ART THROUGH GLASS

Paintings by Charlotte Brisland
until 27th February 2021

“If the door is locked find a window…” - the recent Art Advent Calendar was conceived by necessity as a window only show and it looks for the time being that we shall have to continue to bring you wonderful art through the eye of the Gallery window on the High Street for the foreseeable future. Undeterred we shall make sure the life of the Gallery goes on both in the window, on the Gallery website and on our social media platforms.

For this show in our ‘Art through Glass’ covid lockdown season we are showcasing the work of Charlotte Brisland, Royal College graduate and Art Space Portsmouth member whose studio I visited back in 2017 intrigued by images on Instagram of large paintings of singular, always single buildings; solitary but not lonely, unpeopled but not abandoned. A strange otherworldly quality settles over these otherwise ordinary buildings in her subtly surreal reimagined settings. Brisland’s work will be featured online through the month long period of the show and we will be changing the featured artwork in the Gallery window. A selection of Charlotte Brisland’s paintings are now available in the Jack House Gallery online shop.

‘Throughout her career, Brisland has used the snapshot to record the landscapes she has lived in, often for months and years, yet sometimes they are made within a fraction of a second on a train or in a car. Fragments of these snapshots are collaged in the studio to retain an essential element of fiction. At once part of the displacement the Artist feels in the world, the spaces become overlapped by past and present. There is a sense of performative storytelling within the painterly description of the image as broad brushwork structures scenes that echo genres within the painting tradition and create a majestic tension that transcends the figurative content. A single building in space, lit from without and concealing what is within is no literal object in this work. What is hidden remains so; nothing and nobody emerges. The scenes promise human presence and permanently banishes it. Familiarity is omnipresent while the absence of so many possible elements is comparable to a stage, paused and vacant.’
Create magazine 2019

Charlotte Brisland, who won theLandscape/Seascape/Cityscape Category Award in the Jackson’s Open Painting Prize 2018. She was interviewed by Clare McNamara ‘CHARLOTTE BRISLAND: MARKING OUT THE IMMORTAL LANDSCAPE’ in December 2018 and you can read the full interview here

“Working in landscape painting has been a kind of rebellion of what is currently on trend in the art world. Painting, as a taboo medium because of the ties with the traditional or amateur, is a fascinating arena. Painting has been an endless state of discovery for me, a medium of its own autonomy. There is a language which, the longer I play with it, the more I believe it’s a gateway to something far beyond my physical mortal understanding. It is, for me, conceptual within and without, tied up in the medium completely. The work hangs on a vacancy of narrative, that moment where landscape painting became secular and bravely looked at the world just as it is. The empty spaces I’m drawn to are pliable both for myself and the viewer, it’s a world partly erased and full of daydream. Built up from a clash of cultures; the paintings are places I’ve lived in or imagined, which always have me on the outside both in time and space. Erasing parts means I can play and add what I want, filling in with utterances as a child does when playing with blocks and figures. Light is altered, a background narrative of lost worlds fallen to war or infection is projected and forgotten. Paint, as a pliable medium and rich with borrowed approaches of artists in time slip about the compositions. The final painting is a kind of residue of all that, the physical impression after the flash.”

Charlotte Brisland January 2021

Zines of deformed decadence…

A word about "Zines of deformed decadence" - Charlotte Brisland can also be found in issue 1 of a new Zine which is available to buy and is a real print BOOK! In lockdown let's face it something intelligent and rather lovely in print - it’s what we all need? Only £10

From it’s publishers: "We're delighted to announce that Charlotte Brisland will be featured in @the6ress upcoming issue, 'An Echo in the Heart Cave' - a deliciously decadent curation of experimental art and poetry from over 20 artists and poets, presented as a full-colour perfect-bound book with a skin-soft cover. The first edition will be limited to 100 copies, available to pre-order through @the6ress Etsy shop. A portion of each sale will be donated to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Please follow @the6ress on Instagram or visit the6ress.com for more details."

You can order your copy from their Etsy shop here