A Sharp Eye to an Open Eye 

Aesthetica magazine

A Sharp Eye to an Open Eye

The Lloyd Gill Gallery
Lee house
13 Beaconsfield Road
Weston-Super-Mare
Somerset
BS23 1YE
www.thelloydgillgallery.com
Lloyd@thelloydgillgallery.com
44 (0) 1934 623449

Gallery open hours are 10am till 4.30pm Monday to Saturday. Children and disabled people are welcome with given notice to the gallery.




Exhibition title

A sharp eye to an open eye

Preview night 26th May from 7pm

Exhibition dates are 28th May- 22nd June 2012

This exhibition will feature artists from Europe who paint using realism as their technique along side painters who paint in abstraction and use methods of automatism, metaphysical and biomorphism. The purpose of this exhibition is to compare realism with abstraction.
There will be an essay to accompany the exhibition which will discuss two artists Chuck Close and Pablo Picasso. The aim is to compare the techniques these two pioneers worked with in their paintings. I am interested in how both artists have travelled through realism and abstraction in their developments.
Milan Ivanic is a painter of two styles, both abstract and realism. His colourful abstracts are gorgeous on the eye. The exhibition will have both paintings by him and drawings, which have the realistic style.
Gregory Chiha is a painter with a tremendous ability. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe and is in many collections. I find his work intriguing and blends abstracted figures into realist backgrounds of woods where the tress and other scenery bring us the viewer out of the everyday work environment and somewhere where we can loss ourselves in admiration in his work.
David Lewis is a painter with heart. His works are composed of abstracted forms and complimentary colours. His art is often expressively portrayed and renders multiple marks which are like an ambiguous story, where the marks made by brush or pencil are a process to where the paint follows.
Luke Austin-Heywood has an interesting influence from Japanese style of painting in the context of 'super-flat'. The Japanese masters where able to distort a sense of perspective and the illusion of death by using 'super-flat'. Luke's abstracts are influence by the 'super – flat' idea, but have their own individual identity, which makes up his own personal style in his art.
Rebecca Cains's work is fascinating in its detail, but even more so in its subject matter. Rebecca visits the place where cars go at the end of their lives and where they are inevitably crushed. The junkyards propose what is not always considered when being in a car or looking at one. These paintings make us ask questions about our own morality.
Eve Harvey paintings are superb in colour and composition. I see a fauvist influence, especially in the colours and I think the artist Georgio de Chirico could be a possible influence where our perception on the composition is distorted. Her work is bold, colourful and delightful to witness in person.
Helen Bur's paintings remind me of Nan Goldin's photography and are a powerful bridge between photography and painting. The realism aspect acts as a documentation of events and people in Helen's life.

Selected artists

Milan Ivanic

Milan studied Fine art at the Hollar School of Art, Prague between 1962 to 1966 and continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague between 1966 to 1970. Milan has had one-man exhibitions at Keele University, Wolfson College, Oxford, The Clyde Bertrand Gallery, Stockton, California, Aston University Arts Centre, The Terrace Gallery, Worthing, and The BBC, Manchester. His pen-and-ink drawing 'The River Lune' was selected, hung and sold in the 2011 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Milan is included in Buckman's Artists in Britain since 1945.

Artist statement
I was born in a country which doesn't exist any more, Czechoslovakia. I came to Britain in 1970, and have lived and worked in Devon, Sussex, London, and Stockton, California, before settling in the North West of England in 1986. As an artist I feel at home in Britain.
I like the view, attributed to Picasso, that painting and drawing are the same. Drawing is painting with fewer means.
For me, 'abstraction' is a characteristic of form, not of content. I see my work as making 'fields of marks' which not only represent, but also materially embody meanings, tensions and emotions.


Under the Pepper Tree Andalucia, 65cm x 65cm, Acrylic on canvas, £660 ono

Gregory Chiha
Gregory is an art teacher in France. His work is highly sought after and he has exhibited throughout Europe. A few exhibition highlights are 'Galerie de l'Echarpe, Toulouse, France' and 'Gelerie Wollondilly, Brasschaat, Belgium.'

Artist Statement
He doesn't talk much. He only says he has nothing to say. He says he himself turned his back, that's why his characters don't look at us.
He lives far from everything and each time he comes back from a city where he has felt the presence of millions of people, he fears mankind should disappear. We may wonder if part of it lingers in his paintings.
Whenever his paintings can be mistaken for photographs, it's not to depict reality but to create the illusion of truth.
Everything which is neat and sharp in detail, doesn't convey any more sense of reality than blurred and confused areas represented by reflections of light spots.
His models are characters shaped by their own absence. They are in places we partly see, which might be a clue about what we assume they see, but at the same time, their own body hides the object of their attention.
He knows painting must be a promise of what will never be given.



La Dentelliere, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 80cm, 2009 £620 ono


David Lewis

My background is in film, but just over ten years ago, 
I picked up a paintbrush, and haven't put it down since.

