2022 turned out to be a good year for exhibitions of paintings, particularly paintings by skilled colourists.  The stand out exhibitions for me were Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern and Milton Avery at the Royal Academy and - for slightly different reasons - Cézanne, also at Tate Modern. 

The only true contemporary painter was Himid but, despite both working during the early 20th century, Milton Avery, to me didn’t feel particularly dated whereas Cézanne did; and I’m still feeling a tad thoughtful about that.

I found the works of Lubaina Himid extraordinary. The sheer size and boldness of the colours are enough to stop you in your tracks but then you’re drawn into the storytelling of the pictures. As the small catalogue states: ‘This exhibition reflects … her training in theatre design. Unfolding as a sequence of scenes we, the audience, are welcomed as active participants.’  These scenes allow us to witness moments in people’s lives, some seem perfectly ordinary moments, others look more complex.

Probably, I should have gone back another time, spent more time, as I realise now I was so overwhelmed by the overall experience, I didn’t give myself time to take things to a more granular level and consider individual paintings. A lesson learned.

Milton Avery I loved - again initially for the colours, although his are more muted than Himid’s and the paintings are smaller. Similarly, you are drawn into scenes from other people’s lives, feeling almost as though you are invading their privacy. A girl writes at a desk, a couple just sit, doing very little other than the man smoking a pipe. There is no immediately evident drama, not the of the kind that Himid suggests in some of her works. But I found Avery’s approach to painting really helpful for my own work in which I find it hard to leave behind entirely things that are representational albeit I yearn to be more abstract! He said that ‘he never invented what his eye did not witness’ although, as the exhibition curator responded, ‘he omitted detail, distorted forms and used non-associative colours.’

A quote from the introductory essay by Ralph Rugoff, to the Hayward Gallery exhibition ‘Mixing it Up’ in 2021 stands out for me when thinking about these artists, and the role of paint particularly: ‘there are few media that can deliver both the immediate, instantaneous impact of painting and the slow burn of its unfolding’.  

So to Cézanne. Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe that fact that it was a crowded space (unusual since Covid) spoilt the experience rather. But I felt somewhat under-whelmed. Exploring his paintwork and thinking through how this sat with other paintings of the time was, of course, really interesting but, the colour palette became rather monotonous, as did so many still lives all in one place. Landscapes I found more attractive and enjoyed the thought of his bold autonomy in his painting style, but again I began to itch for a change in colour palette. I was more drawn to his paintings of people and couldn’t but be grateful for such an opportunity to explore his brushwork up close and capture it with my camera.

The Gardener Vallier (1906)