East End

The Lockdown Paintings of Nicholas Borden

The video of this exhibition has now been posted on Youtube:

Exhibition at Town House 19th June – 4th July, booking not required to visit the gallery

Nicholas Borden: *Arnold Circus, the Boundary Estate*

Town House welcomes Nicholas Borden back to the gallery here for an exhibition of his lockdown paintings. He always works from life, taking his easel out with him in rain or shine and he continued to work this way during lockdown, with added views from his windows. So of necessity, many of his subjects in Wishful Thinking were painted locally in East London where he lives – although he did occasionally venture further afield.

This way of working always lends a vibrancy and immediacy to Nicholas’ work that combine to convey a sense of ‘being there’ to the viewer. The works in this exhibition have a particular intensity however, perhaps the result of the circumstances and isolation imposed by lockdown, but also perhaps a response to a more urgent need he felt to record what he saw around him during the pandemic.

What Nicholas recorded in paint was what we all experienced in lockdown: going for a walk, visiting parks and looking at gardens whether from outside or in, the Wishful Thinking of the title for those who had no access to their own outdoor space.

Nicholas Borden’s exhibition ‘Wishful Thinking’ will be on sale at Town House in Fournier Street and on the home page of the website from Saturday 19th June – Sunday 4th July. Please note we will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays while restrictions remain in force. No booking necessary

Unlike John Allin and Rose Henriques, the next artist, Peri Parkes, had trained at the Slade and moved to the East End after the break-up of his marriage: a friend was living there and Peri, trying to make his way as an artist, couldn’t afford anywhere else. This is one of a series of paintings executed when he was living in that prefab in Conder Street, Limehouse and dates to around 1982.

It’s another ‘backs of houses’ and is the fourth in Peri’s sequence of the street. Earlier on in the series the emphasis is on the rigorous measuring technique which he’d been taught at the Slade, the subject is just what’s available to him out of his window. But gradually you can see him being drawn in emotionally and he becomes fixated on the wall in the foreground that gradually disintegrates from one painting to another and a patch of moss that was cleaned off it. He wrote: ‘at the very beginning there was a rich snakeskin pattern of moss down the wall, one day it was scraped away, nonetheless I have determined that its absence remains the main focus of the painting’. For him these paintings become an allegory of the passage of time and so there is an air of forlorn dereliction to the painting without the signs of life in Walter Steggles’ painting even though the subject is similar. There’s just a faint air of decay and emptiness.

Except when I hung it in the gallery, I noticed something I’d never spotted before in this: the very faint head of a child looking out of the window, which is now the first figure to appear in one of Peri’s paintings. From this point on the East End becomes more than just whatever’s outside his window for Peri, it starts to get under his skin and the buildings with rubble outside that had been derelict and lifeless in his work, start to become inhabited and take on a life of their own

For a short video of the whole exhibition see the link below:-

https://youtu.be/OOtTDzI115o

Wishful Thinking…..

The Lockdown Paintings of Nicholas Borden

Town House in Lockdown 4: Peri Parkes