Sandra BANK

" Meta-physical " - June 4th - June 28th 2003

During the last twenty five years I have written many appraisals of exhibitions in the course of developing a general awareness of the subtleties of the joy of painting, but this exhibition is quite exceptional.
Bank has managed to maintain her quite strict rules of approach to painting,which were explored and very well explained by John Russell Taylor in his Catalogue Introduction. So that you may judge for yourselves, I have reprinted the majority of his Introduction, as you will find that many of the comments can be applied to the paintings in this “Meta - physical” Exhibition.
Bank has maintained her steady discipline. The 2003 exhibition gave her the opportunity to explore a much wider range of metaphorical allusions with vigour, style and exuberance.
Single-mindedness marks Sandra out as someone quite remarkable; someone who, unlike so many others, always keeps her eye on the end result, yet manages to preserve the vital air of mystery. This allows each individual viewer to make his / her own interpretation of the work in question.
Today,Taylor's summation that we live in a world...“ shot through with myth and hinted allusion” is more true than ever.
With attractive prizes like these as rewards for joining in the chase, we believe she may have to work very hard to keep up with demand.

Noel Oddy and Laurie MacLaren, June 2003.
Copyright www.oddyart.com 2004

“....Bank’s paintings have lived...their history is written on their faces for all to see..... it is buried in the exquisitely intricate surfaces, to be extracted only by a sort of archaeology of the eye. They yield evidence of additions and subtractions, absorption or burial..... frequently she chooses to build up image upon image,but.... nothing is ever completely lost.
If she wanted to lose an image completely, she could begin a new canvas......one can effectively obliterate evidence of abandoned first thoughts if they are ... truly abandoned. But, Bank sees her paintings as complex constructs in which different eras of painting, different strata of paint, happily co-exist and echo off one another ............ the effect resembles those MATISSE drawings in which the subject is rubbed out and redrawn over and over again, so as to produce a palimpsest, with each stage readable through or round the predominant image which has first engaged our attention.
On the other hand, Bank has other lines of approach......... if you read the picture very closely, it seems as though the build-up is almost sculptural - not so much in any heavy accumulation of pigment, but rather that one gains the illusion of being able to move all around the painting, and even physically penetrate it, as with a sculpture..........
And this, even though Bank’s work is obstinately tied to the real world, its colour schemes redolent of the sea, the sky, and the desert, its characters firmly standing with their feet in the desert sands and their heads in the stars.
That is, if they have heads, which many of them do not. The generalisation of figures cut off just above the shoulders also adds an extra touch of mystery to the apparent subjects .......... this is a world shot through with myth and hinted allusion. As one soon learns with Bank, life in her paintings is a game which has to be played by HER rules. And, when the results are so seductive who is going to refuse to join in?”
(Extracts from the Introduction to the Bank exhibition at the Harriet Green Gallery written by John Russell Taylor)

Paintings