This month sees the premiere of a film celebrating the work of a creative trio who each share a fascination with text, artist Vivian Pedley reveals.
There are thousands of miles between them and they haven’t all met in person either, but that hasn’t stopped a trio of artists from joining forces and creating a new collaborative artwork.
As part of the St Ives Festival, the Penwith Gallery will be showing the premiere of a film, a documentary made in three countries and involving three visual artists who all share an association with Cornwall.
As I was Going to St Ives focuses on the work of Vivian Pedley, Rex Dixon and Adrian Frost.
It was inspired by how the three were connecting and creatively working during the coronavirus years. Viv in Sussex and then Cornwall, Rex in Trinidad and Adrian in Arkansas. With no gallery exhibitions, they found themselves showing their work on Facebook and Instagram, talking to fellow artists and creating new, collaborative works.
One of these collaborations was the St Ives film, an idea first raised by Rex. The artists shot video footage of their studios, and spoke to camera about their work and their Cornish influences. The footage was crafted into a documentary by Caribbean-based filmmakers Patricia Mohammed and Michael Mooleedhar.
As I Was Going to St Ives will be premiered at the Penwith Gallery for the festival and it will be accompanied by examples of work by all three.
Rex worked in St Ives as a young man, and as a visual arts officer he knew some of its famous painters, including Patrick Heron. Adrian was born and grew up in St Ives around the artist community that included his father, Terry Frost. Viv was from Camborne, and although he left Cornwall 40 years ago, he has recently returned to live in the county.
Viv knew Rex from Stourbridge College of Arts where, in the 1970s, he was a student and Rex was his tutor. They ended up in different parts of the world, but around eight years ago they reconnected and forged a creative relationship that developed as time went on.
When Viv encountered Adrian’s work online, he had no idea who he was or his connection to Cornwall. After all, ‘There are lots of Frosts around,’ he points out. However, he says, ‘I came across a piece Adrian had written. He was doing a reading of it and I was very taken with it. I felt I should collaborate with him... but he said he was a bit busy!’
Despite the initial brush off, ‘I felt compelled to make an image which I sent back to him,’ says Viv. ‘What transpired was six years of collusion.’
Adrian’s work uses both film and performance as well as painted sculptures, along with verse, and it draws on classical and literary references.
Viv’s first collaborations with him were responses to Adrian’s writing. Viv describes them as ‘knee jerk reactions... very quick reactions on throwaway paper’.
‘I was responding to the work in my terms, how I felt, but as it went on, I started to pre-empt it a bit, not what he was going to write but the storyline as I was seeing it. Then the pictures went first and he started writing to the pictures.’
The internet and in particular social media are what connects them all. It’s an outlet for your work says Viv, especially during the lockdown years when visiting galleries was not an option. It’s a really useful tool he says, although adding, ‘I’m not into ‘likes’.’ Ticking the like option on every posting is not Viv’s way. ‘I like to comment,’ he says.
As for Adrian, ‘He’s the kind of person that if you ask a question on Instagram he will send back a poem.’
Although Viv and Rex have met up again in person, it’s only recently that Viv and Adrian even spoke to each other. ‘It was so odd talking over the phone, one on one,’ says Viv. ‘It was really quite strange and it made it much more real, more personal and touching, it was all engaging.’
The use of text is common to the work of all three. Rex uses it reflectively with literary references and in work about nostalgia and loss, especially of his Caribbean art colleagues.
Viv uses text just as he would colour or line, the two go hand in hand, he says. ‘They co-exist. I can’t do image without words. I have to use words as part of the structure.’
Those words may be written on the side of a box, caught on a TV programme or heard in the street - ‘You hear some good things at the bookies!’ He then manipulates the words to form something new.
He adds, ‘Text can be misleading, it can be fake, it can be true. It is up to the individual to understand text on a picture as much as a drawn line.’
Of the exhibition Viv says, ‘It’s not unusual to see text in paintings, but it’s kind of unusual for three people to be using text at the same time in different ways.’
Viv’s strongest Cornish influence was undoubtedly the artist Roger Hilton. ‘His craftsmanship as a contemporary artist was phenomenal.’ Now a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, Viv’s own work has moved from abstraction to more figurative work. He reacts to news, national and international events, creating work daily, fulfilling a need for immediacy. It’s that knee jerk reaction again. He describes himself as a butterfly. ‘The time we live in is not the time to dwell on a painting, it’s the time to make your mark and move on.’
He quotes Adrian. ‘He says, when you make paintings there are no rules, you borrow and steal, you manipulate, you’re not serving anyone in the first instance but yourself. You try and make sense yourself of what you’re putting down. You just hope someone out there gets a reading of it.’
As I Was Going to St Ives will be screened at the Penwith Gallery for the duration of the festival, from 10 to 24 September. There will be a special event on 13 September with a talk by film director Patricia Mohammed followed by a Q&A with Vivian and Rex.
www.stivesseptemberfestival.co.uk
Portraits of St Ives
Portraits of Roger Hilton and other St Ives artists, including Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach and Peter Lanyon, will be on show in another exhibition at the Penwith Gallery during festival week.
The photographer Cornel Lucas (1920 to 2012) had a career in portrait photography spanning over 70 years. He began working in the film industry when he was fifteen years old.
He photographed an impressive list of film stars and stage actors, including the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Gregory Peck, Dirk Bogarde, Joan Collins and Ben Kingsley.
London-born, his link to Cornwall came through his marriage to the actress Susan Travers, daughter of Linden Holman, a co-director of the Penwith Art Gallery. Cornel fell in love with St Ives and travelled there to shoot on location and at his Piazza studio during the mid to late 20th century.
The images that will be exhibited include his personal collection of intimate portraits of the most important British artists of the era that lived and worked in St Ives. The images are from the family archive and many have not been exhibited publicly before. The exhibition will run until 7 January 2023.
Examples of his work can be seen at www.cornellucas.com
