'discerning - adj. having or showing good judgement or good insight' (OED)

Well, that is indeed a definition to live up to and if, after looking at the 90 or more works of both invited and selected artists in my section, the viewer still feels able to agree that it has been displayed here, then I will be more than delighted. What they may then be able to discern about the choices and decisions in a selection which would seem (even to me!) to cast a very wide net indeed, would seem rather harder to pin down. For a critic in a very exposed position like this perhaps a few words of explanation may be allowed before the works are allowed to speak for themselves.

First is the observation that, having trained as an academic art-historian some four decades ago and then gone straight into teaching in art schools, my best teachers have always been artists themselves - it was only too easy to forget sometimes at the Courtauld Institute that art is not just some abstract, intellectual and historical activity but something actually conceived and then made by artists.

And it is through my friendships and associations with artists also, that most of the things I really value in my life - poetry and music, as well as art itself, has finally come. They have taught me, first, of the close interconnectedness, in form and intention, of these three arts in particular and if there is any one quality that all the pieces here share, whether abstract or figurative, painting, sculpture or drawing, it is the way in which the poetic and the musical can so vitally inform the visual.

The other fundamental lesson they have taught me is that artistic thought is essentially circular in character, an intuitive activity that, through close concentration given both to the world of visual phenomena and the medium through which the perception is to be given physical form, short circuits the essentially linear character of the verbal, academic culture within which we largely live and act. It's what can make art, any art, hard, at first, to come to terms with and then so exhilarating when finally we give ourselves up to it. Because, only then, do we become fully conscious in, and of, the world in which we find ourselves.

 

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