Berwick Visual Arts

Portrait of the Week from The Ruth Borchard Collection in the Granary Gallery: John White  It seems that this picture was acquired in 1962, or soon after. It is quite likely that White was an art student at the time. Undated and unsigned, this small, intense, extremely accomplished picture shows a long, lean face with prominent ears, full lips and thick black hair on top. The openness of his countenance co exists strangely with the moving puzzlement of his opaque black eyes. The picture’s rich colourism is in the tradition of Post-Impressionist, Fauvist and Expressionist art. White’s way of painting flesh as some kind of brilliant, phantasmagoric landscape only serves to accentuate an impression of palpable yet evanescent human presence.

Doug Fishbone and Friends Adventureland Golf opens at Berwick Gymnasium Gallery today from 11am. See artworks by David Shrigley, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Zatorski & Zatorski and play the course itself - we gave it a test run yesterday...

Here's a portrait of the artist Michael Noakes, topical this week as he went onto paint portraits of many notable public figures including Margaret Thatcher and he will be attending her funeral this week.  More information about Michael Noakes here: There are two letters from Michael Noakes to Ruth Borchard, dated ’29 Jan 59’ and ‘5 May 1960’, from Reigate, Surrey, when both were living there and had become good friends. In the first, Noakes responded to Ruth’s request for artists she could approach. ‘All this thinking about portraits set me to doing a couple myself – of me with beard! I doubt if you would like either, but I must show you sometimes. (I’m now without beard, you’ll be glad to hear).’ Later Ruth acquired a self-portrait painted in 1958, when Noakes was twenty-five.. Born in Brighton in 1933, Noakes graduated from Reigate School of Art in 1954, and then spent two years doing National Service, mainly as an Army Officer in Germany, before attending the Royal Academy Schools from 1965-60. In 2001, Noakes recalled that as an R.A. Schools student, ‘I was experimenting as a young artist, playing around with different self-portraits at the time.’ He also remarked that painting oneself – the most ‘convenient model’ of all – was ‘no problem, it takes the pressure off. Yet all the questions about how to find the form, to achieve likeness, colour and tone, remain.’ He says that his self-portrait was ‘painted fairly low, drained of colour, greenish’, noting that, by contrast, ‘you can’t paint a sitter with a greenish face’. The picture shows the artist with a long, gaunt face and large, penetrating eyes. His emphatically pallid, green-hued skin, thick red beard and moustache, fiercely illumined hair and those disquieting, shadowed eyes combine to give him a quite wary, haunted look, not unlike D.H. Lawrence’s. ‘At art school,’ he says, ‘we were taught anatomy, and so I caught the last of the traditional training there.’ Noakes is now renowned as a portraitist of public figures. To contemplate the picture-crowded walls of his London studio today is to be confronted with a glittering, eclectic cast from modern British public life. These include, in no special order: Gilbert Harding (the BBC panel-game chairman) sensitively portrayed as brilliant, prickly, vulnerable; the Queen standing self-assured in a turquoise, fur-trimmed outfit; the comic actor Robert Morley, doublechinned, regarding us with inimitable perspicacity; Cardinal Basil Hume, a pale, white-haired figure in scarlet robes, whose regard seems ineffably sweet; a deadpan, enigmatic-looking Sir Alec Guinness seated on a simple kitchen chair, his hands precisely clasped; a life-size Margaret Thatcher depicted on the steps of 10 Downing Street, her uncompromising presence dispassionately rendered.

A group of students from Bishop Auckland College visited the exhibition last week so we thought we would post up a Bishop Auckland based artist -Tom McGuiness this week... Tom McGuinness, Self-Portrait, 1959, Oil on canvas, 51.5 x 41cm Tom McGuiness painted this self-portrait in 1959 for Ruth Borchard. She paid fifteen guineas. He was around thirty-two years old though, at first sight, the thick, glossy head of hair and trim, rugged features seem toindicate a man perhaps in his mid-twenties. Closer perusal highlights an expression of pained enquiry on somewhat worn features, especially communicated through the eyes and the slightly down-turned mouth. Here is a man in whom a strong sense of identity – conveyed partly through dynamic black outlines – co-exists with acute perceptiveness. His complexion is a subtle and fluid admixture of all the other colours in the picture, bringing them all together into a disquieting ‘map of the face’. Born in 1926 in County Durham, McGuinness was brought up in his coal-miner grandfather’s household.  His talent for drawing was recognised early and encouraged at school. In 1944, he was ‘conscripted’ to work in the local coal mines as a Bevin Boy. A mining supervisor, on seeing McGuinness drawing on the side of a coal tub, advised he attend evening art classes. He began to attend local art exhibitions, and was especially impressed by Turner and Daumier, and began to read about artists such as Dürer, Goya and Rembrandt. He left the coal industry in 1947 to work on the railways, and the following year began painting in earnest. A turning point was a decision in 1953 not to take up a commercial art career in southern England but to return to work as a coal-miner, painting and drawing in his spare time. He worked as a miner until 1983, all the time portraying – in sketches (made compulsively as soon as the day underground was over), oils, drawings, and latterly, prints – the desolate comradeship of wiry, huddling miners caged in narrow seams, many of them observed strenuously hewing at the coal face. One of his rare self-portraits – a fresh and sketchy 1950s picture painted on the back of a finished oil painting – is a moving study of a sensitive young man. The delicate line marking the contours of his head is beautifully wrought, and the painting of his electric-blue cardigan and a lemon yellow background, shows an early predilection for strong, expressionistic colours. His 1959 self-portrait portends a growing tendency for glazed, luminescent greens and yellows seen in his later portrayal of miners working underground – a visionary iridescence in the gloom.

The Ruth Borchard collection of Self Portraits -  Exhibition Preview. 

22nd March. 18:00. The Granary Gallery, Berwick-Upon-Tweed.

Paul Kenny, his seductive work leads us through a magical world which links the sea, the sky and our own imaginations.