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"Looking at Art" is the Society's Art Appreciation Group.
Page edited by Michael Culverwell
This group meets most months at Holy Trinity School, North Willows Road, Stratford upon Avon. The Society has three members who produce an interesting presentation on Artists, Painting genre or Art highlights related to upcoming art appreciation visits.
The meeting starts at 7.00pm and the evening is punctuated by a refreshment break with cake enabling members to mix and mingle. We have an interesting programme and you would be most welcome. You don’t need to be an artist to join; you can join the Society as a Pure Art Lover (PAL) at a modest fee of £20.00 per year which entitles you to attend all the meetings and enjoy the art appreciation visits.
Thursday 1st May, “The Life and Work of Toulouse - Lautrec”
By Michael Culverwell
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
French painter, printmaker, and draughtsman, one of the most colourful figures in 19th-century art. He showed an early talent for drawing (his father and one of his uncles were amateur artists) and in 1882 he began to study with Bonnat. The following year he became a pupil of Cormon, and in January 1884, aged 19, he was given an allowance and set up in a studio of his own in the Montmartre district of Paris, an area notorious for bohemianism and seedily glamorous nightlife. Almost all his work is taken from this world and his scenes of cafés, brothels, and nightclubs (notably the Moulin Rouge) have helped to create the popular image of fin-de-siècle Paris. He led a gruellingly dissipated life, but he was always a dedicated professional artist, and it was a matter of pride that he kept his earnings in a separate bank account from his parental allowance (his work sold well, but he was constantly short of money because he was so extravagant).
Thursday 22nd May
“Sir Stanley Spencer” by Jane Hornby:
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an important and original British artist of the 20th century. Cookham in Berkshire was the place he was born and lived most of his life. He always considered it his ‘earthly paradise’ and the village featured in many of his paintings. He is best known for his imaginative interpretations of biblical events set in Cookham. He also painted landscapes, some portraits, and was appointed as an Official War Artist in 1918, which later resulted in a series of murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire. In the Second World War he was again appointed as an Official War Artist when he painted large canvases showing shipbuilding on the Clyde, depicting the teamwork that went into the war effort.
By all accounts he was a very sociable and unusual character who has often been called eccentric. Around Cookham he became a familiar sight pushing an old pram which carried his canvas, paints and easel, often wearing pyjamas under his suit if it was cold. The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham holds one of the largest collections of his paintings and drawings. Memorabilia, such as the pram which is also at the gallery. He received a knighthood in the year of his death in 1959.
Thursday 26th June, “Jheronimus van Aken (Known as Hieronymus Bosch) (c.1450 – 1516) ”
By Tony Mawbey
Hieronymus Bosch is arguably the most discussed old master artist of the late medieval period.
His paintings are full of grotesque contorted figures and impossible monsters making no effort to produce an idealised portrayal of the natural world. In the words of Albrecht Durer such paintings “make a picture of a dream”.
Within the concepts of art in this period of history, two terms identify what was distinctive about Bosch’s art, “drollery and grotesque.”
His use of drollery or “humour that is both clever and surprising” came from the well-established tradition of comical figures in the borders of manuscripts and on stone or wood carvings which he transferred to panel painting. The grotesque gave him the freedom to offer moral and satirical scenes which would astonish and impress the viewer with their invention.
There is, however, no established pictorial tradition of the themes Bosch used in any contemporary sources - this makes Bosch unique.
There are, in fact, only twenty paintings and eight drawings which are currently accepted as in Bosch’s own hand and then only a further six panel paintings and six drawings which are attributed to his workshop. There are a few others that hover on the edge of attribution and then many copies made both during his lifetime and after his death.