It’s a funny old world and one that never ceases to amaze and surprise, one were connections and narrative intertwine into a texture and reality were chance plays way more than we could ever imagine.
If i had not sought out a student placement at The Box Tree, I’d never have had the steer from the chef Michael Truelove to get a job with Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux ‘Quat saison, totally "Sliding Doors”.
Having got that job, aged 20, in July 1986, I met Richard Hamilton and his partner Rita Donagh whilst working my first weekend service as a waiter.
This boy from Blackpool developed a taste for fine art that must be in us all, but we need a catalyst, mine was Richard and Rita.
Richard was a great friend, a financial backer of Pied a terre, a founding co-director, and obviously an amazing Artist. Sadly, Richard died in September 2011.
Following his death there were several great exhibitions, recently the Reina Sofia gallery in Madrid had an amazing collection of his works, and last year the Tate showed some of what was shown in Madrid.
It’s here at the Tate, at Richard’s retrospective that I first meet Dillwyn Smith. We both commented on Richard's work and we found that we had many mutual friends, including the AMAZING curator Gill Hedley.
Dillwyn has a studio in West Hampstead and I had recently opened a new restaurant, “one-sixty”, an American bar and smokehouse, very close by. I was passing his studio very day!
Gill was pivotal in bringing Patrick Heide and Dillwyn together and we attended a talk with the artist and curator, a fabulously intimate evening hearing where the inspiration came from; hearing some of the serendipitous circumstances that brought his work together, and how fate played a hand in the outcome.
I have taken an introduction to the exhibition from the website of Patrick Heide as they speak much more eloquently than me on the subject.
Spanning almost a decade of experimentation with textiles, colours and homoepathic essences, “Dirty Linen” attempts to capture the metaphysical qualities of the creative process and fuse them with the traditional techniques of painting and drawing.
While living through a prolonged period of his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease, Smith experienced the replacement of common conversation by silent dialogue and began to question some fundamental aspects of art and how it is transmitted and perceived. Always seeking to challenge his creative process, Smith set out to research if, besides an intellectual, emotional and sensual dialogue between an artwork and the viewer, there is an additional and more essential exchange of energies that better defines that dialogue.
“Dirty Linen” is an inquiry into this exchange of energies, it is about energy produced, emanated and received during and after the creative process.
In his ‘Potency Paintings’ Smith experimented with essences of pure colour pigments. These ‘potenised pigments’, made for him by Nelsons Homeopathic Company, were sprayed and saturated into fabric or canvas, which were often stitched together with other textiles or painted surfaces and then stretched over wooden frames.
The “Placebo Paintings” display Smith’s characteristic sensitivity to materiality combined with a new interest in pure colour and its communicative and spiritual capabilities. At a recent residency in Oman, Smith discovered the warm and luminous tones of the local Dishdashi cloth, as well as the traditional craft of sewing, weaving and dyeing.
Invited to make a one person show at the Rothko center in Latvia in 2013, these materials and techniques inspired him to a series of purely stitched fabric works influenced by the colour and traditionally carved wooden dwellings in Daugavpils, the city where Rothko was born and spent 10 years of his childhood, not surprisingly an artist with whom Smith shares common ground.
Smith’s drawings have the most direct communication with the effects of energy. Executed using the technique of Kirlian photography, the paper, with the aid of an electro plate, is exposed to a high voltage source. The compositions that emerge after processing are defined by the corona around an object or a motion; in Smith’s case the fingers and their sliding movement across the paper.
Gill Hedley is an independent curator, writer and consultant. Previously an exhibitions organiser at the British Council and, from 1993-2006, Director of the Contemporary Art Society, she is currently working with individual artists, the Freud Museum, the Wellcome Trust and the Foundling on a range of projects.
