GEORGINA ALLEN
LANDSCAPE STILL LIFE ABSTRACT
15 September - 9 October 2021
LANDSCAPES
Brecon Beacons, Cornwall, Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Peak District, Pembrokeshire, Teesdale & Yorkshire, Wiltshire & Hampshire
THE BRECON BEACONS
CORNWALL
THE COTSWOLDS
THE PEAK DISTRICT
HEREFORDSHIRE
PEMBROKESHIRE
SURREY
TEESDALE CUMBRIA YORKSHIRE
WILTSHIRE & HAMPSHIRE
STILL LIFE
ABSTRACT
Appraisal of Georgina Allen by NICHOLAS USHERWOOD
Features Editor of GALLERIES magazine
Art is one of the most extraordinary human activities, a moment when we attempt to stop the arrow of time in mid-air and give tangible, visible form to that instant of consciousness. It is a process which can take one of two essential directions – an inward path in which abstract forms and colours become the markers of conscious and unconscious response, or a turning outward, to external visual stimuli – landscape, natural history or the figure for example – as metaphors for thoughts, feelings and ideas. And yet, while Georgina Allen's quiet and subtle landscape and still-life paintings may, quite obviously, seem to belong to the latter class, the more you look at them the more they begin to take on a distinctly inward, contemplative character also. Thus the forms of the Pembrokeshire landscape that she has been painting so intently for nearly a decade now are unmistakably taking on the depths and resonances of abstraction, in which the inflections and variations of colours, tones, textures, lines and forms become an essential element in these intense meditations on conscious experience.
A similar process is apparent too in the still-lifes that have long formed the other central strand of her work. When I first visited her studio to write about her 2014 show at Piers Feetham, the sight of her studio floors covered with a quite astonishing array of stones and bones, butterfly wings and feathers, strands of seaweed and women's gloves immediately alerted me to a very particular artistic intelligence at work, one in which abstraction again played a vital part. Those attitudes are still very much in evidence in these new pieces though now one also senses a quiet shift of emphasis, a degree of plainness in which the objects being painted are there even less for their individual extraordinariness and rather more for their abstract relationship to each other, even to the point, in some of the paintings, of remaining incomplete and only faintly drawn in. Paradoxically this seems, to my eyes at least, to place the focus back on the intense 'objectness' with which they now seem so movingly imbued. It is a similar intensity of looking that is reflected in a nice story she tells of her efforts to capture the essential spirit of one particular rainy Pembrokeshire coastal scene from her car, a physically exhausting procedure which involved hanging over the front seat of her van for several hours – a hard-won image indeed!
C.V.
Georgina Allen studied at Chelsea School of Art, graduating with a BA (First) in Fine Art and an MA in Painting. She has had six solo exhibitions at the Piers Feetham Gallery. Group exhibitions include: in London, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Mall Galleries (Lynn Painter-Stainers Exhibition, Threadneedle Prize Exhibition, New English Art Club Open and Discerning Eye), Stephen Lacey Gallery, Art First, Cadogan Contemporary, Long & Ryle, Curwen & New Academy; Denise Yapp Contemporary Art, Monmouthshire; the West Wales Arts Centre, Pembrokeshire; Quercus Gallery, Bath and The Art Stable, Dorset.
A similar process is apparent too in the still-lifes that have long formed the other central strand of her work. When I first visited her studio to write about her 2014 show at Piers Feetham, the sight of her studio floors covered with a quite astonishing array of stones and bones, butterfly wings and feathers, strands of seaweed and women's gloves immediately alerted me to a very particular artistic intelligence at work, one in which abstraction again played a vital part. Those attitudes are still very much in evidence in these new pieces though now one also senses a quiet shift of emphasis, a degree of plainness in which the objects being painted are there even less for their individual extraordinariness and rather more for their abstract relationship to each other, even to the point, in some of the paintings, of remaining incomplete and only faintly drawn in. Paradoxically this seems, to my eyes at least, to place the focus back on the intense 'objectness' with which they now seem so movingly imbued. It is a similar intensity of looking that is reflected in a nice story she tells of her efforts to capture the essential spirit of one particular rainy Pembrokeshire coastal scene from her car, a physically exhausting procedure which involved hanging over the front seat of her van for several hours – a hard-won image indeed!
C.V.
Georgina Allen studied at Chelsea School of Art, graduating with a BA (First) in Fine Art and an MA in Painting. She has had six solo exhibitions at the Piers Feetham Gallery. Group exhibitions include: in London, Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Mall Galleries (Lynn Painter-Stainers Exhibition, Threadneedle Prize Exhibition, New English Art Club Open and Discerning Eye), Stephen Lacey Gallery, Art First, Cadogan Contemporary, Long & Ryle, Curwen & New Academy; Denise Yapp Contemporary Art, Monmouthshire; the West Wales Arts Centre, Pembrokeshire; Quercus Gallery, Bath and The Art Stable, Dorset.