morning, Winter oil on canvas 102 x 91 cms 40 x 36 ins 4 Studio Mantlepiece, 2012 oil on canvas 1 127 x 102 cms 50 x 40 ⁄8 ins 5 Christmas Jumper and DMs: Ella on the Stairs oil on canvas 76 x 76 cms 30 x 30 ins Indeed, it was Sickert’s participation in the Club that first brought it to Brown’s attention when he was an art foundation student in Bath in the late 1980s. Sickert had had a long connection with the city: ‘There never was such a place for rest and comfort and leisurely work,’ he wrote following his first visit in 1917. ‘Such country and such town,’ he exclaimed. Sickert settled there briefly in 1918, rapturously describing its ‘incredible’ beauty to friends. And he returned twenty years later, making his last home in neighbouring Bathampton, and it was in Bath that he died in 1942. Brown has called Sickert ‘the grandfather of us all,’ and Sickert, like Brown, painted numerous oil paintings of the town’s vibrant, everyday street life – works that were very well received in the press. ‘He gives us colour,’ declared The Times in 1919, ‘that might be pretty if it were not beautiful.’ This observation distills, perhaps, the very essence of all successful Impressionist painting. 6 Summer Morning: the Broken Trumpet oil on canvas 89 x 76 cms 35 x 30 ins When Peter Brown returned to Bath in the mid 1990s after a number of years studying and then working in Manchester, the NEAC was already in his sights through Sickert’s link, and he was keen to become a member. In Manchester, however, he had been painting in a postmodern, almost abstract expressionist manner – large squares and rectangles of pure colour. It was a very intellectual, structured way of working that was slowly leading him into a dead end. Back in Bath he suddenly found himself simply drawing once more, without questioning what he was doing. He just wanted to get on and do it again, to ‘see and put’, as one of his art teachers once memorably phrased it – something he does very well indeed: seeing and then putting it down in paint, be it out on the street in a downpour of rain or in his warm home beside a crackling fire. But as he observes, There is one clear difference between the two situations – one of control. Out in the elements it is a battle against time – before the canvas surface gets so wet you can’t make the paint stick, so I always say you have to slap it on. Inside you have more time to mix colour and to apply it. The challenge then is to keep the guttural, not to overwork it. You can fiddle for a year with a tiny brush trying to answer every mark in front of you, but it is far better for me to answer as broadly as possible. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could do a painting in one brush stroke? It’s like painting a crowd of people – forget the individual bodies, the faces, arms, legs … what does the crowd, the mass of shape, actually look like? What is its colour? It’s form? When I paint I make sure I am always dealing with ‘what does it look like’. This is what he calls his ‘visceral’ instinct as an artist – painting from the heart, not the head, the urge to put down what he sees on paper or canvas as quickly and as urgently and as well as he can, an approach that sometimes leads him to suddenly realize he’s painting the same scene over again. Extraordinarily prolific and experimental, his studio is stacked with canvases and boards – for he is always exploring, looking, rediscovering as he reacts and responds to the sights around him. Gregarious, easy going, charming and chatty, he is a familiar character on the streets of Bath, always painting, always willing to talk with passers-by. It is no surprise that when he first started selling his work off Bath’s street corners as he worked, he soon enjoyed considerable success. 7 The Blue Room: Lisa, Hattie, Ned and Ella oil on canvas 89 x 76 cms 35 x 30 ins It was only five years after his return to Bath that, in 1998, Brown was elected a member of the NEAC. ‘I really felt like I’d arrived then,’ he recalls. Under the direction of Ken Howard, the NEAC was enjoying an exciting period of renewal as it re-established its reputation, and Brown soon found himself on the Club’s organizing committee. Their meetings were often held in the studios of other committee members, and Brown reflects how incredible it felt to suddenly find himself propelled into this world of established, recognized, successful artists. It is appropriate that now, as the new President of the NEAC himself, Brown should have taken his palette and easel to Suffolk. It was this coastline, around Southwold and Walberswick, that Philip Wilson Steer, one of the NEAC’s founding figures and a brilliant early British Impressionist, helped make popular as an artistic destination in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Whilst Brown’s recent interior paintings are worked on over many days and sometimes weeks, out of doors he aims, like his Impressionist predecessors, to paint a picture in – as he puts it – ‘one hit’, if he possibly can. These new works have a freshness and spontaneity that captures the breezy sunlight of the east coast of England – but they are paintings that are based on years of hard work, careful observation and constant practice. 8 Combe Park, Christmas oil on canvas 122 x 61 cms 48 x 24 ins It is this hard graft aspect of the artist’s life that Brown wants to highlight first and foremost in the period of his presidency at the NEAC. ‘Above all,’ he explains, ‘I want the members of the NEAC to do what they do best – to paint as best they can because that is what it is all about.’ This, he believes, will be achieved by drawing upon and vocalizing the expertise and experience of the membership – through artist-led tours of their annual exhibition, panel discussions and lectures, as well the display of members’ sketchbooks, which, like Sickert, he sees as the foundation of painting.

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