I had seen paintings and sculptures from the Avondale Centre at exhibitions before, at the Phoenix Gallery in Brighton, and at Brighton Library, where they more than held their own as works of art. If I had not known about the Avondale Centre and the Grace Eyre Foundation I would not have been aware I was looking at work by the 'learning disabled'. This was work full of learning and ability - of discipline and intuitive sense. I want to try to describe what it is like to see it in the place in which it is made - away from the setting of a gallery or a library in which you might expect to find a kind of work which is politely (or even impolitely) acculturated and learned.
I went to the Avondale Centre with my friend the painter Dennis Creffield early one mild grey December afternoon. The Centre is a converted Victorian church; the upstairs rooms, where the art rooms are, are on a level with the capitals of the columns; the art and the vaults spring from the same place. The clients were settling to classes and workshops; while some were curious to know who we were and eager to introduce themselves - to give themselves and us names - it felt as if our desire to look quietly at the work was understood and equally welcomed. I'll try to describe the work as it impacted on me.
There's a big board covered with paintings of heads, like an icon-stand in a Russian church, portraits of the artists as themselves, or not quite themselves, or more than themselves: they laugh and shout and seem to clamour for attention. Just as these heads are so strongly individual, so do the objects and paintings which fill the rooms have their own distinct personalities, something which can catch you unawares, while you are not looking for it. Many are framed, and while some are piled or lean against walls others thoughtfully hung or placed, on tables, in cabinets. There is a black papier mache aeroplane suspended in the air, RAF, two engines, made by Albert Barber. Maybe it has just dropped its bombs on an imaginary Germany: for consciousness, wrote Tolstoy when he was 80 (remembering when he was eight), is both mobile and motionless: a breath of the 1940s underneath the Victorian arches, a folding and overlapping of time.
There are elongated papier mache sculptures of cats, by Shirley Hart, they seem to be round every corner, tall, thin, upright-sitting ones, in pinks and blues, in spots and stripes, in groups, in solitude. Shirley Hart is at work in the art workshop surrounded by her materials, and she shows us an immensely long-bodied stripy cat in a different, also unmistakably cat-like position, its tail extended in a gentle and elegant geometric curve behind it, its front paws stuck out parallel beneath its chin. This is how cats are. A bright green and yellow painting, a crucifixion by Louella Forrest, is dark and tense, partly constructed in squares like a mosaic, full of solemnity and suffering; the Christ's arms are stiff and taut, and the alert, hieratic cats can seem to be paying their own devotion. The crucifixion hangs among Keith Purcell's paintings of dark flowers, rich in colour and mysterious in atmosphere, and near Brenda Allen's teeming landscapes, which have, faces peering out of them. The landscapes have depth - masses and volumes protrude and recede, creating hummocks and shadowy niches - and tremendous weight. The horizons are high up, there is little sky. Like the hanging Christ, suspended so painfully against the pull of gravity, and the tall cats so firmly and stably seated on their haunches, they remind you that you too are subject to the pull of the earth under your weighty head and body.
Some airier pinks and blues and greens glow from some paintings hanging on the opposite wall. The white spaces between them transform and resolve themselves into swans, and the pink and blue and green paintings begin to link and group themselves together too. Sure enough there is a name attached to them, in unignorable letters: Miss Gwen Roberts. This volatile world keeps threatening chaos; and then reveals a new set of landmarks; you are never still, but you are never lost. Another bird, by Gwen Roberts, flies near a house and a wood, or, to put it another way, a small painting opens itself up like a balanced line of verse: a blue house next to a brown bird next to a green and brown and blue wood. The brown bird fills its part of the space from top to bottom, and flies against the direction of the line of verse. It makes its own space, and life sparks across the small gaps between the house, bird and wood parts of the painting. The bird and the wood are heavy; perhaps it is raining and the feathers and leaves are wet. There is noise in this painting - spattering rain - and now noise seems all around: meowing cats, droning aeroplane, screeching and twittering birds.
There is no escape from sensation in this world. The experience is an encounter with the most unexpected: what could be more unexpected than the sensed and perceived world - that which in being born you never asked for? But in the work at the Avondale, this is a joyful rather than just an overwhelming experience: sensation mediated and ordered, in some sense named, a shared experience of embodied individuality. Like the vaults, the works at the Avondale Centre have gravitas and poise; like Gothic vaults, they are channelled eruptions of responsive energy.
Robert
Snell
January 1998
Robert Snell is an art critic who has reviewed numerous exhibitions in the TLS and elsewhere, and who has taught widely, as an art historian, in art colleges.
