Sometimes artists get a bad press. They are occasionally depicted as narcissistic types obsessed with their own ideas and neurotic about reviews and, of course, sales. But the
Art Auction held by HIP in December proved all that to be utter nonsense. In fact, the generosity of local artists in their willingness to donate for free was quite staggering. The Auction raised more than £5k. A sum that is a considerable boost to the paper for 2022. A huge ‘thank you’ goes out to absolutely everyone involved.

Curiously, on the day itself, the omens were not good. In the afternoon a storm hit the town and brought such heavy rain and wind that many of us felt no one would brave such elements just for pretty pictures. (On top of that, 7 December was also the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbour air raid – not really relevant, but hardly an encouraging sign.) But, amazingly, the weather calmed by late afternoon and the people of Hastings came in search of artistic treasure in great numbers.

Kate and Richard in action

HIP would like to take this opportunity to thank a couple of individuals by name. Dave, the proprietor of ‘The Horse and Groom’ in Mercatoria, was an absolute star: he let us wander in and out of the back room in the days before the auction as we saw fit and really could not have been more helpful. Although at one point on the day of the auction, the pub had to bolt its door to keep the wind at bay. Carrying large paintings from car to pub in the afternoon risked the artwork being flung into the wild air. Another hero of the artistic hour was Richard Fryer, local writer, seafarer and brilliant furniture maker who also, it turned out, was a great auctioneer. He was ably assisted by the multi-talented Kate Tym who engaged the audience with wit and not a little good-humoured verbal prodding.

Pondering the paintwork

The range of art on show was amazing. The auction had everything, from the brilliant to the baffling or bizarre and all stations in between. There were all sorts of paintings from the small and intricate to the vast. There were numerous artists in this field, and among them were Oska Lappin, Katherine Reekie, Russell Baker, Ian Barraclough, James Mackinnon, Tom Banks, Daisy Clarke, Stewart Walton, Robin Holtom, Martin Bradshaw, Danny Mooney, Claudia de Grandi and many, many more. Photography included Ian O’Leary, John Coles, Alex Brattell, Alexandra Vacaroiu, Patricia Webb and Sonny Levitt. Print and mixed media was very lively, including works from Alan Rankle and Laetitia Yhap, Hazel Brook and Peter Quinell but also more pop-punky pieces from Carrie Warrior, Georgie Wheeler, Chris Milton and Jude Montague. Ben Eine’s street art came courtesy of Steph at ‘Stella Dore’ and many thanks to her for that. In what might be called the conceptual category we had the wonderfully intriguing Becky Beasley. Adrienne Hunter’s piece seemed to dynamically straddle drawing and painting. There was also a strong showing in ceramics, from Mudworks, Annabel Faraday, Bernard McGuigan, Liz Emtage and Jane Loftin. We even had a charming cartoon by the late, great Martin Honeysett. Local shops were also generous in donating prizes for the raffle, and Catriona Lafferty was heroic in jumping in, last-minute, to run it. 

In total, more than fifty artists contributed and apologies to those not mentioned due to lack of space. Thanks also to the unsung heroes who did the lugging in the rain and the fixing to the walls. Including Claire-Marie Moore and our own Fiona McGarry, Rod Webb, Kent Barker, Suzie McFie and Ben Cornwell. Overall, as they say in very silly circles, everyone was a winner. 

• See the full list of works for sale here

As everyone knows, the art and popular culture market is a fickle one. Often seeming irrational. Why, for example, is George Formby’s banjo-ukelele worth more than Noel Gallagher’s hand-written lyric book? Is ‘Wonderwall’ a lesser achievement than ‘I’m leaning on a Lamp-post?’ Who knows? Obviously, it is very hard to know what determines the value of things. Which is, of course, why auctions are so fascinating and indeed unpredictable. 

On the evening of December 7 this newspaper is holding an Art Auction, at the suitably chic ‘Cactus Hound’ in St Leonards, to raise funds to keep HIP alive. And maybe kicking. (Big thanks to the Cactus – which arguably has some of the best cocktails in St Leonards on Sea) Hastings and St Leonards are brimming with creatives and they have been incredibly generous in offering work for the event. As a result, the auction will feature an exceptionally diverse range of work. In addition to paintings, there will be prints, photo-graphs, drawings, ceramics and sculpture. The auction will have ‘guide prices’ set for each piece, but monetary outcomes are, inevitably, hard to call.

