Critical Text: O Painters! My Painters! By Lynda Morris
The brush marks in James Metsoja’s paintings are like lines in a quick drawing. The idea of the relationship between a line in a drawing and a brush mark in the final painting came from the Venetian painter Titian and it links Velazques and Goya to Manet. Degas and Whistler taught Sickert who brought this idea to England. In the 1930s Sickert moved on from drawings made from life to photographs, snapshots or daily newspaper images to paint from. Sickert continued to teach and lecture into his eighties and enough of a record survived for it have been recovered by the figurative painters influenced by Kitaj’s Human Clay exhibition and the idea of a School of London. I learnt about this from John Lessore when he taught with John Wonnacott in Norwich. His aunt was Sickert’s wife, Therese and his Helen ran the Beaux Arts Gallery that gave early exhibitions to Bacon, Freud, Middleditch, Kossoff and Auerbach.
Quite separately Peter Doig was influenced by Kitaj’s idea of these painters as the School of London and he painted large canvases infused by the magical qualities of light created by the weather and how that quality of light infects all the colours in a scene glimpsed for just a moment, a moment that we remember all our lives. In the late 1990s Doig taught at the Royal College of Art, and his students Hurvin Anderson, George Shaw, David Rayson and Paul Housley had early exhibitions in Norwich. Paul Housley taught a course in Norwich painting from small ornaments so the students could concentrate not on what they saw, but how they saw. James Metsoja was on that course.
James Metsoja’s paintings in this exhibition, based on images from old books and recent newspapers, represent the obscure and the notorious. They are images of the people that have led us to wonder if maybe we are living through a period of decline? A period of decline is a little voiced thought shared by so many people as dreams of the future shrink, and shrink. If we are living in a period of decline, then we should look for signs of new, more rational ways of thinking and representing our times. The two ideas of the line in the drawing becoming the brush mark in the painting and the light of the weather infecting all we see gives me hope for a more realistic future. Painting is not just about what we see but much more about how we see, and there is something humanely sympathetic about how James Metsoja sees. See, it matters how you see.
James Metsoja
9a Rowington Road
NR1 3RR
Norwich
Norfolk
United Kingdom
Europe
