FRANCIS Bacon used to say that “no artist in their lifetime can possibly know whether or not they are any good”. “Only time,” he said, “can eliminate the twin perils that beset every creative person – the first is Theory, by which most people enter a painting, and the second is fashion – what an audience feels it should or should not be stirred by.”
This period of artistic evolution as far as the consumer is concerned takes between 70 and 100 years, by which time the artist is usually dead and buried.
The theory goes that most artists just have to live and accept the fact they will be unloved, unappreciated and almost invisible, living within the curious void of not knowing if there will ever be any public acceptance of their work.
If on top of that you’re a woman you have to cope with the additional burden, that until recently it was considered altogether unbecoming for a woman to become an artist. That negative theory kept going for most of the 19th and a large part of the 20th century. Today, visitors to major galleries can of course view some compelling work by women, but the numbers even now are miniscule compared to the volume of dominant male canvases. The Tate Gallery in London, for example, owns work by 316 women and over 2,600 by men.
Things of course have moved on apace, or have they? When I spoke to Nic Costa, owner of the Teckni arts gallery in Paphos, there was one eerie remembrance of the bad old days. Nic explained what happened only two years ago, when he organised a life class and the nude model was a male. “I had men phoning up telling me that this was totally unacceptable, that their wives, sisters, cousins, should not have been exposed to this sort of thing.
“To me this outdated mode of thinking made me realise that we haven’t yet reached that point here where liberal thinking and action are something to be encouraged.”
Despite this reaction, Nic who was trained in fine art at the Royal College in London, has continued his art, sculpture and photography workshops and as a fan of the nude himself, he has encouraged his students always to learn the basic, which has to be life drawing. Five women who have benefited from the creative time they have spent at Tekni will jointly launch themselves onto the commercial world this week, with an all-women exhibition. This, one hopes, will help alter the long held perception that women are somehow inferior to men when it comes to painting.
The women range in age from 18-45 and each has a unique approach to their work.
Stephanie Karghoti is the youngest in the group, and she has created some impressive high impact graphic collages.
Fiona Fraser offers us a lovely gentle Rackhamesque set of imagery with delicate paintings illustrating her children as characters from the world of fantasy.
Mary-Lynne Stadler delivers a brilliant colour and composition power punch with her large and highly evocative canvases; one senses in her work that she has only just scratched the surface of her brimming talent bank.
Ulla Drysdale shows on her canvases an innate sense of dazzling colour and balance. Her ‘Target’ pictures all work through the themes of fertility and the fact that the circle is indeed the symbol of infinity.
Kelly Norman obviously adores organic shapes and natural textures and here she takes her series of landscapes onto another highly creative level, one that focuses on the beauty that the inherent natural world always offers us.
One can hope that this all-female show will go some way to refuting the long-held prejudices and commercial imbalance that has existed for women artists. We need to reward these women by getting to know and appreciate their own individual style. After all, they do deserve a place both in our galleries and as living art on our living room wall. They are, after all, half of the art history of the future
Tekni Arts Gallery. Kinyras Street (just behind the law courts and down from the Moufflon bookshop) Tel 26-933 356, 99-958078
Email: [email protected]. The exhibition opens on June 4 at 7.30pm and will run until Saturday, June 11h. Opening hours will be from 10am-6pm daily.
