Art on the Stade

"Sunbathers" by Jeffery Camp RA

The trouble with things being on your doorstep is that you don't give them the attention they deserve.  This has certainly been true of the Jerwood Gallery's current exhibition of paintings by Jeffery Camp RA, entitled "The Road to Beachy Head".  Nothing in the publicity had particularly tempted me, so my visit to the exhibition was a particular pleasure.

Not that Camp's loose freedom with line and shallow layers of paint are normally my thing.  But after the initial jolt I began to look more closely.  In this group of paintings Camp, who formerly lived in Hastings, concentrates on the landscape of and near Beachy Head, just down the road.  But what makes the paintings unusual is his combination of elemental landscape with human figures or heads.  The impression is of human beings caught in an elemental environment beyond their control - or, as in "Sunbathers" above, rapturously united with nature.  It's not fashionable art, but it has a particular resonance that is usually the key to something important happening.

An incidental pleasure of nipping into the Jerwood Gallery is that they have rehung the permanent part of the collection, removing some and introducing others.  There are some terrific new appearances.  I particularly liked David Bomberg's "Portrait of Eunice Levi", but could happily have pocketed half a dozen or so others for the walls of the Shoebox.

Across the open space of the Stade is the Stade Hall - a featureless large room that is sometimes used for art exhibitions, sometimes for meetings.  At the moment there's an exhibition of paintings by Oliver Crowther called "Guardians of the Stade", with powerful portraits of local fisherfolk.  There's no sentimentality about them, and they're a good complement to the Jerwood's curated show.

Antony Mair