Festival 15 - Valerie Grove
Our next featured artist is Alan Rankle . Here he talks about his art, insects, travel, Norman
Road and the shared experiences of dogs and art restorers....
Can you tell us something about your work in this show and something about how
your work has developed over the years?
The painting featured in the exhibition Untitled Painting XXVI (Bodiam) 2018 is from a series
called Mothland. An evolving theme of these paintings came from my thinking about how
various creatures experience the world in quite different ways. For example bats are flitting in
the evening landscape focused on sonar. Moths are tuned in to the particular sound
frequencies of predators and navigate by the light of the moon. Dragonflies and mayflies live
their lives in the air and also underwater and then on the surface membrane of the water. As
for your dog…. as well as seeing things only in blue and yellow your dog can hear many
sounds you can’t and is of course seeing ultra violet light also…. itself the means by which an
expert art restorer can spot a great painting from a fake.
What do you find most enjoyable and/or difficult about the process of creating art?
Since I’m interested in landscape painting the work begins with walking and catching ideas.
I like to talk with writers and some artists I’m close to about the way painting can be a catalyst
for noticing symmetries and relationships between all kinds of phenomena. As Shih Tao put it:
‘… in terms of penetration and development, painting is the greatest guiding form in the
world.’ I don’t find it difficult, except maybe knowing when a painting is complete so I tend to ask
someone and as Oska Lappin once said: ‘Well you could just walk away Renee or keep going
and cross that line into genius…’
You travel a lot with your work, would you like to tell us about your recent projects?
Two projects I’ve worked on recently are an exhibition curated by Claudia De Grandi and
myself for the Fabbrica del Vapore arts centre in Milan which we called Axis: London Milano
and designs for six suites of rooms at the Lowry hotel in Manchester in collaboration with
Rebecca Youssefi , the architect Veronica Givone and AFK Studios .
You’ve been based in St. Leonard on Sea for a number of years and have seen a
burgeoning art scene evolving. Do you feel an affinity with the other artists who live
here?
Well a few of them interest me a great deal and we’ve worked together on various projects
over the years. The exhibition in Milan featured some artists who’re based here on the coast:
Rebecca Youssefi , Oska Lappin , Charlotte Snook , Matthew Radford , Overlap , Kirsten
Reynolds , Walter and Zoniel along with others who have connections to the town like Jake
and Dinos Chapman , Cat Roissetter and Stephen Newton .
It seems quite special to be able to just walk down Norman Road to the Russian Cafe and
meet up with artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers... what to say…. Bonjour Monsieur
Torriset!
What would you like to see the Hastings Arts Forum do in the future?
I think inviting curators to bring art from other places would be a good idea. Maybe you could
link up more with the local museums and do joint ventures.
Nature Strikes Back began in the mid-1990s as a creative response to rapidly increasing environmental
destruction and the underlying human disconnection from its own ecosystem. It also came out of a
professional realisation that the radically inclusive and constructive political thinking
required to shift direction was absent for the foreseeable future. In the archaic and
traumatic context of global power; politics and the prioritisation of economic acquisition
and military dominance it will continue to be absent.
The project began with political collage pieces, and landscapes created with often toxic
combinations of paint and household materials, using objects, board or paper found in the
street. As digital spectrums and technology developed, industrial printer inks became a primary
medium making the work more vivid and the landscapes more artificial. I photographed
and edited many of these works to create a series of prints in which the original landscapes became
unrecognisable. From the mid-2000s, I worked with site-specific and themed installation
works both internationally and in the UK. Much of the above is archived on this website
while the blog is an irregular mix of reviews, travelogue and personal rant.
Following a house move in 2014, I started to work directly with raw, natural materials and plain,
white acrylic. The subtle colours and textures in these paintings, and their sense of
stillness and order, is a stark contrast to the constant movement and intense colour
saturation of our contemporary visual environments. This series of works is on
the recent painting page
Current and ongoing projects include Elegy, an open web project about death and dying, and the
Crowhurst Art Garden, a small sculpture and art space in southern England. I also provide a retreat for
artists, writers or anyone who just needs some quiet time out.
Valerie Grove
2022