New Art from Oxfordshire

 Those of us who were around at the time will remember the Young British Artists, the YBA's, whose work came to our notice most noticeably in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, promoted with the same panache and daring as the Sex Pistols had been twenty years earlier. Gavin Turk's Pop was a waxwork figure of Sid Vicious that seemed to acknowledge their lineage. Tracey Emin has continued to parade her emotional torment from her tent and unmade bed to neon signs and Damien Hurst has moved from animals preserved in formaldehyde to diamond encrusted skulls to accumulate some monetary reward for his efforts. 

I suspect I might have seen the future and the next generation last week on a visit to Wiltshire and into Oxfordshire. Due to contractual reasons I am not in a position to reveal their names but I had time to contemplate their paintings at some length and found plenty in them. They are the VYOA's, the Very Young Oxfordshire Artists, already producing some very exciting work and likely to make big names for themselves if able to progress from this compelling first show.

As you can see from the highlights I have selected here, with special permission, they are notable for their vibrant and imaginative use of colour. I was grateful to be informed that this study in green and blue, so markedly different from Whistler's subdued palette, is a car driving into fog, a footnote that is very enlightening and transforms our appreciation of the energy with which the paint has been applied to the canvas. I did once find myself having to drive a van into a thick cloud of smoke and the painting evokes that same feeling of heightened anxiety.

More subdued but brilliantly done is this next one which suggests perhaps a Portugese Man o' War with its tendrils lit by submarine light. The subtlest hints of green in among shades taken from other areas of the spectrum ingeniously add to the harmony created by the predominant shifting yellow, burnt orange and cerise. Again, the brushwork is confident and almost flamboyant even though this is by the younger of the two painters, bringing to mind some of Maggi Hambling's uncompromising oeuvre.

The VYOA's are as yet unaffected by the potentially ruinous academic study of their discipline. I don't know if I ever recovered from the 'education' in Eng Lit I underwent sufficiently to write poems that escaped it. It certainly takes a long time to grow out of those things one has been taught and even if it's necessary to know some of the history of what one is doing, it's best not to regard it as any sort of law. The VYOA's arrive innocent of any knowledge of Fauvism, Modernism, Surrealism or any other -ism and yet here's one I'd pay good money for, and will ask for, in preference to owning anything by Jack the Dripper, Pollock.

As happened with the Hambling waterfalls, the artist can apply the paint freely, with some abandon, and see what happens. Unexpected things can, and do. It happens in poetry, too, when verbal effects emerge from what sounded right to make it even better whether or not it was part of the original intention. Nobody, surely, believes that the miles of shelf space taken up by books interpreting Shakespeare are full of things that Shakespeare was aware of having done. The audience contributes to the work, each in their own way.

It was possible to find birds, faces and anything else one's imagination could supply in Maggi's waterfalls and so it is here in this which may or may not be a confused octopus eating a grape.

I have taken a detail from the bottom left corner in which I found a portrait of Lowell George (1945-1979), the much revered singer-songwriter from Little Feat best known for his masterpiece Long Distance Love.

It was there to be found by anyone who had both long enough to look at the painting and knew who Lowell George was and what he looked like. I had the privilege of being the only person who could do that. While the artist is aware of the work of Marc Bolan, Little Feat are some way off his radar just yet.

The likes of Paul Muldoon and Tom Paulin took their close reading of poetry probably about as far as it could go in their respective books on the subject. At times they went so far that it seemed all poems re-echoed with all others which is an effect of the limits of language more than artistic achievement. Perhaps something similar is at work here but as a return to art, hopefully on the way out of lockdown and before some real, live music, I hadn't quite realized what I'd been missing.

When you put some effort into art you often get something back. I was very glad of these paintings by the VYOA's and I'm putting in my order for whatever I can get of their work next job.