Some of the artists on show are well established names in the Hastings art world. Laetitia Yhap, for example – who has work in the Tate Collection – has a piece up for offer. Her artwork has now become identified with the town; it is figurative in approach, with Hastings fisherfolk and beach-life at its heart. Alan Rankle is another of the town’s leading artistic lights and he is also donating. John Cole is a local photographer who has produced iconic images of world figures, such as Mohammad Ali, and a figure of similar stature appears in the auction. Chris Milton has donated a print that highlights his gift for putting down a searing, and yet somehow witty, line. His piece ‘Pinocchio Pope’ has already generated interest.

Most of the artists on show have, at some point, been featured in HIP. Daisy Clarke and Tom Banks for example have been highlighted recently: both are intriguing painters whose reputations are definitely on the upward trajectory. Russell Baker, from Kino, is a Slade trained and renowned printmaker, and a wonderful painter.  Also on show will be other well established artists, such as Bernard McGuigan and Claudia de Grandi. Martin Bradshaw – who is currently on show at the Hastings Arts Forum – is also donating. There are many more who could be mentioned. Overall, it is an interestingly eclectic mix and it will be intriguing to see how the auction unfolds. It should be a fun evening.

The paper has always sought to support the local art scene, whether it be traditional graphic work, film festivals, rock bands, people’s operas, theatre or even poetry brothels. We all know that most artists are not exactly rolling in cash but, to be honest, the paper has been overwhelmed with the willingness of the bohemian community to donate. 

In many ways, the value of art is not just about the price of it. That would be crass. But, having said that, and putting all subtlety to one side for a moment, this auction may well offer up some smart buys to the discerning eye. 

All paintings go beyond words. If what is communicated through painting could be better expressed through language then it would be. In her upcoming exhibition at BlackShed gallery, Claudia De Grandi further distills this self evident truth by attempting to express the ineffable. 

Living by the sea can be deeply reassuring. On a daily basis you are exposed to expansive views uncluttered by the verticality and detail of urban space. We have ready access to horizontal lines that can not be taken in fully without a turn of the head or without moving our eyes. Fore and middle ground concede their power to the longer view and everyday perspective and parallax seem like folly. Proximity to the sea and its big skies gives us daily recourse to the mystery and majesty of the sublime. 

Claudia de Grandi loves the moon and the sea. Her paintings are her visceral and heartfelt response to them. In that sense they are votive offerings – her way of saying thank you and her means of worship. They provide us with a visual sensation that can overwhelm and settle in equal measure. They aim to act on our emotions in the same immediate way as music does. It is perhaps unsurprising that De Grandi is a classically trained pianist. 

Fascinated by the boundary between abstraction and figuration, she has produced a set of images that we instantly recognise, yet that also aim to set us free from the relativity of literalism. In this sense the process of representation is not the endgame, but a means to an end.

Great Art binds us to a deeper truth and reminds us of our higher self. It tells us of a world beyond the mundane and guides us to profitable inward reflection.

Some of this series of works is  preoccupied with the moon. Each of these particular works involves seeing the moon, or the light derived from it. Whilst we see the depicted moon, the moon is also looking back at us – and it is this reciprocal gaze that locks us into the divine. The silent yet benign ‘stare’ of the moon challenges us and evokes in us the shame of being tritely obsessed with the everyday. It wisely advises us that the urgent should not always get in the way of the important and reminds of our duty to look after the biosphere and to reconnect with our ‘Mother’.

De Grandi was brought up in Brazil, the home of Candomblé, a syncretic religion practiced by those descended from Africans forced into the slave trade. It is a synthesis of primarily Yoruban and Catholic beliefs. Amongst the pantheon of Candomblé saints or Orixás, Yemanjá, the Goddess of the Sea is perhaps the most well known. Orixás, who are deified ancestors, are the link between the spiritual and the human world. Yemanjá provides life-giving water that nurtures the earth, like the waters of the womb. She symbolizes the divine balance between heaven and earth and is ever present in De Grandi’s work.

The work can also be understood as being similar to that of traditional Mandalas. In many religions Mandalas are geometric diagrams of the cosmic. They reaffirm our relationship with the infinite and provide devotees with a tool for meditation or help to induce trance-like states. Similarly, De Grandi’s paintings are not merely representational, they tempt us to altered states and as such are implements for deep contemplation.

Go to this exhibition with intent, enjoy the sensations the works evoke and take those states of mind with you when you leave.

• ‘Moon and Sea’, an exhibition of paintings and drawings at The blackShed gallery 29th February – 28th March. Private view 7th March. www.theblackshedgallery.org.uk/home

While she is known primarily for the lucidly evocative, large-scale but minimalist paintings launched at her 2018 exhibitions in Milan and London, Claudia de Grandi’s oeuvre extends also to performances in which her live action, calligraphic brushwork is paired in dialogue with a solo musician as part of an interactive improvisation.

