Painting the Town: Stephen Coelho’s Portraits of Local Notables
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Stephen Coelho loves jazz. His portrait exhibition is accompanied by jazz recordings, and the very first picture you see is of local saxophonist Jason Yarde, imposing, actively touching his pork pie hat and holding his tenor under his other arm. It’s an affectionate and skilful representation of a talented musician well-known locally and nationally, often seen playing in different venues around the town.
The exhibition, paintings of local luminaries of all kinds, has taken at least two years for Coelho to finish, and he says his own painting style has developed over that time. He has learned, he says, the value of impasto, and the later portraits are partly made effective by the building up of layers of paint. As he has spent a lifetime as an artist and designer, I wondered that he is still developing new ways of working: he said that as an artist he never stops learning.
A fine thing about many of these portraits is that their subjects are in situ, and the surrounding objects and the viewpoint are clear in their contribution to the effect. Laetitia Yhap, for example, sits in her upstairs studio surrounded by the lovely paraphernalia of her working life as an artist. Bernadette Martin, controller of the East Hill Lift, looks out from the lift to the town below, painted from an extraordinary, but very effective angle. The late poet Pete Brown (whose last performance at Jazz Hastings was the first performance I saw there, just after pandemic restrictions were lifted) reads from his own 2016 poetry collection, Mundane Tuesday and Freudian Saturday. It’s a superb portrait, a great likeness designed (as the best portraits are) to show inner, as well as outer, character.
Coelho’s next project, already started, is to paint musicians who play at Jazz Hastings. Regular readers of these pages may have seen last year’s review of Xhosa Cole’s band, in my opinion one of the finest gigs of the year. The first portrait, of Cole, is apparently well on the way to being finished. I am greatly looking forward to seeing these.
‘Painting The Town’, an exhibition of portraits by Stephen Coelho, is upstairs at St. Andrews Mews, off Queen’s Road, until 24 December.
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