Past Exhibition
Gaps – Spain 2019
In September 2019, Robert Mountjoy took an unscheduled trip to Spain, visiting Andalucía and its historic sites. He took a sketchbook and a camera and came back full of new ideas, minimalist forms and textures, but most of all colours— reds – both intense and bleached out, with deep yellows and dusty grey/blues. He spent some weeks playing with figurative landscapes based on the drawings, but felt he was not producing anything new or exciting. Looking back through his photographs, he found a batch where he had accidentally nudged camera settings to wide angle and continued to shoot before noticing the mistake. The resulting images showed views through narrow streets from one plaza to another with ‘barrel’ distortion… and these resonated with a series of abstract collage sketches he had been experimenting with. The artist adapted and scaled up some of his collages; overlapping convex sided lozenges and painting them with the hot dry colours and textures recalled from the recent travels. Working on HDF or canvas boards, he built up layers of colour and texture over hard edged forms with contrasting gaps. He showed two of the first paintings in the Penwith Gallery, St Ives with the South West Academy 2020 Exhibition. He destined another four to the 21 Group Exhibition that year, also at Penwith. The colours became more intense as the series continued and the stripped-down forms less architectural. Three of the later paintings in this sequence was included in the SWAc Reflection 2020 Exhibition. Four paintings were shown with the 21 Group at the Limekiln Gallery, Calstock from April to June 2021, two at the Artizan Gallery in Torquay and six more at the September 2021 Exhibition in St Ives.
📅 14 May – 4 June 2022
Launch
📍 Artizan Printmaking & Sculpture Gallery
⚫ Exhibition Finished
Related Exhibitions
Participating Artists
Robert Mountjoy SWAc
I was born in 1950 a month or two after Terry Frost painted “A walk along the Quay’ and I grew to regard the British Modernists as integral to my cultural heritage. As a young impressionable art student in the 1970s I was taught the basics: composition, colour theory and drawing for which I am thankful. I emerged as a teacher and an abstract painter in 1972. A move back to my native Devon in 1985 resulted in a brief halt in painting. When I did begin to paint again, I painted landscapes. My abstract paintings had mostly been constructed through a response to landscape and I initially explained my new approach as ‘going back to the source’ but I liked the idea of moving from abstract painting to realism, counter to Panofsky’s model of artists’ development. From expansive landscapes I began to explore corners of rural neglect and then still life paintings involving time worn utensils. I now choose to paint simple subjects set in beams of strong light. The highlights and shadows that were abstracted in my early paintings are now appreciated for what they are. These shadows, reflections and luminosity are now the main subjects. For the most part the objects I paint now have no symbolic significance and are chosen for their colour and form. I try to render them truthfully but make adjustments for the sake of composition. I want to avoid the sterility of excessive accuracy and brush stokes are not entirely blended out. I believe it is important to be able to read how the painting is made. I work mainly on paper which has been stretched in the watercolour tradition and primed with gesso. Layers of thin acrylic overlay underpainting, and the composition is built up holistically. Finally, the detail is added by stippling with a size 0 brush. There may be final glaze to draw the surface together and sometimes a coating of varnish.
Art
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Works In Abstract
A Different Perspective
In September 2019, Robert Mountjoy took an unscheduled trip to Spain, visiting Andalucía and its historic sites. He took a sketchbook and a camera and came back full of new ideas, minimalist forms and textures, but most of all colours— reds – both intense and bleached out, with deep yellows and dusty grey/blues.
He spent some weeks playing with figurative landscapes based on the drawings, but felt he was not producing anything new or exciting. Looking back through his photographs, he found a batch where he had accidentally nudged camera settings to wide angle and continued to shoot before noticing the mistake. The resulting images showed views through narrow streets from one plaza to another with ‘barrel’ distortion… and these resonated with a series of abstract collage sketches he had been experimenting with.
The artist adapted and scaled up some of his collages; overlapping convex sided lozenges and painting them with the hot dry colours and textures recalled from the recent travels. Working on HDF or canvas boards, he built up layers of colour and texture over hard edged forms with contrasting gaps. He showed two of the first paintings in the Penwith Gallery, St Ives with the South West Academy 2020 Exhibition. He destined another four to the 21 Group Exhibition that year, also at Penwith. The colours became more intense as the series continued and the stripped-down forms less architectural. Three of the later paintings in this sequence was included in the SWAc Reflection 2020 Exhibition. Four paintings were shown with the 21 Group at the Limekiln Gallery, Calstock from April to June 2021, two at the Artizan Gallery in Torquay and six more at the September 2021 Exhibition in St Ives.
Exhibiting Artists
