January 2020

Dear Reader(s)

The first Taunton Youth Culture and Arts Festival (Tyca) has begun, thanks to Arts Taunton and some generous funding by sponsors. Young people’s art, sculpture and photography – with prizes – is now on display at CICCIC until 11 November. I hope to get to the PV tonight. If the visual arts are to play a greater part both in the lives of our schools/colleges and of the Deane, initiatives like this need our presence and encouragement. We can  promote and cherish younger artists, and invite them to work with SAGT – even join us. Our thanks to Laura Crofts for representing us.

Also coming soon, at the Museum of Somerset, is the Tristram Hillier exhibition, which starts on November 9 and runs into January, and promises to be well worth seeing and even going back to for further helpings. I remember being excited by his landscapes of the South Downs but know little else.

I commend two further happenings: my talk on  Mondrian and Ben Nicholson on Saturday 23 November, 11.00 am at Trull Church Community Centre, the last of this year’s talks; and our Christmas Lunch for members and their friends at the Quantock restaurant, Taunton & Bridgwater College on Wednesday 18 December at 12.30. Anna Mullett will send out menus shortly and invite you to book your place.

In my November talk I will focus on an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in 2012 which showed  paintings, by Mondrian and Nicholson from the 1930s up to 1943. Their friendship began in Paris when Nicholson visited Mondrian’s studio and ripened over those years. Winifred Nicholson, whom I talked about last year, insisted that Mondrian leave Paris before the Germans arrived, and she brought him safely to England and Hampstead where he stayed for two years with a studio close to the Nicholsons before leaving for America when the bombing of London started. But the two men’s art, related but different, is the heart of the talk.

This year’s tenth Ken Grieb lecture was a success with much laughter and learning. Thank you to those attending and for the many apologies received. We began by remembering Ken and his gift of these talks, Our speaker was Dr. Jan Cox from Clevedon, who specialises in Nordic Art. He talked about Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842) and the Golden Age of Danish Art, someone new to his us. Norwegian by birth, he had an English grandfather and studied in Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm, choosing to be Danish, it seems, and a constant traveller. On the mainland of Europe he studied in Dresden with J.C.Dahl, learning especially to observe nature, and then in Munich where his style was influenced by the local school of landscape painters and by his earlier meeting with Caspar David Friedrich and his way of composing grandiose atmospheric effects.

A bachelor, sketching and painting outdoors by day, Fearnley, naturally merry and gregarious, met other artists in the evenings in the local tavern for food, drink, and song. Cox illustrated this camaraderie and his journeys and their output with extracts from letters and recorded impressions, and showed how his sketches made attractive landscapes, usually with people in them. In Italy (1832-35) his charming pictures of the landscape around the Bay of Naples especially delighted, as did his Lake District paintings of August-September 1837. This tour followed his visit to the Royal Academy where he sketched Turner, perched on a stool, on varnishing day! Fearnley for some years hoped to marry an heiress from Halse – this was the local interest  moment – but later did marry another heiress only to succumb to typhus and die at the peak of his considerable powers in his late thirties.

Two further things of note happened that Saturday in Trull: our speaker was excited by the bright colours of the screen in the East room (unknown to us the equipment had been updated) and by our being so close to him, and he and we enjoyed the resulting interplay. Secondly, we received an informal visit from our MP Rebecca Pow and her sister in the interval, gave them a drink and they chatted and learnt about SAGT, then posed for a photo before leaving to see the marvellous Botanic Art in Taunton Library.

Talking about books I’d like to recommend In Camera Snowdon edited by Robin Muir, a Pallant House Gallery catalogue, 2007. Kevin Saunders has lent it to me. It consists of photos of artists, often in their studios, and a commentary or story or brief biographical cameo. Delightful.

Your turn now. Please feel free to recommend to Anna or me a favourite art book with an accompanying few words, which we could then include in future newsletters.

Happy visual autumn,
Jeremy (Harvey) 23 October

Dear Reader(s)

The SAW fortnight is upon us and I wonder what you have seen and liked. The Reflect exhibition in the Brewhouse (venue 25) celebrates 25 years of Somerset Art Weeks with work by invited artists, including at least one of our members, Hilary Adair. I do recommend that, and a visit to Close House, Hatch Beauchamp (35) for sculpture and line drawings in a new space. This year’s free SAW booklet is informative and well produced.

