ANDREW GRAVES and STEPHEN HARWOOD 'Common Ground'

About

At first the pairing of Andrew/Stephen seemed wilfully perverse — an abstract painter self-consciously in the tradition of American Abstract Expressionists (though with a twist), and an entirely figurative painter of re-imagined landscape... self-consciously in the very English tradition of... aah but that's where the experiment in disassociation becomes an exercise in coincidence as when two people find in mid conversation that their mothers both grew up in the same town. Both painters put their work through a distinctive refining process, their sources pared down and stripped of bombast. With Graves the scale of the work strips Expressionism of it's over-weaning need to 'express' and becomes more reflective, as though Ginsberg had taken heed of Emily Dickinson as indeed he did of Blake and simplified and refined his 'Howl' into a cogent touching ballad. Harwood's landscapes are also put through a refining process — their source material travel books (i.e. the Shell Guides), films (i.e. of Derek Jarman), and photographs (i.e. of Paul Nash) of eras lost through time and mortality.