Linden Hall Studio
32 St Georges Road
Deal, Kent CT14 6BA5th to 26th November 2022
An exhibition of work from 1970 onwards, where Arthur's painting career began - born out of Camberwell Art School. The title also references his youth of 70+, and also that there will be 70+ works!
The exhibition will run from Saturday November 5th - November 26th and will be shown throughout the entire gallery (Linden Hall Studio).
‘Arthur works somewhere between the figurative and the semi-abstract. He engages with the formal problems that arise in the process of looking, in its broad sense, to attempt to make something that is a coherent painting.’
‘Prolonged, procrastinated messy chaos… just occasionally organised chaos.’
It was possibly the Brueghel painting of three very drunk men, slumbered, beneath a
strange wheel like table and pancake roofed houses. It was both intriguing, disturbing
and alive.
Or maybe it was the Van Gogh portrait of an old man in a straw hat that caught my
attention on the back wall of the primary school classroom.
I was eight years old. The combination of mystery, hidden narratives and in the case
of the Van Gogh, an intensity of feeling and luminosity planted a seed. Fascinated on
the one hand and moved by the other.
By that Christmas (after much pestering) I was given an oil painting set with brushes,
all in a lovely wooden box. As is common with childhood excitements, I found myself
truly disappointed. Not knowing about priming, the result was disastrous. To console
myself and on discovering that the turpentine had serious warnings of flammability, I
made myself a flaming torch. Out of control, I dropped the flaming thing on to the
carpet of my bedroom floor, which duly caught fire. I managed to put it out, without
the need to call the fire brigade, and managed to conceal the large hole in the carpet
until I left for art college many years later.
Not much has really changed, apart from my being older and no longer being so
foolhardy with matches. There have been many more paintings and many more
stories, but the magic and struggle of it all has never faded.
- ARTHUR NEAL