Salon 9 - The Old Lock Up Studio - Contemporary Art Exhibition

Opens 25th November 6-9pm -continues 26th - 27th November 11am - 4pm

You are warmly invited to Salon 9 - please feel free to join us for the opening of the show on 25th November 2016 from 6pm - 9pm. The show then continues 26th - 27th Noveember from 11am - 4pm.

The Salon exhibitions are held twice yearly at The Old Lock Up Studio in Cromford Derbyshire - and began in the Summer of 2012 - co curated by Rachael Pinks & Clay Smith - with the aim of bringing contemporary art to rural Derbyshire.

‘Salon – a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace’s definition of the aims of poetry, “either to please or to educate” (“aut delectare aut prodesse eat”)’

The Old Lock Up Studio - http://www.theoldlockupstudio.co.uk

David Ainley -
'Having regard for Cézanne’s exemplary persistence David Ainley is in art for the long haul. Since his first acclaimed exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham, in 1966 he has exhibited regularly in many solo shows and numerous selected group exhibitions including the Jerwood Drawing Prize (twice), the INGDiscerning Eye and, in 2015, ‘Contemporary British Abstraction’.
An ongoing concern he has is for the exploration and distillation of content in painting by adopting procedural strategies that have strong metaphorical associations. The systems method he developed in the 1970s evolved from an engagement with the ‘Game of Life’ devised by the mathematician John Horton Conway. Since 1995 much of his work has been concerned with ideas and experiences of landscape and labour informed by research into mining and quarrying in relation to human endeavours that have shaped our surroundings but which are frequently overlooked in art.'
http://www.axisweb.org/p/davidainley/

Peter Cartwright -
'As time passes and my work evolves, I find that it reconnects more distinctly with some of the issues that preoccupied me during the 60s and 70s. I recognise links, particularly with some formal modernist concerns I had in much of my work from the early 1960s, which now only exists as colour slides...
The painting has an underlying layering that contains references arising from drawings, direct notations of everyday occurrences and things. I'm constantly making rapid drawings on scraps of paper, anything to hand and together they form a record and a stock of images. The experience of the mundane object, how it enters consciousness – that pale violet plastic fork on the pavement, in the accumulated muck by the wall – the blackbird dead on the road, pounded by tyres, a flat heraldic trace. These images act as an accumulating series of 'memory triggers'. 'TAG' – the painting is in a continuum, in a series of new works, and work yet to be made.'
http://www.petercartwright.net/about

Geoff Machin -
'Geoff Machin trained at the Chelsea School of Art, where he was joint winner of the Biddulph Scholarship in1957. After a final year of study at the London University Institute of Education he began teaching and, over the years, worked in several schools and colleges. He was a senior lecturer at Hereford College of Education and later Head of Art, Design and Creative Studies at Dudley College. He left teaching in 1987 to spend more time in his studio near Ashbourne, Derbyshire.
As well as solo exhibitions, Geoff Machin has taken part in national shows, such as John Moores Liverpool Exhibition.
Through improvised drawings, Geoff Machin evolves clear visual ideas which. Because of his unusual way of fitting together individual shapes these, in turn, become precisely structured compositions. Sometimes pristine whiteness is preserved and contrasted with black line, whilst in other works, surfaces are sensitively textured with grey crayon, or acrylic colour is applied.
These intriguing abstract works are concerned with interaction: between flatness and implied space, containment and freedom, surface reality and atmospheric qualities, as well as strongly suggested movement against static structure.'

David Manley -
'David Manley is one of the most significant artists working in the Midlands and has
created a extraordinarily varied body of work that eludes stylistic and historical categories. His practice encompasses painting, drawing, photography, digital manipulation, sculpture, assemblage and installation although Language,
spatial arrangements and scale in painting are central ongoing concerns. The poetry of materials, both traditional and provisional, is of paramount importance to the artist whose intellectual curiosity and interest in spirituality imbues his work with startlingly original and often non-specific jumping off points.'
http://www.davidmanley.co.uk/index/Introduction.html

Rachael Pinks -
Creating paintings that are intuitive, which for Rachael is about trusting and not
thinking – the thinking part comes later on.
Interested in the processes involved in painting and also the physicality of the materials themselves.
The paintings are made up of layers of paint and paper that are scratched, rubbed, scraped away and then added to until the desired affect is achieved.
https://rachaelpinks.wordpress.com

Clay Smith -
"I tend to use images that have some emptiness within them, only to place or misplace another image within it. I like the connection of how two or three different images can work and adjust themselves when placed within the same frame.  I guess this all comes from my thoughts about society on a socio-dynamic level, from investigating tribalism within our multicultural environments to thinking about the vibrational energy our thoughts give off, that in turn effect everything else. I want to take my work further than a mere metaphor or a simple representation of the surrounding world."
http://www.claysmith.co.uk

Stephen Snoddy -
‘Snoddy always starts by picking up on elements from a previous painting. Then he constructs a multi lined grid, and the interjection of these lines helps him to arrive at a new work. While this sounds methodical, intuition plays its part and is revealed in the pentimenti inherent in the act of painting. He often regards it as a cousin of the earlier painting – related, yet not too closely. Snoddy likens the whole activity of making art to building a family. But he is even more convinced that structure is the absolute key to a fully considered and contemplative painting. He invites us to think about process, and work out for ourselves how the images have been arrived at. He says, ‘I would hope that the paintings reward looking at to induce a slow, inexorable awareness of intricate relationships’ and ‘through the reworking of the paintings glimpses of the decision making reveal themselves.’  
http://www.contemporarybritishpainting.com/wordpress/?page_id=6671&doing...