Three Painters, One Sculptor

About

THREE PAINTERS, ONE SCULPTOR

An exhibition of pictures and sculpture from four living artists, curated by Alan Kluckow in collaboration with Stapleford Granary.

www.staplefordgranary.org.uk

Tom Benjamin, Susan Laughton, Philip Maltman & Ian Turnock

OPENING TIMES

Monday - Friday 8:30am - 4pm

Saturday 9am - 3pm

Sunday 10am - 3pm

Please note that from 1st March onwards, the Granary will be closed to the public on Wednesdays during the day. 

The gallery is also open during evening events for concert ticket holders. Please see event times for details.

Occasionally, we have to close the foyer area of the exhibition due to recordings or events taking place in the concert hall, Please check this page before visiting for updates. Thank you for your understanding. 

Tom Benjamin was born in Totnes in Devon in 1967. He has lived and worked in Lewes for thirty years. Themes in his work include tree portraits and seascapes of Hope Gap in Sussex, Newhaven, Cornwall and Harris. He has regular solo shows with St Annes Galleries Lewes and shows with The Russell Gallery in London and Browns Gallery in Tain, Scotland. He exhibits regularly with the New English Art Club. Tom also teaches at the Paddock Art Studios in Lewes and at West Dean College in West Sussex.

'I am committed to the practice of plein air painting. The sense of the subject being about to slip away as the light changes lends the working process a sense of urgency. I am often drawn to subjects which have a sense of slippage such as the coast where wet mud or rock pools gives way to water which reflects the sky, or woods where light falling on a visual tangle creates tension between the form and weight of the subject and the play of light which both reveals and disguises it.

I tend to produce a group of paintings in each location and there are some places I have been working in for many years. Paintings are sometimes completed in a single session but more often I return to them aiming to carry on when the light and weather are similar. I paint quickly and relish the improvisations required by painting in front of a quickly changing subject.'

Susan Laughton worked in architecture for twelve years before devoting herself to a career as a professional artist. Her work is exhibited regularly in the UK and is held in private collections in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia. It has been selected for the Royal West of England Academy Drawn exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy Annual exhibition and Fully Awake 5:6 at the Freelands Foundation, London.

'My paintings and drawings evolve from half-remembered glimpses seen from the corner of my eye, fleeting juxtapositions, the dislocated reverie of long car journeys, or from more studied compositions. They are created from many visual sources that are filtered through sketchbook work and altered intuitively as the painting progresses.

The landscape is my starting point, not as a picturesque or static view, but as a space travelled through and experienced often on the edges of the urban and rural. It is a source of man made and natural structures, surfaces and colour from which my reductive personal responses develop. I am inspired by distant horizons, the silhouettes of trees and rooftops contrasting expanses of sky interrupted by power lines, and by the architectural forms of vernacular buildings'.

Philip Maltman was born in Ayrshire and studied at Ravensbourne College of Art & Design. He has produced paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and written work for over 40 years. His early work was inspired by meetings with Don Van Vliet, Alan Davie, Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys. His canvases with words and grafitti-like marks draw inspiration from Robert Rauschenberg and latterly the work of Cy Twombly.

'Artworks for me are about mark making, drawn, painted, scratched, gouged, flooded, scrubbed, stuck, dried or dusted. The mark is paramount whether accidental or deliberate and is recognised as primarily an attempt to convey the accident of passion before the secondary concerns of deliberate representation or composition.

Drawing comes first, but photography is often the most immediate form of mark making being instant and comprehensive in trapping the ephemeral for subsequent exploration. My main area of interest is in the aftermath of human intervention in nature. This can be as direct as looking at a beach at low tide or as indirect as using astronaut's photographs of the earth from space. It can be as indirect as the residue of history or the discoveries of science.'

Ian Turnock's sculpture is inspired by complex patterns and structures in nature. His sources of inspiration are the silhouettes formed by trees against the sky at different times of the year and the empty spaces and gaps between the leaves and branches, an aesthetic concept known in Japanese culture as ‘Ma’ which is akin to the silences between the notes in music. The Japanese also have a poetic word for the dappled light trees create: ’Komorebi’.

'My background in graphic design influences my exploration of form and line. Drawings and photographs are the starting point from which I develop organic, abstract and figurative sculpture. I create intricate drawings from which the final artwork is digitally cut into stainless steel, corten weathering steel, aluminium, copper, brass and plywood, transforming the drawn line into a tangible object'.