Anthony Frost & Albert IrvinAlbert Irvin (born 1922) is a painter of very large, very colourful abstracts, dramatic and vibrant. His subject is ‘the experience of being in the world’. Not simply abstract and devoid of meaning or subject, Irvin creates paintings that are a response to his feeling that he could not begin to express complex subjective experiences by conventional figurative or literal means. The notion that one must express emotion in words is blown apart by his images, and fuelled by his life: at Goldsmiths as a student, and later teaching, and before that in what he described as his ‘terrifying’ wartime experience with the RAF.
The American Abstract Expressionists were a fundamental influence for Irvin, as was his friendship with Peter Lanyon and other St Ives artists. This liberating route of influence was also mapped into the future for Anthony Frost (born 1951) who was brought up with St Ives painting. Frost’s work differs from Irvin’s in that it is for the painting itself: to start and finish with colour, densely applied in a bold, uncontrived manner. ‘I am concerned with making a painting about colour, shape, space, speed, rhythm. I want to create the same feeling you get when listening to music.’ Sensuous like Irvin, Frost particularly revels in thick paints poured straight from the can, achieving a tangible physical surface. Frost gets inspiration from music (He has designed album covers for The Fall), and like a distant drum or base line there is a formal element to the lateral and vertical planes of discordant loud colour.
Both Anthony Frost and Albert Irvin appear to have their own form of synaesthesia. Both clearly integrate colour with memories and perception. Places, music, words seen in vibrant internal colours convert sensory experience to create rich unctuous paintings and painterly monoprints or silkscreens. The prints shown in this exhibition are either very rare or unique examples of their work. These artists can produce to a massive scale but these works are much smaller jewels, proving size cannot diminish the uplifting hopefulness of the fresh bright colours they contain. A selling exhibition, the prints also represent a chance to own a piece of the massive contribution both these painters have made to British art.
Our thanks go to Advanced Graphics London, the only print studio in the UK to specialise in combining screenprinting techniques with woodblocking and who have collaborated with these artists to produce and publish these works of art, and who were kind enough to lend them to us. |
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AF07/09 |