Carolyn Blake Exhibition
At Malvern Library, Graham Road, Great Malvern
Until 26 August 2023
An Artificial Silence
Original artists look for the gaps, the spaces between the already acknowledged to explore. Birmingham painter, Carolyn Blake does just this, and Malvern’s Gallery Cafe, The Book and Cup is currently the waiting room of her exhibition ‘An artificial Silence’.
Blake is a fine artist, her work is representational and accessible in that you feel to be there. There is an artificial reality, and sometimes a sterility, to the spaces she paints, a haunting hanging of time that seeps from the railway lines and mortar of stations between movement. Blake captures this, in her use of vertical lines and posts (and somewhat counter intuitive vertical brush strokes) which depict the horizontal landscape. Working with uniform formats there is window like precision in their presentation, an order containing the presence of disordered strollers, propped wheelbarrows, and a discarded shopping trolly, touches of abandoned human intervention which litter her compositions.
Her skies explore the extremities of natural colours, tending to work on an apricot base, the waiting places and the realities of British transport travel emerge, the passing views from train windows and platforms. The titles are taken from W G Sebald’s classic work The Rings of Saturn.
There will be poetry responses to her paintings from local writers, which will be exhibited alongside her work, a collaborative approach Blake has successfully used in her book The Unchanging Traveller.
On 12 August 2023 there will be a talk by Professor Andrew Kulman at 12.30pm Deputy Head of Birmingham Institute of Creative Arts, with an invitation to picnic in the garden after.
Further information about artist Carolyn Blake can be found at: Carolyn Blake
Information about artist and writer Juliet Mootz can be found at: Juliet Mootz