ARTVERSE: Two Artists, Poetry and a Week in Mayfair
I first met the painter Dan Llewelyn Hall at a talk he gave following a residency at the Society of Antiquaries in London. I was immediately drawn to his work and to the way history, literature and a sense of place seemed to find their way into his paintings.
Dan has had a remarkable career, encompassing portraiture, landscape and history. He painted First World War veteran Harry Patch, has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and Windsor Castle, and in 2013 painted Queen Elizabeth II. Yet it was perhaps his curiosity about the past, and the way he draws upon it in his work, that particularly struck a chord with me.
Some time later, at Christmas drinks hosted by our mutual friend Silke Lohmann, conversation turned to poetry and literature. Dan and I discovered just how many interests we shared and, somewhere over the course of the evening, decided we should work on an exhibition together. The beginnings of ARTVERSE started to take shape.
There was a shared Celtic sensibility too: Dan is Welsh and I am Irish, and our respective histories, landscapes and literary traditions are never very far from either of our work.
Then came another rather unlikely discovery: we share a birthday. 18th of August.
The lion would become our exhibition mascot.
As two Leos, it seemed inevitable, although we approached him from different directions. Dan's painted lion took its inspiration from Sylvia Plath's Ariel, while I found mine prowling through Edmund Spenser's great Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene. Spenser's Lyon encounters Una wandering alone and, rather than attacking her, becomes her devoted protector.
We brought our two lions together in a linocut poster, carved and printed on Dan's magnificent Victorian printing press. It seemed to sum up the idea rather neatly: two artists, two very different approaches, with poetry bringing them together.
One of the highlights of my year has been making trips to Wales to visit Dan at his studio, housed in a former Victorian chapel. With its vast, barn-like interior and high Gothic windows, a more perfect artist's studio I couldn't imagine. Surrounded by paintings, books and all the accumulated paraphernalia of an artist at work, it was here that much of ARTVERSE began to take shape.
Poetry has long found its way into my work. Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and William Morris have been recurring companions, so the prospect of creating a whole body of work beginning with poems was irresistible.
For ARTVERSE I found myself moving between poets past and present. There were the swans of Yeats's The Wild Swans at Coole, John Clare's hares, Spenser's extraordinary Lyon and the lilies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, alongside works inspired by contemporary poets including Hugo Williams and Sue Hubbard.
I would find an image or line that stayed with me, begin drawing and eventually transfer those drawings to lino. The result was a rather eclectic gathering of lions, swans, hares, lilies, urns, poets and kitchen utensils. Rather like me, really.
ARTVERSE in Mayfair
Curated by Silke, who had unwittingly been there at its very beginning, ARTVERSE opened at 54 Shepherd Market in Mayfair at the end of August.
Seeing everything together for the first time was rather extraordinary. Until then the works had existed as paintings, blocks, proofs, drawings and ideas scattered between studios. Suddenly they were on the walls having conversations with one another.
Over the course of the week poets, collectors, friends and people we had never met before came through the door. There were readings and conversations with Sue Hubbard and T. S. Eliot Prize-winning poets Hugo Williams and Robert Minhinnick. It was a wonderfully circular moment to hear poetry spoken aloud in the same room as the pictures it had inspired.
Just before we opened, we also had the enormous pleasure of discovering ARTVERSE across two pages of Country Life. Dan and I had spoken to Carla Passino about the exhibition, our shared birthday and the rather eccentric chain of events that had led from Christmas drinks and a conversation about poetry to two Leos making lions.
To see the story in print, alongside photographs of the two of us at work, was a rather wonderful moment.
From Print to Silk
As silk scarves form such an important part of my work, I wanted them to have a place in the exhibition too, framed on the walls as artworks in their own right.
I created three designs inspired by Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel.
Spenser's Lyon strides through a tapestry-like landscape of leaves and flowers; Keats's classical urn is surrounded by figures, garlands and ornament; while Rossetti's design grew from one wonderfully visual line:
“She had three lilies in her hand.”
Those three lilies sweep across the scarf against a green ground of Gothic arches and stars.
Printed in Italy on silk twill, the designs retain the marks and irregularities of the original linocuts. The journey is a slightly curious one: poem to drawing, drawing to lino, lino to print, and finally print to silk.
I like the idea that something which began with a poem more than a century ago can eventually be folded, worn and lived with.
I don't think either Dan or I ever really thought of ARTVERSE as something with a particularly definite ending. There are, after all, far too many poems still waiting.
For now, I am delighted that these three pieces have found a life beyond the exhibition and that the ARTVERSE silk collection is now available through my website.
Perhaps that is what I have enjoyed most about the whole project. A poem becomes a picture, a picture becomes an object, and somewhere along the way somebody encounters an old line of poetry afresh.
Not bad for something that started over Christmas drinks.
SHOP ARTVERSE: POETRY IN SILK
Discover the three silk scarves inspired by Edmund Spenser, John Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
[SHOP THE ARTVERSE COLLECTION]
VIEW THE ARTVERSE CATALOGUE
The ARTVERSE exhibition also included original linocuts, works on paper and paintings by Rory Hutton and Dan Llewelyn Hall.
[VIEW THE DIGITAL EXHIBITION CATALOGUE]
For enquiries about works from the exhibition, please contact curator Silke Lohmann at silke@exclamationpr.co.uk