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Paul Gough
on Rita Vickery
Galleries magazine
April 2003
Rita Vickery is a painter whose
working methods have been likened to Nash, Piper and Sutherland.
But perhaps her approach owes as much to a long period
spent under the piercing light of South Africa and to
a profession as a photographer, where having to compose
within the square viewer of a Hasselblad has taught her
to create pictorial tension within the often awkward confines
of a square format.
This is an exciting show of new work at Fovea, full of
vivid touches and gentle nuances of colour and line. Using
collage and oils on paper Vickery is able to conjure up
half echoes of places many of us may know; the silhouette
of a hilltop town in southern Italy; the outline of the
headland that pokes into St Ives Bay, the meander of a
Wessex hedgerow. But these elements are introduced without
much fuss; topographical verity matters little to this
painter. Instead she is more likely to be stimulated by
images and colours seen in the corners of places, those
motifs that lie at the margins of perception. This approach
to working in the landscape was characterised by Sutherland
who wrote of his long walks in Pembrokeshire that he deliberately
tried hard not to locate his subject matter, hoping instead
that it would infiltrate without his knowing and appear
in his work by stealth rather than frontal attack.
Unlike so many of those English neo-Romantic artists though,
Vickery attempts complex formal games with the picture
surface- creating rectangles within the field of colour,
dividing the surface into compartments of high key colour
and segments of textured collage. Snow dance is typical
of the way Vickery creates spatial sub-divisions in her
work. Divided unequally into four vertical strips, it
describes various stages in the cycle of a cross section
of a snow bound landscape. Using a limited palette it
successfully integrates the spatial dimension with the
temporal, incorporating the subterranean with the passing
of time. In other work the palette is warmer and the painterly
language more gestural. A particular favourite, Tree in
the City, describes a rather ungainly red tree, its limbs
weaving across the picture surface unifying passages of
green and blue, an emblem of a particular urban memory.
From ‘Antennae’
section of Galleries magazine December 2002
It is a little remarked upon fact that London’s
suburbs, both inner and outer, are among the most visually
deprived areas, per capita, in the country, with huge
boroughs of 2-300,000 people without a decent public art
gallery worthy of the name, let alone a commercial one,
on the (false) assumption that anyone wanting visual culture
will go into the centre for it.
Harrow has been sadly typical, but not any more, I am
glad to report. Without waiting for the council to produce
their draft cultural strategy for the next five years
(groan), local artist Debbie de Beer has opened a sparkling
new gallery space in an old butcher’s shop.
Named the Fovea Gallery (top marks there, as the fovea
is that part of the eye responsible for both our colour
and critical vision), it seems to be running an approachably
contemporary policy too, with the first show given over
to young Bristol trained artist Sandra Beccarelli’s
pulsating, phosphorescent light boxes, filled with toy
cars, planes, dolls-Christmas with a vivid edge.
By Nicholas Usherwood
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'Snow Dance'
2003
Rita Vickery |
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'Pulse Box 9
- Doll wire cars' 2002
Mixed media with lights
Sandra Beccarelli |
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