AS BRADFORD gears up to 2025 City of Culture and contributors come from far and wide, it’s reassuring to know that Bradford’s visual artists are busy producing fresh, original art.
The Bingley Gallery’s Summer Exhibition focuses on local talent and features more than 90 works from 20 talented artists from our region. With no specific theme, expect a wide range of subject matter, media and techniques.
As curator of the exhibition and gallery owner, I will explains a little of how artists get to be included in the show. The hardest thing about running a gallery is the frequent need to turn down requests from artists to show work.
Often artists travel from afar and arrive without warning, anxious to get their work included. While art trails, open studios and municipal exhibitions offer some outlets, commercial galleries - which have work on show year-round - are becoming thinner on the ground. I cannot take on more than a small proportion of applicants and limit what I do take to keep within the gallery’s 'style'.
My other two rules are that the artist and/or art must be locally connected and that I have to like their work. The latter is important - I couldn’t sell something I’m not genuinely enthusiastic about. One great thing about our Summer Exhibition is that we take on a broader range of work than usual, even if it’s only a couple of works from an artist. If the work proves popular with the public, then there’s a chance the artist will be invited back to be a bigger part of a temporary exhibition or even a permanent exhibitor in the gallery.
Sometimes artists come from surprisingly close to home. When my neighbour in Saltaire, Andrea Hobson, and her partner opened their house for the annual Art Trail, I discovered that she was a wonderful artist, working in acrylic paint, to give a lovely bright, clean and summery treatment to views of our local parks.
In her words “Most of my work tends to focus on landscapes. My most recent series looks at urban parks. These wonderful, sky filled, spaces bring me close to nature and give me a sense of peace and comfort. Perhaps, because they have over decades been slowly shaped, tended and cared for, they emanate calm and tranquillity. I find the scale of things fascinating: trees as big as cathedrals and long boulevards of fragrant roses.
"And I find myself wanting to capture that feeling of curiosity and reflection in my paintings. I enjoy adding figures into the spaces. Tiny in the painting, they require delicate, pointed paint brushes to get them to the scale I want. I wonder what their stories are. My colour choices are super-bright, unapologetically vibrant and joyful, evoking the uplifting positivity I feel in the surroundings I paint."
It may be just a few years since Bradford-based Jessica Swift completed studying fine art at Leeds Arts University, but she has already had four solo exhibitions of contemporary abstract paintings and sculpture. Interested in the methods of making, she aims to make the viewer to think about the process behind her work, rather than just the finished piece as a whole. This stems from her preferred way of learning, being dyslexic herself.
Jessica’s love of bright, often contrasting, colours is evident in her painting. For example, one of the pieces she is showing, 'Harmony In Contrast' uses colour to symbolise a unity between different textures and tones a composition in which the brightly coloured background (her past) becomes nothing more than a backdrop to the commanding colour - in this case purple- which represents a strong consciousness of change in her life.
At the other end of the experience scale, Marilyn Brophy has been a visual artist for most of what she says has been ‘a very full life’. Admitting that these combined both painful and joyful experiences Work has taken her from Guyana - teaching teachers to embrace education for students with special needs, to running Marin’s tearoom/gallery in Haworth. Her art has followed alongside these paths, taking imagery from sublime to distorted perceptions of emotion. Under grey Yorkshire skies she ‘found’ colour and has held onto it, believing that colour is synonymous with life. Forever exploring new themes, her work on show in this exhibition features cats behaving badly, in vintage surroundings. Asking about the origins of these, she proved elusive - not even liking cats due to their impact on her garden. In ‘It Wasn’t Me’, I love the inclusion of Munch’s ‘The Scream’ in a domestic interior, passing silent comment on a black and white cat’s misdemeanor.
Ann Davies, who studied graphic design at Bradford College, is a painter with a particular obsession; glass structures including Victorian crystal palaces, shopping arcades and greenhouses. The latter have inspired paintings and drawings from wonderful formal gardens to the humble allotments at Beckfoot in Bingley. “I never tire of the link between the formal structure and the plants that grow and are nurtured within,” she says. A wide range of media including pen and ink, watercolour and acrylic combine in her work to make pictures that reflect her love of human-made structures and natural forms.
There are other artists - too many to mention: Rob Thomson is a former architect, whose landscapes have a distinctly ‘structural’ quality. Pam Bumby is a master of catching light with oil paint. Alison Deegan, known more as a lino print artist has found new expression in a series of bird-themed collages. Jeremy Taylor, fondly remembered as the tutor of numerous art classes around the Bradford region, is continuing his return to painting after having to take extended time out. Another former art teacher, Josie Barraclough has examples of her own striking oil and mixed media views and Louise Garrett has not only plein air landscapes but some intriguing works inspired by textile machinery at Bradford Industrial Museum.
Quite a collection, with much to admire and a wonderful insight into the rich seam of artistic talent that thrives at grassroots level in the Bradford region.
*The exhibition runs to Sunday September 8 at The Bingley Gallery, 29B Park Rd, Bingley BD16 4BQ
Visit: davidstarleyartist.com/bingley
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