Drawing

Basil Beattie + Frances Aviva Blane

23 November – 21 December 2001

The space chosen for this exhibition was the basements of an industrial building on Great Sutton Street; this physically ‘enclosed’ space was the ‘encounter’ and the psychological space for the viewer’s interaction with the work.
Basil Beattie and Frances Aviva Blane are British abstract painters of two generations. Although they make large paintings, both Beattie and Blane produce small drawings.

In Beattie’s work ‘there is a ‘sense’ of urban environment, a fleeting encounter that triggers a whole range of associations with urban experiences rather than specific architectural references. Recurring motifs and symbols alluding to architectural features, are like metaphors of experience; echoes of doorways, stairs, arches, subways, reconfigure like an elusive group of memories. At times these metaphors are like routes of escape to suggest a desire for a purity that leaves all these behind’.
Blane’s drawings ‘appear grounded in an experience of rural and not urban phenomena. It is not a domestic landscape but something bleaker, exposed and not pretty. They are concerned with finding a means to locate physical things to each other and to oneself across a divide leading to a feeling of separation even disassociation’.