The Poetic Landscape

Cheshire

The Poetic Landscape

£3,000

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Aim: To publish The Poetic Landscape, a collaboration between artist Anne Lever & poet Michael Fox, based on the Grosvenor Museum exhibition...

The Poetic Landscape

is currently an exhibition at the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, (running April - July 2016) of 26 gorgeous abstract landscape paintings by Cheshire artist Anne Lever. Each painting is accompanied by a poem specially written by Cheshire poet Michael Fox. The artists are asking for funds to produce a fine art edition of the paintings and poems in order to preserve this unique collaboration beyond the exhibition itself.

 

The Paintings

Anne's painting is inspired by her love and knowledge of the British landscape and its history. The work is ordered by geometry and infused with feeling for the spirit of place.  Working in the imaginative Neo-Romantic tradition, she is influenced by the French master Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), the American painter Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) and the British artist Keith Vaughan (1912-1977).  Exhibiting widely and with a growing following, her work is in many private collections.

Anne says of her work:  “In all my painting I seek to transmit something of what I feel when a fleeting glimpse of something in the landscape stops me in my tracks.  I go out in all weathers.  Something catches my attention.  I try to capture that sensation in my work.  Not by recording reality but by finding an image that reflects my experience.  Sometimes this just breathes itself onto the surface of the board; sometimes it is a monumental struggle; and all honouring the rectangle, on a flat surface and using colour.  I have a passion for paint and am compelled to push through boundaries in order to resolve things which I do not fully comprehend.  The result is always a surprise and leads on to further discovery.”

 

The Poems

Each painting in the exhibition inspired a poem by Michael Fox, a Cheshire-based writer, frequent collaborator with Anne and a collector of her paintings.  Michael was the first Literary Manager of the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, before becoming a BBC drama producer.  Subsequently he set up his own independent media company as well as co-founding and directing the Commonwealth Film Festival in Manchester 2002 - 2006.  Now an Anglican priest, he combines his writing with doctoral research into drama and theology.

Michael Fox says of the collaboration:  “Anne’s paintings are powerful visual expressions which need no explanation, but since first encountering her work I have admired it for its poetic quality, for its dash and verve and sense of creating a vivid experience there in the moment.  I found myself wanting to respond by chasing down the imaginative places to which the work takes me and by finding a language for the deep resonances the combinations of colour and structure evoke in me.”

 

St. Michael & All Angels
St Michael and All Angels

Were you waiting all that time amongst the brush hairs,
laying low in sable, stiff with that last leaden swirl

of chrome yellow? Or in the paint itself, a bubble  
after the stirring, its meniscus your soon-to-vanish halo?

And did you creep in with the feathered stroke
of the brush on the board, to lie under a smear of crimson,

like flat smoke, squashed up against the church tower,
invisible to the watchers, the grim ones with stones for eyes

who rose early to place salt and bread and other grief tokens
in the grave clothes? The second thief’s torso

is still hanging, all muscly chiaroscuro, arms up
behind like sycamore seeds the wind will take

once they’ve dried and loosened. You have your resurrection now,
stealing through amber dawn, ready to say your peace.

 

The book

in two different formats, will be produced on high quality paper with careful attention to colour quality.

I have read each poem in conjunction with the painting which inspired it, and I think they are wonderful. Richly textured, sensual and allusive, your poems and Anne's paintings correspond and complement one another extraordinarily well.  I cannot imagine a more equal or harmonious interrelationship between text and image.  They will make a great exhibition, and an equally rewarding book. Peter Boughton, Keeper of Art

 


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