Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu
Louis Turpin & Mick Rooney
Fosse Gallery, Stow-on-the-wold 1st to 21st November, online from 19th October
Louis Turpin offers gardens and landscapes; Mick Rooney, myths of his own making. I admire both artists. A careless glance at this exhibition might allow one to think it a surprising pairing. In fact, it is as inspired as it is natural. In their different ways, both are among the music-makers and dreamers of dreams.
They go back a long way, not quite to their south-london boyhoods, but to the early 1970s, when they met at a southcoast exhibition, having moved to Peasmarsh and Hastings respectively. Rooney moved away, eventually to the Cotswolds, while Turpin stayed on, but they have remained friends.
As blues man Turpin says, while their paintings may be inspired by different triggers, their meetings have always been ‘celebrated with food, conversation and music. At parties we would usually end up playing guitars together, Mick adding a jazzy riff to the mix.’ Most recently, they have been working while battling cancer, complicated by COVID.
A brief art-college flirtation with abstraction left a trace in Turpin’s slightly impressionistic style, which avoids plant portraiture in favour of structure and colour patterns. He began by painting human portraits, then moved on to interiors, and then to gardens treated as outdoor rooms.
The glory of his colours is sometimes enhanced by subtle use of a gold ground, which emerges to great effect between colours or makes a whole sky. The gardens include Scotney, Rodmell and Sizergh, and he is also showing a small number of ink-wash-on-paper landscapes around Rye.
Dreams do not have to follow logic, or have storylines, and this is true of those that Rooney paints. He describes the process as freeing the mind ‘to wander to and fro amongst the ghosts of one’s own vocabulary’. Occasionally titles are indicative, as in Fast Exit from Eden, but more often the artists leave us to play with whatever impressions the pictures suggest. We may build our own stories around the groups of bears and circus people set against Italianate landscapes in Entry of the Pilgrims and Family at a Belvedere.
Rooney exhibited with the Fosse when it opened 40 years ago. Now he notes, ‘Both Louis and I have lately been conversing with the bad boys. That we share an exhibition at Fosse Gallery is testament to our survival instincts, energy resources and the tender ministrations of family and friends. It’s almost as if now we have no time left to worry about art. But of course we still do.’
Prices range from £1,200 to £8,000.