The overarching theme of my work is the duality of existence. Heaven and Earth, Light and Shade, Good and Evil, Life and Death.
These themes are explored from both a secular and religious point of view.
Each composition seeks to capture the moment of balance between the opposing states.
Some of the paintings have a loose, expressionistic style where 
the balance is achieved quickly and with passion, others are quieter and more considered. 
Sometimes this balance is achieved by bringing multiple canvases together to create a harmonious composition.


Triptych 2, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 48 x 72", 2008, £3,125 ono

Luke Austin-Heywood

I am a painter painting both in oils and acrylics on canvas. I paint most often at a scale of 4' x 4', and work from home. My paintings have as a whole spanned a broad area of interests. They have explored my interests in music, fashion, modern graphic design, painting's history and the experience of being a contemporary painter today.
I have lived and worked as a practising painter in Cornwall since being a child only leaving to live in Exeter whilst undertaking a degree in Fine Art Painting.
The Paintings I am including in this exhibition are conceptually influenced by modern and traditional Japanese art and culture. Particularly being influenced by the classic Japanese images produced by Hokkusai,some of the most famous being of mount Fuji and Japanese contemporary culture such as the 'Super-flat' phenomenon, the art works of Takaski Murakami and the Hiropon factory. The 'Super-flat' idea interests me in the way that painting is seen or expected to portrait itself with regard to the terms of visual space and dynamics. For example traditional and much Post-modern Japanese art is created to be 'flat', that is to say not just in it's surface but also in the use of pictorial space and the function of perspective to create the illusion of depth of field- this is to say that Hokkusai does not essentially use perspective in the way we understand it from a western viewpoint, the art works are foremost about line, using a calligraphic formula to describe the subject. Super- flat also fuses the ideals of high art and the low brow – creating Westernised Japanese pop-art images.
I feel that my paintings are in this exhibition touching upon both and seeking to combine further, western perspective and depth through shadow light and form, and eastern calligraphic line and elements of the 'Super-flat' phenomenon's subject matter: such as comics(manga) cartoon (animé), toys,
modern-music sub culture etc.


The Rain it Pours, Acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 120cm, 2005, £1,062.50 ono

Rebecca Cains
Rebecca Cains was selected to train as a dancer at The Arts Educational Schools, London in 1985, where she studied ballet, contemporary, Jazz, tap, choreography, singing, drama and art. After graduating in 1988, she embarked on a professional dance career working and touring in both the UK and Europe. A knee injury led to a change in career where she concentrated on her painting, which had always been of parallel interest. She gained a BA (hons) in fine art painting at Bath Spa University.
She is a representational artist whose work captures the less fashionable areas of towns and cities where she grew up and has revisited with renewed vision. They are places in a state of decay, often unnoticed but part of our everyday lives. Much of her work has been based at a local scrap yard where she is visually interested in the haphazard shapes, textures and colours of decayed vehicles stacked together like forms of sculpture. 
Her paintings create a haunting poetry about the wrecked detritus of our contemporary world, heightened with the urban environment juxtaposed against a rural landscape. The scenes are devoid of people with the wrecked vehicles taking on a personality of their own. They are undocumented areas which in the future will change or be lost forever and capture the essence of today's throwaway society. She paints in oils using a limited palette to capture the subtlety and subdued colour of her chosen subject matter.
She has exhibited widely including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition London, New English Art Club, Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Royal West of England Academy Bristol Autumn Exhibition, the Royal West of England Academy National Open Painting Exhibition 2010 where she was awarded 1st prize and was runner up in the Lynn Painter Stainers Prize exhibition 2011, Painters Hall in London.



Porsche 924 in Scrap Yard, Oil on canvas, 90cm x 94cm, 2010, £2,750 ono


Evelyn Harvey

Since graduating with a degree in Fine Art, most of my working practice has been within the artistic field, both as an employee and in personal development. Since 1996 this has also involved courses as self-employed. The past few years, since official retirement, I have concentrated on pursuing my own development.
The primary focus of my own work is Figurative Abstraction, that is, working directly from perceived reality, developing the format into wherever it leads, whilst trying to expand that which generated the excitement at the beginning of the original creation. Commercial undertakings have included numerous commissions (mainly 'pets and portraits').



Untitled 3, Oil on canvas, 80cm x 100cm, 2011, £2000


Helen Bur

The relationship between art & life and photography & painting are paramount to my practice. I photograph to keep a record of my everyday life as a diary of experience and memory; a homage to the small moments that may otherwise go unnoticed. I'll paint from a photograph in an attempt to make it valid, contrasting a spontaneous snapshot with a large scale, meticulous, meditative process of painting. This parallels an interest in Buddhism, being mindfully aware and the vital importance of the present moment.
I am interested in the comparative ease of taking a photograph with creating a painting and people's psychological connections and reactions to the two mediums. When I begin to paint the photograph becomes a short-hand to the memory and something creeps in and works over and above it, filling in what a photograph alone can often miss out.
I am currently exploring using multiple photographs and drawings, collaged together as the basis for paintings, taking people from different times and places, sitting them together in an illusive scene. 
My ultimate goal is allowing concept and aesthetic to find a balance and co-exist in my work so it can step outside the often scrutinised box of photo-realism.
"Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the lives of the people." George Elliot.


Holly & Chester, Oil on canvas, 122cm x 122cm, 2010, £1,140
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