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Stone and Timber, mother e.ART.h



Stephen Hornsby-Smith

Let's not pretend that any anti-modernist, and anti-Painting thing is a Conceptual Art dishing out Art apartheid ! Let's avoid that hysteria. But let's recognize that Painting, especially Modernist Painting today isn't getting much coverage - without going over the top we need 'more coverage and less skeletal exposure', today's 'nudity' metaphorically speaking. Why? Because we have a heritage of early radical endeavour that stretches to today's enlightened diversity made dramatic by opening-up 160 years of practice for today's practitioners. We want to 'brush the stars and pluck horizons to make new work in different idioms, dimensions and colour to celebrate the noble narrative of metaphor. We should be tantalized by our immersion in the fresh discoveries of new light to furnish our own generation to search for beauty. This 'self-help' bonds us together away from the edifices of ossification that blights all new and renewed forms of modernism - vigilance and originality opens-up our own form of intransigence ! Furthermore expect 'Painting's 'Art cavities' to develop as a necessary consequence of biting into the eternal Art and cultural questions that fill our canvasses. Expect failure and plan for redemption. Here we offer a living breathing community of human history and a confluence of unity and Art bearing the full weight of knowledge, wisdom and unapologetic prism of colour.

However, all Art is limited by our inconsistent peripheral vision, human limitation and vice where we can only hope to respond to our own era whilst being revitalized by ancient timbers and chiseled stone. Art is a great benefactor that opened-up to all human folly and excess?. Perhaps it was modernism that embraced human technological advancement of the 19th century like its own 'Renaissance', its own 'Artistic Industrialization'? Modernist Painter's crossed the rubicon of Art but under its own 'Parisian liberation', under the ancient twin bell towers of Notre dame. Our 'Notre Dame' must have been inspiration for our Parisian founding Fathers, and we must rebuild and value by human hand chiseled by human brush, our 'Painted brick by brick' to reclaim our universal spirit and destiny. This Paint offers 'our stone and timber' our twinned icons of resurrection, where we stand shoulder to shoulder with 850 years of history, our own modernist family tree and with the Paris of today in the immense but absolutely imperative guardians of universal culture that transcends our paltry mortal existence. where flames and fire can never prevail.


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