This Friday myself and a group of my artist friends went to Bristol to support our friend and artist colleague Angela Wood at her landmark solo show and also take in a few of the other artistic sights Bristol has to offer whilst we were there.
Our first destination on arrival (train £13 carpark £6 shared between 5) and quick pitstop at Dom’s Cafe(£5) (excellent coffee and cake) was the Stuart Geddes exhibition WINE GUMS AND ROCK at the THAT Art gallery half way up the very picturesque Christmas steps. Open just over a year ago run by Andy Phipps this gallery is a little gem with a varied and exciting program of domestic sized artworks for sale by established and emerging artists. Following on form his more monumental solo show at The Atkinson Gallery at Millfield Stuart has seamlessly scaled down his working size to produce a body of colourful and playful abstract paintngs which really delight and please the eye. They looked wonderful in this space and I wouldnt hesitate to encourage anyone from visiting this very cool exhibition.
On our way from there to the RWA (all up hill!) we found ourselves pulled into another little gallery on Christmas Steps. This was the opening of the Bristol Pound exhibition in the Antler gallery. Looking promising from the outside we soon found ourselves joining in the launch by helping to judge the competition for the most popular artworks to be reproduced in the new notes. How exciting! More information about this initiative and the competition winners can be found at https://bristolpound.org
So we yomped onto the RWA getting rather soggy as it had started raining and amazingly we bumped into Stuart Geddes who was trying to have a break before going to teach a workshop. We had a brief chat and he said he would be interested to see what we thought of the RWA exhibition.
The exhibition we had come to see was Women of Vision (£6.95) Frink-Blow-Lawson which finished yesterday. I think the Sandra Blow work was my favourite with the very impressive heroic abstract Helix 1990 at the end of the gallery centre stage. I loved the colours, scale, mark making, composition, pattern and dynamic of the work. I was very excited by it. As awesome as these three women's work was, the side exhibition of women of the RA was an eclectic but more understated collection. Two Jean Rees’s popped out to me straight away and there was a interesting array of landscapes, sensitive portraiture, abstract painting, sculpture etc all of which I enjoyed. After a quick non buying exploration of the gift shop we pressed on downhill this time and went to Wahaca at the junction of Queens Road and Park Street for some yummy Mexican food. (£13) And time out to digest some of what we had seen.
Still in the rain we walked on to the city museum and had a mooch around there. There was loads to see and we were in danger of visual input overload. I skipped through a lot of the beautiful ceramics and silver work and made a beeline for the contemporary art section, I wasn’t disappointed and found myself studying a rather fantastic Peter Lanyon painting called High Moor . There was also Ai Wei Wei’s One tonne of tea which was a perfect cube of compressed tea which almost looked like a lump of rock with sedimentary linear patterns in it.. There are also the likes of Banksy and Damien Hirst and I lost myself totally in a really cool film which shamefully I didnt get the name of the artist.
In preparation for our Geology themed exhibition at Town Mill Arts LymeRegis in April I also had a good look at the Ichthyosaur collection there. These are the biggest examples Ive seen and they are very impressive also there is one with a baby which is extraordinary in its preserved skeletal detail. They have a model of a complete beast hanging in the main atrium, apart from being gigantic it seemed to me to have a very small out of proportion tail but so Im told they are largely muscle and we are so used to looking at the skeletons that its surprising to see them like that, we are used to seeing big models of T.Rex and the more popular monsters we knew as dinosaur obsessed children but we aren’t used to seeing the Ichthyosaur.
So as a break from the gallery shuffling we headed off back down the hill we did pop into the Guild which all looked very groovy and expensive and we did a quick scan around a book shop which had a fun diplay of customers portraits on brown paper bags behind the counter. Once at the Watershed we waited in the rain for the waterbus (£2.50) to get to the Create Centre. Here at the Waterside we were entertained by a very colourful troop of musicians who were playing various hits with unabashed vigour which was just the tonic on this very grey day.
And so we made it if not rather soggily to our final destination the Create Centre. Angela was there to make us feel welcome and guided us around her show. We soon forgot how damp we had become. I was really impressed by how her work not only looked at home here but how it sang too with lots of air and space to really come to life. Big canvases counterpointed with smaller work and a long thin canvas looking totemic mounted on a central pillar. Angela’s work is often painted with local West Somerset soil and she had plenty of well thought out interpretation to help guide the viewer around her methods and ideas. Work of this nature always provokes interesting discussion and we certainly put the world and universe to rights whilst we were there, so whether you want debate or contemplation this is certainly a good exhibition to go to.
The Create Centre is a community run building dedicated to education regarding environmental matters, during the day there is also a very nice FairTrade Organic cafe. And if its information and environmental inspiration you are after this place certainly is a must visit, there is always cool stuff going on here and lots of groovy people on bicycles. What's not to like.
Written in Stone by Angela Wood is on until 27th AprilMonday to Friday 9-5pm plus the first Saturday off April 10-4 more information about Angela and her work can be found at
