Written by Archie Franks
A review of The Essential School of Painting Shows at the Art Pavilion Mile End Park Art – 23 June to 7 July 2022
On two separate bustling evenings a party atmosphere fills up the Art Pavilion Mile End Park in East London. Music resonates through the venue adding to the atmosphere. Delicious cocktails and hand made hors d’oeuvre are being served up and people are indulging in animated conversation… and then there’s the art.
At the entrance to the show, Emma O’Rourke’s stunning painting in an impactful yet sensitive palette of pinks was stopping visitors in their tracks.. Crispin Dior’s painting ’55 days and counting’ of a woman in mourning conjured an atmosphere of grief with strong expressive strokes in a beautiful palette of pinks and yellows with a dash of grey. Crispin seemed to be analysing the very process and procedure of grief itself. Elsewhere Helen Bishop had made a series of ‘protest paintings’ about her experience of protesting with XR. Shots of yellow were used to conjure an image of aggressive authority. The paintings were made in expressive bold paint.
Both these exhibitions, aptly titled ‘Art Matters’ showcase artists who have a range of experience in art. Indeed, the tagline of the Essential School of Painting (ESOP), ‘the courage to create’ was evident in abundance from these works on display. Some artists are fairly experienced, with BA or MA qualifications from other institutions, and some are right at the beginning of their artistic adventure. However, all the works showed courage and confidence in execution and a particular individuality of vision that is needed to make interesting artwork.
Gabrielle Eber made a series of paintings reminiscent of Edward Hopper of buildings and trees. The ordinariness of the settings of these paintings was juxtaposed with a sense of unease and even foreboding. Victoria ‘Vika’ Benson, who had work in both exhibitions, displayed in the first show an immersive wall installation that played with the language and approaches of the great artists from the modernist period, via a personal lens projected by the artist. In the second show Vika Showed a tryptic based on flower patterns with the same nod in the direction of the modernist past.
Georgia Lepper showed dreamlike figures occupying seductively colourful spaces. These were paintings that sat somewhere between reality and dream. Gill Roth conjured the spirit of 90’s art icon Sarah Lucas in her punk sculptures and wall based work. She seemed to be reworking the ideas of the Brit Art icon into something even more aggressively sexual, playful and absurd. Caroline Cornelius made beautiful, considered layered paintings with a lot of restrained atmosphere, handled in inventive and subtle ways. Sally Johnson made vibrant, colourful paintings of various scenes, using seductive and bold colour.
Indeed, these artists on show aren’t afraid of boldness. They attack their paintings with gusto, unafraid of failure and unrestrained by doubt. These students have been given the confidence, space, time and facility needed by the Essential School, and the encouragement to grow and develop their art from the tutors working at the school. Each tutor provides a tailor made approach to every given student, listening to each students’ individual needs and concerns and then responding to them on a case by case basis.
There isn’t just painting, there’s performance too. Uran Apak made a haunting performance based on Joan Lindsey’s book ‘picnic at hanging rock’, inviting the audience to imagine a ‘sonic painting’.
Mary Clarke Klaber made a series of sensitive group scenes inspired by Walter Sickert and Paula Rego with a personal narrative attached. Gillian Harding painted angel like figures on a strong blue ground emerging from the space. There was a confident build up of a palimpsest of marks within the work.
Victoria Snazell has an approach that is like art brut on acid. These works were reminiscent of South African painter Ansel Krut but with even bolder colour. Painting is often stretched to it’s limitations and beyond in these bold students’ work. Toni Galleger, who’s piece you can also see at this years Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, makes subtle ‘tangible objects’ that play with space in an abstract manner, deal with material abstraction and subvert the masculine with a feminine material.
Painting: World King by Victoria Snazell 2022
G. Luca Iozzi made an exciting proto-vorticist styled picture of something between man and machine, Lou Mumford made a gorgeous, hallucinatory expressive painting of figures. Indeed, a lot of the work on show seems to sit somewhere between reality and dream. This seems to be a trend picked up from the wider current trends in painting, showing how students at the Essential School are well attuned to the zeitgeist.
Art history also plays a huge part in giving backbone to much of the work on display. Gwen Ovshinsky channels Edouard Vuillard in her beautiful painting of women at work sewing. Polly Fehily deconstructs an image of Judith beheading Holofernes in her sensitive haunting works, and Julie Hamilton made interesting and well considered responses to Thomas Gainsborough’s iconic work ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’.
Lucy Marston made a set of paintings that were about her preoccupation with rope; drawing out meaning from the material, and a set of works based on the ancient monument Stone Henge, finding intriguing contemporary ways with which to engage with the ancient monument.
The Painting Year 1 Course at the Essential school of Painting offers practical advice for painters at the early stages of their painting journey, and the fruits of this years cohort of students’ labours were on display in abundance here. Alison Stirling made beautiful, atmospheric work based on her train journeys, Mandy Leonard made evocative abstract works in mixed media reminiscent of some of the abstract painting stars that emerged around a decade ago, like Lucien Smith and David Ostrowski. Pippa Davismoon made bold and colourful works based around the notion of a woman in a street, Alice Cannatella showed bold, colourful semi abstracted landscape works, not too far removed from Lebanese painting star Etel Adnan. And Sue Vass experimented intelligently with pictorial structure, landscape, and format. All in all this cohort have shown that when approached with the right mentality and attitude, the problem of painting can be attacked even by people with limited prior experience.
Amongst the myriad styles, attitudes and approaches on display it is difficult to think of too many overriding similarities between the works. The Essential School has no ‘house style’. It is a school whereby your desires for your work are taken into account, your dreams for your work are made manifest. The work on display, whether abstract, figurative, or more conceptual in approach all has the individual artist at the core. It is that individual, that artist that the Essential School of Painting aims to draw out and encourage, and it’s in these two shows across two weeks that the evidence of this individuality and conviction in each students own artistic enterprise is on full glorious display. Art matters indeed.
‘The Knitted Road’ by Toni Gallagher 2022 
‘The Knitted Road’ by Toni Gallagher 2022 
‘The Knitted Road’ by Toni Gallagher 2022 
Protest paintings by Helen Bishop 
‘Act Now’ by Helen Bishop 
‘The Surgeon’s Protest’ by Helen Bishop 
‘October 2019 Westminster’ by Helen Bishop 2022 
‘Sept 2021 London Bridge’ by Helen Bishop
Artwork copyright of the artists, Image and photograph copyright of the Essential School of Painting Ltd (ESOP) Photography done by Julie Kim. Edit and layout by Andrew Wamae All rights reserved.