For the unacquainted, The Old School Gallery is a commercial gallery based in a former schoolhouse in the village of Alnmouth, Northumberland. The gallery runs a number of solo and group exhibitions across the year and maintains a Cafe and Pizza Van in its courtyard. The gallery also runs a number of camping huts located adjacent to the St. Oswald’s Way coastal path. The Shoreside Huts have been utilised for artist residencies, including one run in collaboration with the BALTIC Gateshead.
Small Pleasures
By Luke McTaggart
Border Ballads is the current group show running this summer at the Old School Gallery in Alnmouth, Northumberland. The show contains the work of just over a dozen of the gallery’s artists, with several new artists making their debut here. The bulk of the show is painting, with a modest contingent of printmaking. In this write-up I will try and highlight some of what I found the most interesting and exciting work in the show, noting my predisposition towards landscape painting-something well represented in the exhibition.
The title of this review, Small Pleasures, alludes to the sizeable amount of work in the show that measures no more than 40cm along any dimension. The market for large-paintings has contracted somewhat in response to the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and this is reflected in the curation of the show. Further to this, and before getting into depth with the work, I would like to note that given the commercial nature of the gallery the hanging changes as works are bought and gaps appear, therefore certain paintings may not be on display in subsequent visits. Likewise, the hanging may have changed in the time since I last visited the gallery.
Whilst I am not sure that I agree that Border Ballads is the most fitting title given the geographical breadth of work on display, it does capture the sense of lyricism present in much of the work. Whether in Rob Newton’s dancing and trapsing pastel marks, or in Nadine James’ saturated landscapes, there is a collective sense of celebration in many of the paintings on display, a celebration of life and the land.
In terms of new additions to the gallery I found that the most interesting works were those of Nadine James. I have known of James’ work through Instagram for several months prior to the exhibition and was pleasantly surprised to find that she had been included in the show. The Gloucestershire-based artist’s small works are delightful in their intricate pattering and intense colouring. I have enjoyed thinking of the paintings as a meeting between the work of Bonnard and Samuel Palmer. A marriage of a European attitude to colour with the English landscape painting tradition. The paintings are unframed, something that doesn’t at all detract from them, but that I sense adds to them. Their delicate dotting and dashing is pleasurable to spend time with-rewarding the patient observer.
(Image: The Artist/OSG)
I was first acquainted with Sue Asbury’s paintings in her solo show at the gallery last summer and have followed her work with interest in the meantime. Her paintings depict fragments of the everyday, subtly highlighting and delighting in their magic. One of her paintings, cheerfully titled ‘Veronica’s Tea’, is a small acrylic that brilliantly depicts the flickering, iridescent light of a fire pit. I have always sensed that her work seems to have a relationship with the photographic. Not only in the format of the canvas and its similarity to a vertical iPhone photo, but also in the sense that the paintings are snapshots, recollected parts of summer breaks since passed. The paintings are permeated by a subtle and wistful, but not overly romantic, nostalgia for life’s more relaxed moments. (Left: ‘Veronica’s Tea’, Sue Asbury, Acrylic on canvas, 24x18cm. Image: The Artist/OSG)
Linda Schwab’s small, hazy paintings have been a presence in the gallery for some time now and she has several works in Border Ballads. In terms of her paint-handling I have always seen a similarity to that of the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, however the imagery in Schwab’s work has a much more poetic quality. One of her works is titled ‘Weeping Willow’, in which we are presented with a half-remembered vision of a warm summer’s day, stood ankle-deep in the cool waters of a stream. Perhaps this is the case in whatever reference this painting draws on, maybe a memory or an old photograph, or maybe I am wrong. Yet with Schwab’s work I am not sure that it really matters, her paintings are diffuse and open, not specific. They do not assert an absolute physical reality, rather they are records of the act of recounting something, an event, a place, experience or memory. Perhaps the artist’s own or perhaps not. Regardless, they are simply there for us to ponder and muse upon.
(Image: The Artist/OSG)
(Image: The Artist/OSG)
(Image: The Artist/OSG)
The largest works in the show are two oil paintings by gallery stalwart Rob Newton. One of these is a pale, spacious painting titled ‘Low Tide, Budle Bay’-my preferred of the two. Its large areas of dragged near-white paint are evocative in approach of Gerhard Richter to his ‘Abstraktes Bild’ works, the painting is emblematic of a recent sparer, minimalist approach being pursued by Newton. Yet the two oil paintings are outshone by a pair of beautifully luminous and elegant pastel drawings, done in the midst of last year’s winter storms. Their dancing and trapsing marks set against broad areas of soft light capture well the dynamism and changeability of the weather on the Northumberland Coast.
(Image: The Artist/OSG)
The medium of pastel has a relatively strong showing in the exhibition. Oli Mumby, another new addition to the gallery, is represented with his soft, hazy, just-rained landscape, titled ‘The Listening Trees’. This modestly sized drawing does well to capture the wetness of the road it depicts and to give a sense of the heavy damp air, a piece that you can almost begin to smell.
Anna King is another artist that I had come across in the gallery last year and she has a long panoramic-format triptych in the show, titled ‘Quarry, Allt Na Searmoin’. The painting is done in her unique and signature medium of oil and pencil on paper fixed to board. This manner of working gives a nice loose, sketchy quality to the painting. Seemingly opening it up to some of the looser mark-making and overall freeness that can be found in a sketchbook whilst retaining its function as a ‘finished’ painting displayed on the wall.
Aside from the works touched upon here were a range of paintings by existing gallery artists, including a surprising Deborah Grice painting, surprising for the fact that it lacks her typical linework, as well as several Brita Granstrom seascapes. There is also the slightly puzzling, if humorous, inclusion of screenprints featuring Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone by Newcastle Graphic artist Jimmy Turrell (The exhibition information page knits them into the show by referencing the fact that the bulk of early Appalachian settlers were from the border areas of England and Scotland). Overall I think that the exhibition does a good job of showcasing work from new additions to the gallery roster, in particular Nadine James’ paintings. Between James, Sue Asbury and Linda Schwab there is a strong contingent of female artists, working on an intimate scale and engaged with different aspects of ‘being’ in the landscape, the exhibition showcases the trio well. The show also gives a good opportunity to see new developments in the work of current gallery artists, like the minimalist endeavours of Rob Newton.
The exhibition will run until the 4th September so there is still time to view it if you are in the area. For more information please visit the exhibition page on the gallery’s website via this link: https://theoldschoolgallery.co.uk/border-ballads/
The views presented in this essay are strictly my own, the copyright of any of the images displayed here reside with the artist and all due care has been given to credit them where used.
Luke McTaggart 