The Brewhouse’s plans to expand are on hold, I understand, while the West Somerset and Taunton Deane Council assesses what cultural project(s) in Taunton to support. There is an important meeting about this on 8 October. You may have signed the online petition in support of the Brewhouse or made your view known some other way. The re-opened Brewhouse has made such a difference to our town’s cultural provision: among its achievements, it has given art a gallery fit for many purposes, brought cinema to Coal Orchard, restored a café, attracted a wide range of people, and given voluntary organisations a role and worthwhile stake in its future. Surely it has to be commended, and now adequately funded and backed to expand?

Ken Grieb, who died on February 11, some months after his 100^th birthday last year, was remembered by family and friends, including members of SAGT on September 20. Born in Wales, he served as a Captain in the Royal Engineers in India, returned in 1946 to become a good caring architect who sought to improve the quality of life for residents. He designed London housing estates and the hall of a Poplar primary school (now listed). He married Joyce, owned and altered Hendon Park lodge and coach house – a home he loved. He was appointed chief architect for Islington but found the job too stressful and resigned. He recovered, and then worked for the Housing Department of the Department of the Environment where he developed the idea of ‘gradual renewal’ of an area rather than comprehensive redevelopment. This later became Government policy. I was told that he applied this successfully to a part of Exeter.

He took early retirement and moved to an Arts & Craft house in Wembdon with a view of Steep Holm and  Welsh hills. Joyce was able there to support her sick brother. Ken’s many interests included the new Bridgwater Arts Centre and joining Chandos. He did the Guardian concise crossword: when stuck he phoned his friends, ‘Six across?’ he would ask. He went to the opera, saw plays, attended the Preaters’ Friday morning life drawing, and more recently was driven home by Damien Parsons, a friend and fellow London architect, after a class in Pawlett. Damien described Ken’s ‘life’ drawings as ‘distinctive, lively, amusing, rather than naturalistic.’

Ken joined SAGT in its early years and funded the lectures that bear his name, which we hope will continue well into the next decade.This year’s is on Saturday 5 October, at 11.0 in the Trull Church Community Centre. Our Speaker is Dr. Jan Cox and his subject is Thomas Fearnley and the Golden Age of Danish Art. We do hope you can come. It will be the first that Ken has missed. Please encourage others to be there. The cost is £7 for members, £10 for non-members, and £3 for Students.

In addition to his generosity to SAGT, for which we give many thanks, I learnt from Anna Mullett, at the farewell to Ken, of an RIBA article written by a fellow architect Philip Bottomley, which I quote from. He chose Ken, ‘a rather modest retiring chap’, as the person who had left perhaps the biggest impression on him. To illustrate this Bottomley selected two projects that Ken completed.

‘He was deeply committed indeed obsessive about the production of good local authority housing…He attacked each new design with a fresh and open mind and never just took the current dogma off the peg.’ Bottomley then described the Angrave Road scheme in 1950s Shoreditch. In those days inner city houses had to be built at a density of 136 persons to the acre. An obvious way to achieve that was to build high. Not by Ken who knew that most people wanted houses on the ground with gardens, not patios. Ken struggled until he had achieved back to back housing with 60 feet gardens, overcoming building and public health regulations and the ‘scepticism and general disapproval’ of most of his senior colleagues. In the second example, a point or tower block in Camberwell Road, he managed to ‘overcome the drawbacks of many of the current designs’ by ingenious replanning of such things as draughty lift lobbies after another ‘stiff fight’ to meet building regulations. ‘The lobbies together with the completely glazed escape stair enclosure and small play-deck at every third floor produced together a spacial arrangement of considerable delight, a surprising achievement in a high-rise local authority block.’

For those of us who have known Ken in his later years we may have found him, at times, odd, a bit abrasive, even rude or crude, but often amusing.  The warmth and affection with which his family and friends remembered him on September 20 will be my lasting impression of this generous and talented man who survived much and gave even more.

Best wishes,
Jeremy (Harvey)