Exhibitions

Fredereick Gore CBE RA & Sir Lawrence Gowing CBE RA ' Two Friends..'

Exhibition Date: 22 February - 10 March 2012

'Two Friends ...'

All work will be available for view by Friday 17th February.

The camaraderie that can exist between artists, especially those of a gregarious bent, is

particularly powerful.Sir Lawrence Gowing and Frederick Gore were sociable,generous

characters who exerted a formidable influence upon the British establishment and art

education. And theywere friends.

 

Frederick Gore as Head of Painting at St Martin's for twenty eight years,was said to have

been the most influential Royal Academician never to have been made President, and

Lawrence Gowing  became an internationally respected art historian, highly acclaimed

curator for the Arts Council and the Royal Academy and numerous key exhibitions; he

created a series of outstanding television films on art,and followed in the footsteps of his

mentor, William Coldstream ,to become Slade Professor of FineArt.

 

Above all,both men were consummate artists.

 

Lawrence Gowing used oil paint in the open air since he began painting as a boy at

school and was recognised for the astuteness and tenderness of his portraits from a

young age  .As Richard Morphet wrote“It was,however,through landscape paintings from

the motif - typically of paths beneath the cavernous spans of branches and trees – that

Gowing developed an increasingly searching concern with the character of visual

information.  This led him…eventually to the virtual abstractions, still derived from the

motif…He described these as giving the pictorial essence of the scene as a fabric

stretched out to the four corners of a canvas…”;

 

Freddy Gore  carried his easel to remote mountain sites in search of solitude and

inspiration. En plein-air he managed to capture the southern light of Provence, create his

palette of singing colours and excite his imagination. His joyful and celebratory subjects

of harvests and lavender fields, olive groves and vineyards, a sun blessed France or his

Chelsea garden live on in his canvasses and lesser known watercolours.   Gore was a man

for all seasons, in sympathy with the eccentric and avant-garde.  He devoted his life to

painting but his second great love was for Russian dancing.  He joined the semi-professional

dance ensemble The Balalaika Dance Group and danced with them for over thirty years.

Both artists' commitment to colour, their closeness to the modern French masters, the

great blossoming of form – to use Gowing's own phrase,is ' enormously stimulating'.

 

All work is for sale, a price list is available on request.

*Richard Morphet,Sir Lawrence Gowing,Obituary, The Independent, Thurs 7 Feb 1991

 

Laurie MacLaren and Diana Lanham