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Harlequin Gallery |
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R.J. Lloyd RI The Cornwall Paintings 8th to 29th June 2003 |
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A statement by Peter Davies - art critic and author
of many books on British Art to accompany the exhibition: R. J. Lloyd
is a versatile and seasoned West Country artist. Primarily a painter, Lloyd
has also made serious inroads into pottery, sculpture, stained glass, book
illustration and printmaking. While we may speculate about interdisciplinary
osmosis, Lloyd's pictorial language is more the product of a particular
accord between poetic and plastic factors or between naturalism and
abstraction. The current
exhibition "The Cornwall Paintings" reveals fundamental facts about
the creative machinations of Lloyd's art. The subjects, isolated or
relatively inaccessible places like Boscastle, Cadgwith, Kynance, Godrevy and
Mullion, show a resistance both to tourist honeypots and to the well-trodden
art cauldrons of St. Ives and Newlyn. He did live in Camborne and Porthleven
during the early 1950's, but his inherent individualism savoured isolation
while partaking in the more or less universal neo-romanticism that, courtesy
of surrealism and post-modernism, so effected landscape painting in this
country throughout the 1940's and 50's. Elements of
this taut and delineated style persist in Lloyd's art today as does the
enduring "genius loci" of Cornwall, which Lloyd characterises in
terms of steep narrow inlets, deserted tin mines, cocooned harbours and
beached boats. More personal symbolism lies in the recurring head of a young
woman that appears like a phantom or witness in the foreground. Insistent
surface pattern and rhythmic design sees topographic description and
embellishment subordinated to compositional architectonics. In line with the
modern artist he is, Lloyd creates ambiguity and intrigue between concrete
surface imagery and the illusion of spatial depth and in this tension lies
the essential character of his style. |
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