Notes from The Hepworth

Hepworth + Moore + friends:

• I didn't spend a lot of time thinking too critically about these pieces, but there's no doubt they're beautiful to look at. Like I was thinking about Hockney before, it's really nice / interesting to see artists engaging with the environment around them, particularly when it's local.
• It's also a weird feeling to see artists grouped together frequently whether it's because their work/ location is similar or if they really were friends / colleagues. Art seems like such a selfish pursuit that I forget that it's not a vacuum. Same goes for design, though I find myself picking out peoples' influences much clearer there- a question of my own knowledge but how it is also an Industry.
• Naive / folk / tribal art was very lightly touched on in Hepworth/ Moore exhibits but not gone into depth so much, as far as I'm aware. It seems a shame to not talk about these influences so much.

Stanley Spencer

• My critical and formal opinion of this exhibition is that it is WILD
• It's hard to describe how I feel looking at these paintings, particularly in regards to the religious paintings which are what I remember and focus on mostly when I think of him. It is hard to imagine them in a context where they are taken seriously- stylistically they are bizarre, iconically and what is going on in the paintings is often even stranger. It is quite amazing to look at the big shipyard paintings that he was commissioned to make by somebody else when you also look at his other paintings.
• So from that : I imagined Spencer's painting work to be insular and isolated but in some way he established himself as a successful and sometimes commercial painter, I want to find out how painters work- maybe not so much for my own career but just out of interest.
• In all honesty my gut instinct is often to laugh at these paintings, but they are also incredibly dark and full of upset. Even after reading the painting descriptions I found it a little hard to understand where he was coming from but that's ok, once it's in the gallery it is the viewer's to think about.
• The compositions themselves were also jarring, often they looked to be in grids but not quite - the perspectives would be off - sometimes the pieces felt unbalanced... but that all largely fed into the strange feelings of the work.

• The exhibition manager (?) is a friend of the friend I visited the exhibition with and we coincidentally saw him briefly in Leeds afterwards. Where we were was too loud for me to actually hear him (I'm sure he had plenty of great things to say) but I was glad to hear that the exhibition was getting a good reception from Stanley Spencer fans. We also mentioned the young kids doing some kind of theatre outside on the grounds and he mentioned how they provide space to them as one of the few spaces in Wakefield. Art education is important and I forget that because my own making as a teenager was so insular (that isn't good).