Love and Paint, Actually
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling
There are some exhibitions that just seem to come and go, but occasionally an exhibition comes along that feels like an important cultural landmark. The forthcoming exhibition at the Rye Art Gallery (RAG) is probably one of those. It has a deceptively short title, namely Colony, but it should come with a very long explanatory subtitle. Although actually, that would be very difficult because this is one of those exhibitions which cannot be summed up very easily. In one way, it is about what the featured artist Mick Rooney calls “the close continuity of art and friends”. All of the artists involved have been part of a sort of art-infused friendship circle and have shared a journey in Art. Indeed, Mick Rooney and Gus Cummins have been friends since school days; amazingly, Mick remembers a school trip to Cookham together when they met a very elderly Stanley Spencer and maybe, unwittingly, picked up a kind of torch.
Waiting and Wondering by Mick Rooney
REMEMBERING FRED
Meeting Mick with and Gus a few days ago, you could sense an enduring fraternity, or what should probably just be called love. But in some ways, the main instigator of this exhibition is the brilliant English landscape artist Fred Cuming. Fred, born in 1930, was the mentor of both Gus and Mick and contemporary of the one female artist in the show, Jacqueline Stanley. Cuming has been exhibiting at RAG almost since its creation in 1957; he was on the board of the gallery for many years and helped to make it the discreetly influential gallery that it is. It is therefore very fitting that Fred should be a key player in marking the sixty-fifth anniversary of the gallery. It was Fred who had the idea that he could mark the moment with a show featuring the people that have meant most to him as fellow-travelling artists. But, very sadly, Fred died in the early summer of this year. And so, at another level, this show is a tribute to Fred, and perhaps to the enduring spirit of friendship.
This group of artists are not linked by a connection to a particular art movement. Each artist is rather too anarchic to subscribe to any groupthink. But there is something which unifies them: all of them have lived a long life dedicated to the vague thing we call art. Indeed, they all have the prizes and plaudits to prove it, and Fred, Gus and Mick are all Royal Academicians. But that is not what motivates them. At some level, this exhibition is a testament to what W.B. Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult”. Art as an addiction, almost.
And then maybe there is also a sense that this is an exhibition about the spirit of place. Fred Cuming devoted himself to painting this corner of East Sussex and Kent. He was perhaps the last truly great English atmospheric landscape painter. Yet he was painfully aware of a kind of absurdity in trying to capture meteorological moods in paint: he brilliantly encapsulated his life’s work as an attempt to “convey something which is about nothing more than emptiness”. But the devotion to place goes far beyond postcodes and actuality.
Gus Cummins painting Hey little hen
YEAR ZERO
Mick Rooney paints another sort of place. A magical, weird, poetic place in which lost or imagined souls dance little dances or make a fast exit from Eden, to borrow a title or two. Mick’s work exudes a certain dark humour. In talking to Mick it was evident that his humour accompanies some incisive views on art. He has a sense that his generation was the last to be schooled in the stories of art history: the last to feel themselves to be part of an English tradition. He may well be right. Certainly, the curator of RAG, Julian Day, agrees that “We will not see such painters again.” Mick seems to feel that art colleges have, in recent times, somehow scrapped the past. What he calls the “Pol Pot-Year Zero approach”. The exhibition may be a chance to tap into a narrative that flows backwards.
Gus Cummins has had a luminous sort of art career. He has won a glitter-box of art prizes. In 2018 he had a solo exhibition Off the Wall at what used to be the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, now the Contemporary. His work is hard to pigeon-
hole: defiantly modernist but with odd dashes of realist quirkiness. Something of his approach is captured in the fascinating documentary Abroad in Britain – the Search for Bohemia by Jonathan Meades. (Recommended viewing on Youtube for Hastings dwellers) In that short film, Cummins, and his wonderful wife (and painter in her own right) Angie, reflect on what drew them to Hastings. Gus confesses, with glee, that it was its “seediness,” while Angie was more drawn to the shapeshifting sea. Gus tells Meades that he has always preferred to head for the basement and paint from his interior mental landscapes. He admits that some people think there is something “a bit crazy” about hiding from the coastal light but when you look at the work you feel that he has invented an altogether different sort of world. Today he is suffering from poor health but when we visited him, his love of the oddness of things still shone through. Indeed, for someone initially not inclined to talk, he proved to be quite a raconteur. His stories of Hastings life should really be put in the National Archive, perhaps particularly the account of the attempt to bury a notable local Hastings character at sea, in which the coffin proved to be unwilling to sink. One could sense a certain mordant relish for black farce both in his storytelling and in his beautifully strange art.
Merry Go Round, Fun Fair by Jacqueline Stanley; Rye Harbour by Fred Cuming
PUSHING THE PIANO
Jacqueline Stanley, born in 1928, is the oldest of all the artists exhibiting but, in some ways, perhaps the most elusive. She has lived in Ireland since 1975 and the Irish landscape has been the source of her inspiration. But unlike Cuming, who looks to let loose paint become clouds and vapour, she always sought to use line to ensnare landforms in line. Her daughter, filmmaker Nichola Bruce, says that her mother told her how she used to come to Hastings on holiday just after the war and can still remember the barbed wire stretched along the shingle at Rock-a-Nore. In some ways, it was her drawings of that landscape that got her into art college and then an art life. Quite a risky step for a working-class girl. She married fellow-artist Campbell Bruce, and, for a while, she was part of the party-loving art commune at Egerton House in Kent. It wasn’t quite a decadent community – the wildest thing they got up to, apparently, was pushing the pub piano up the hill to the big house for a knees-up – but certainly reactive against the grey constraints of Britain as it tiptoed into the explosive sixties. Now in her nineties, she returns occasionally to this area to reconnect with something, after years engaging with the craggy, wild darkness of Wicklow. She returns, she says, rather touchingly, “before it all goes away”.
The exhibition also features some of the work of the acclaimed Hastings sculptor Bernard Mcguigan. His addition to the show is in many ways a deliberate odd counterpoint to this essentially painterly show. The curator Julian Day feels that the show will benefit from a very different note. I suspect the juxtaposition is going to work fantastically well. In many ways this is a show that threads together several artistic lives. It allows for consideration of the wildly different individual artists but also a contemplation of an era, maybe even the end of an era. Definitely one not to be missed.
• The exhibition is on at the Rye Art Gallery from 10 September to 23 October. (Closed on Tuesdays).
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