Roads at night and sudden glimmers of light on show
Emsworth artist Pippa Blake is On The Road with her new exhibition at Chichester’s Candida Stevens Gallery at 12 Northgate.
The exhibition runs until July 31 – open 10am-5pm Wednesdays and Thursdays for drop-in visitors and other days by appointment for those who would prefer private viewings. Installation shots and secondary images are also online (info@ candidastevens.com; www. candidastevens.com).
Roads – or more specifically, travel – might be what we have all been longing for during lockdown, but these are works which predate the coronavirus crisis, Pippa says.
“Some of them are from the end of 2017, but they are all really from the last couple of years.
“There are some quite large paintings that I had finished before lockdown. It felt quite strange going into lockdown knowing that I had full body of work behind me.
“I started making road paintings when I was at West Dean as a student in 2004. I started this postgraduate year not quite sure where my focus was going to be and very aware that I was surrounded by stunning green landscapes but knowing that I didn’t want to paint stunning green landscapes!
“I was going backwards and forwards between Emsworth and West Dean and it was often at night.
“And I started looking at the road at night and I started really noticing it. I liked the glimmer of the lights, the lights coming towards you.
“I have travelled a lot in my life.
“A lot of the journeys I have done have been sea journeys or plane journeys, but this is really about the roads close to home rather than huge overseas travel. There is just something about looking towards the horizon and beyond.
“Some of my paintings are New Zealand and some of them from California, two places that I have visited a lot over the years. They both evoke strong feelings in me, particularly New Zealand, and also I love California. It is the light.
“The light is very different in all these places.
“I take photographs out of the car. I am not driving. I take lots of photographs and not really looking at what I am taking and it is not until I am back and looking at my computer that I start to make compilations and the photographs become a tool that I step off from into the painting.
“Journeys are about what is beyond the horizon, where you are going. You are searching for something and you don’t really know what it is. Quite often it is just the light, something you have glimpsed or a garage flashing past. Quite a lot of these paintings are the countryside around here…”
Pippa admits she found lockdown quite hard in a strange way: “At first you think it is going to be fantastic and that you are going to have so much time to concentrate on work, but I have been selfisolating away from my own studio.
“I have got a temporary studio and have been working on an easel which I don’t really enjoy. I prefer being up against the wall. And it’s also having to make very much smaller work.
“There have been constraints. But the first few weeks of lockdown were about organising your life and making sure you had food coming in.
“We haven’t been going out at all. And that takes all the time, just getting organised and all the domesticity to start off with.
“And then I started thinking about making paintings. But I think because I already had done the work and had the body of work, I was thinking that this might a time for contemplation and standing back a bit.
“It is hard to concentrate, and I think that has a lot to do with the uncertainty of it all. Everything is turning into a bit of a mush.
“But having the exhibition up now is really exciting.”