Stewart Geddes: 'Zed Alley' At Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden

Stewart Geddes, 'Poppinghole', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

I found myself well off my normal urban beat the other day, in the quintessentially picturesque Cotswold town of Chipping Campden.  I’d driven down the Fosseway from Leicester, to visit Stewart Geddes’ Exhibition, ‘Zed Alley’, at Camden Gallery, and it proved well worth the trip.

Stewart Geddes, 'Zed Alley', Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, March 2014

I’ve mentioned Stewart, (a contemporary of mine at Bristol Polytechnic, years ago), a couple of times already.  I came across his name in a magazine article [1.] last year, and subsequently discovering his latest paintings via the images on his website.  It was great to see these for real, especially as their onscreen images convey only part of their sophistication and multiple nuances.

Stewart Geddes, 'Ellerhoop', Oil & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Stewart Geddes, 'Zed Alley', Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, March 2014

My memory of Stewart’s student work is of partially abstracted views of Bristol’s streets and architecture, whilst later works appear to have covered, at different times, loose, painterly depictions of urban scenes as well as modes of abstraction reminiscent of both Robert Motherwell and, (perhaps surprisingly), Fiona Rae.  However, for now, he appears to have settled on a highly distilled form of quasi-Cubism, - finding extensive variation within a relatively small library of geometric shapes and motifs. It seems to imply nods towards Ben Nicholson, Albert Irvin, (with whom Stewart appears to be on very good terms), early Twentieth Century Constructivism, Matisse and the pioneers of Cubist space.

Stewart Geddes, 'Relebbus', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Stewart Geddes, 'Polyphant', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel,
Date Unknown

Stewart’s understanding of Cubism in revealed most obviously through the tension between overlapping or interlocking planes within highly formal geometric compositions.  Often, he acknowledges the importance, within this mode of painting, of the diagonal emphasis, (essentially implying the inclination of a plane into ambiguous space), and the sense of one field being partially visible through another, (a kind of imagined transparency, beyond the mere accumulation of broken coats, if you will).

Stewart Geddes, 'Keskeys', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Stewart Geddes, 'Greeb', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Inevitably though, we are always brought back to the surface of things.  That push/pull of surface plane and fictitious space indicate that this work is primarily Modernist in its intent.  There is real visual poetry in these surfaces, and it is the sublimely modulated, layered, scratched and abraded skins of the paintings, and the wide vocabulary of painterly mark making, that most obviously seduce the eye on first encountering the work.  It should be obvious that all painting needs be seen in reality to exert its full effect on the viewer.  Never has this been so true as in Stewart Geddes’ case.

Stewart Geddes, 'Ren Cancan' (Detail),  Acrylic & Mixed Media
On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

This emphasis on degraded, eroded surfaces reveals his other primary theme, namely the idea of the ‘Modern Ruin’, gleaned primarily from his experience of London streets.  Each painting contains, numerous hints about its earlier states and might be seen as an accumulation of partial obliterations and revealed sub-surface fragments.  A fascination with the time worn materiality of his surroundings was there in Stewart’s student work, with its dry, brushy evocations of Bristol’s crumbling stone and stucco.  Whilst possible shifted to a different milieu, it clearly hasn’t left him, and is reinforced through his use of deep wooden panels, usually with radiused corners, to emphasise each painting’s physical object status.  In his own words,

“I was attracted to how such buildings, having been relieved of their daily function, were liberated to hold new meanings.  They became prompts for work, and accordingly I began to tear and scrape at the painted surface.” [2.]

The ‘Zed Alley’ paintings are then, nominally urban in character [3.], but any element of city grunge is also belied by their high degrees of refinement and precision.  For all their scars and sgraffito, Stewart is no stranger to the impeccably masked edge either, and the small scale at which he often works lends these pieces an air of deftness and crisp delicacy.  This feels like an art of wear and tear rather than of full-on dereliction.  I also note that Stewart’s titles often suggest a rather more rural sensibility, suggesting that the influence of city and country are not mutually exclusive in his work.  More than one of these relate to Cornish locations making me reflect that the pull of the peninsula remains strong in ex-Bristol art students.

Stewart Geddes, 'Treen', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Stewart Geddes, 'Finchcocks', Acrylic & Mixed Media
On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Existing readers of this blog will know that all this focus on the physical properties of, and evidence of entropy within, built environments is right up my street, (sorry).  Another significant way in which I feel a connection with these paintings is through their incorporation of elements of found imagery from the external world.  ‘Pop’ would be too strong a term to describe Stuart’s use of text characters and fragments of printed ephemera, but his scraps of type and glimpsed Ben Day dots might suggest a contemporary take on the use of collage techniques in early Cubism.  Of course, text is everywhere, but is a far more obvious signifier of city life.

Stewart Geddes, 'Zed Alley', Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, March 2014

It would remiss not to discuss Stewart’s use of colour, particularly as this wasn’t necessarily a main feature of his student work.  He felt like a predominantly tonal student painter in those days, albeit one with a superb mastery of nuanced greys and colour-tinted neutrals.  Occasionally, he would allow a slightly more saturated colour to emerge, back then, but the tension between singing colour and neutral grounds has reached whole new levels of vibrancy in his current work.  His handling of all this indicates a deep understanding of how colour works; it’s clever stuff indeed.

Stewart Geddes, 'Vellanoweth', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Stewart Geddes, 'Praa', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

In particular, ‘Vellanoweth’, delights me, with its fields of dull and mint green, activated by a rose pink torus.  It’s a calm miracle of complementary contrast, (and I think I remember that same mentholated hue singing out from an early Geddes street scene many years ago).  ‘Praa’ positively glows with analogous scarlet, carmine and purple, whilst ‘Ren Canan’ allows chips of red to break through balanced fields of slate, stone grey and chalky, citrus yellow, then energises it all with a single spot of tangerine.  Possibly, most cheeky of all is, ‘Bollowall’.  Here, four clean shapes, referring directly to the CMYK of colour reproduction, float unashamedly above a snow-white field, while more obscure graphic elements emerge below, amidst a ground resembling eroded render.  They don’t really teach how to make things operate on subtly different levels like this, (unless I missed that tutorial); you have to work it out yourself.

Stewart Geddes, 'Bollowall', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Stewart Geddes, 'Ren Cancan', Acrylic & Mixed Media On Wooden Panel, Date Unknown

Sadly, by the time you read this, it will be almost too late to catch ‘Zed Alley’ in Chipping Campden, but I’d definitely recommend that anyone interested in painting should look out for Stewart’s Geddes' work in the future, and at very least on his website.  It’s certainly pleasing to see those early years spent in the Polytechnic Studios at Bower Ashton reap such rewards.  Having spent some time with the exhibition, and chatting to the amiable proprietor, (I assume), of Campden Gallery, I left, still thinking about the satisfying tensions and dialogues going on within Stewart’s work.

Stewart Geddes, 'Zed Alley', Campden Gallery, Chipping Campden, March 2014

As it turned out, I was to be confronted by a couple more visual paradoxes, amongst the insulated Cotswold loveliness outside, but more of that later…

  

Stewart Geddes, ‘Zed Alley’ continues until 30 March 2014 at Campden Gallery, High Street, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire GL55 6AG

[1.]:  'Stewart Geddes In Conversation With Albert Irvin', London, 'Turps Banana', Issue 13, Spring 2013.

[2.]:  Stewart Geddes, ‘Zed Alley’, (Exhibition Catalogue), Chipping Campden, Campden Gallery Ltd, 2014.

[3.]:  As well as being the title of an individual painting, 'Zed Alley' is also the name of an obscure little street in the heart of Bristol city centre.