Claudia De Grandi and Tymon Dogg

She has created her seminal work Visual Sounds with the American musician Joshua Tennent in a series of gallery and art fair performances in Berlin, London, Kyoto and Tokyo to much interest and critical approval.

More recently, as a part of De Grandi’s exhibition Blue Moon, which showed in the gallery until 7th July,  A Wave of Dreams Arts Lab was proud to premier a piece she made in collaboration with renowned violinist Tymon Dogg.

The full impact of De Grandi’s work must be fully appreciated both thorough her explorations within the genre of painting as performance and her work with musician collaborators, where specially composed music is combined with sequences of paintings and film presented to remarkable effect. 

As a Brazilian modernist artist who also trained as a classical musician, De Grandi uses these various media of painting, film, photography and music as intertwined  elements in her evolving creative discourse. 

A major sequence of De Grandi’s paintings are now being prepared for a large scale exhibition in 2020, when her ongoing series Waves & Horizons will be presented as part of an immersive soundscape and video installation at Fabbrica del Vapore Arts Centre in Milan.

De Grandi’s collaborator for her specially-created performance at A Wave of Dreams Arts Lab is Tymon Dogg, a virtuoso musician and songwriter known for his seminal work with various bands and performers between Liverpool, London and New York, including Nico of Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground and his bestselling songs for The Clash and Joe Strummer’s Mescaleros.

On the evening of Saturday 6th at St Leonards’ latest dedicated arts venue, the invited guests were receptive and clearly moved by the improvised and closely woven patterns in sound and vision created by the two performers.

From the startlingly sudden launch of the composition, De Grandi worked studiously in a continuous flowing format, painting directly onto large sheets of watercolour paper, throwing a range of carefully limited colours across surfaces as she strode around the paintings.

At the opposite corner of the gallery, Tymon Dogg took a formidable musical stance, playing the electric violin with a strident yet lyrical and astonishingly emotive intensity. Dogg is a strikingly theatrical performer: the sweeping sculptural sounds he created mirrored his own extravagant physical gestures.

Meanwhile the already transfixed audience watched enthralled as De Grandi’s serpentine calligraphy swooped and coiled in increasingly intricate, overlaid  abstracted forms across the paintings.

At a perfectly judged point both sounds and images stopped abruptly and a stark silence, unusual for a gallery reception,  took centre stage. The completed paintings remained in the space.

Claudia De Grandi’s show at Graze gallery is concerned with the dynamic spaces between abstraction and expression, description and presence, looking at and feeling interconnected.

From Sao Paulo in Brazil, but working in UK since 2006, De Grandi trained as a classical musician but didn’t experience satisfaction in the virtuoso world of the classical recital. She quickly realised that exploring the shifting dynamics between inner and outer interested her more than performing other people’s compositions.

Her painting practice is rooted then in her intense responsiveness to the world, but it is not landscape painting in the conventional sense. There is a sonorous depth to the large scale works she developed working at Cooden beach. Making drawing after drawing there, she concentrated on mapping the fast-changing light and form relationships, especially at the transitional points between day and night, making herself look steadily into amplifying darkness.

Whilst we drive to her studio, she talks about her family origins in renaissance Italy, her mother’s lifelong emphasis on the mystery of life and her attraction to Japanese culture through her paternal grandmother’s love for it. She describes herself as between eastern and western cultures, identifying sunyata as a containing, out of clock-time living spacious awareness, but never a symbolic empty void. Real spirituality cannot be ritually imagined without heart and a deep respect for everything else alive; without this, celebrating transcendence can easily become an empty mannered performance too, says De Grandi.

In her studio, delicate calligraphic drawings are as numerous as landscape sketches, and it’s quickly clear that her picture plane perspective, though observed, is not solely the classic western receding into the distance model, but is organised more into related symbolic areas. Sky, horizon, human all present side by side. Turner, Rothko, Reinhardt and Newman are painterly relatives for sure, but there is something more going on here.

These works are not referencing the usual oppositions, sin/faith, mind/body, heaven/hell, nor gendered gaze and identity as dry intellectual theory. These paintings are light made of darkness, empty space made of felt-sense; they are inner and outer, self and other simultaneously present and in a real conversation.

De Grandi’s large works are concerned then with being whole and human in relation to life, others and ourselves. She highlights the human gaze as something received into ourselves from ourselves, but also as something we send out to others and the world.

In a world ever more dominated by an objectifying focus on national identity, possessive ownership and power distribution, these beautiful paintings feel hugely timely and perceptive. Highly recommended.

At Graze Gallery until 23rd July 

For more information about Claudia De Grandi, see her website: www.degrandi.com