For a variety of reasons I haven’t seen as much work as I’d hoped over recent months – a fact I was reminded of when bumping into Nev Smith at the Nottingham Society of Artists gallery in Nottingham today. I was there to catch Laine Tomkinson’s excellent solo show (be quick it runs to Sunday 20th Nov). Neville told me of his outing at the Angear Centre at Lakeside that sadly I missed but you can see some of his work here. Laine is one of the region’s best colourists and her show looked especially good in the new bright white space that the NSA has recently had renovated. It was good fortune too that another of the best painters handling colour in the East Midlands Carole Hawthorn was in the gallery – great to catch up with all three artists.
Laine mostly showed new work, made over the past year, but with a sprinkling of older pieces that together gave a top class selection of her practice. Using a technique derived from her printmaking career most of the works are one-offs, with collage and hand mark-making obscuring and augmenting the printed parts. The older works saw gestural arabeques played off against geometries of sorts but I thought I detected a wider repertoire of forms, marks and lyrical passages than previously – suggesting a greater freedom than hitherto and adding a lot to the mix. I was much taken with a number of works where a group of upright forms created figure/ground relationships and made for startling and original compositions (Calypso is a good example). In a number of pictures good creative use is made of the informal grid by massing together near squares of colour – a group of five of these were especially lively. Her colour sense is unerringly precise, her greatest strength as an artist and her inventiveness in her compositions gets better and better. Although I struggled to get a decent photo of it I wanted to show one of my favourites – Under the Sea – that fair crackled with chromatic intensity. Its a great show and amongst its many strengths it is packed full of joy, for the practice of painting and life itself – if you can get along and see it before mid afternoon Sunday.
cloughieseyes 