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JON SCHUELER - SING BLUES IN GREY 

An exhibition of thirty paintings and watercolours from the 1970s and 1980s by Jon Schueler of Scottish skies.

In The Drawing Schools at Eton College, 28th September - 5th November

A seminal show of 30 abstract skyscapes by the critically acclaimed American artist Jon Schueler (1916-1992) who served as a navigator on a US Airforce B-17 bomber in World War II. The artist’s remarkable war experience, flying in the Plexiglass nose of the plane, fed a lifelong ambition to capture from memory the evocative and fleeting moods of the sky on canvas …

JON SCHUELER  AMERICAN & SCOTTISH PAINTINGS, 1956-1990

To coincide with the exhibition 'Sing Blues in Grey' at Eton College, we present a group of paintings by Jon Schueler, painted between 1956 and 1990.

At 16 Savile Row, London W1S 3PL, 29^th September - 27^th October

Jon Schueler was one of the second generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, a group of artists who confirmed New York's place at the very centre of the art world. In the 1950's, along with fellow artists like Joan Mitchell, Norman Bluhm, Mark Rothko and Franz Kline, he ate most nights at the Cedar Street Tavern, and like them he did battle with the blank canvas, baring his soul and committing his feelings to it with honesty, sensitivity and integrity …

In ‘The Art of Richard Eurich’ Andrew Lambirth wrote of Eurich that “His later nudes, whether in bathroom or on beach, are moving testament to his profound humanism.”

In many ways they can be compared to Pierre Bonnard’s series of beautiful and deeply touching ‘Intimiste’ paintings of his wife Marthe, in the bathroom or at her dressing table, depicted tenderly in off-guarded moments. But so often with Eurich there is an irrepressible quirkiness, a sense of mischief and of gentle humour. Indeed as Lambirth writes elsewhere: “There is always more to Eurich’s work than at first meets the eye.”

In ‘The shower bath, c.1985’ the glimpse in the mirror of a man in a vest (but without underpants) hints at a casual domesticity and ordinary everyday-ness. The hard lines of the shower-bath cubicle contrast with the curves of the naked bodies, and there’s a pleasing, gentle tone of sexuality that stops delicately short of outright ‘sexiness’.

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In 1934, at the age of just 31, Reginald Brill became Head of Kingston School of Art and in the same year embarked upon an ambitious series of paintings that he originally titled ‘The Martyrdom of Man’. As his teaching and administrative duties increased, and the time he could devote to his own art decreased, he came to describe it as ‘The Plan’ but it remained central to his life’s work. Imbued with a humanity and empathy for the lives of others, Brill had an indefatigable interest in the everyday lives of working people, often captured of-guard. Just the titles of his works are revealing: ‘Have you heard this one?’ as three old men on a park bench exchange fruity stories; ‘Let me tell you’ where a smaller man jabs his finger for emphasis at his much larger companion; ‘Men staring down a manhole’ which needs no explanation, but which reveals Brill’s purely English sensibility.

Brill liked to paint on a large scale – Chris Beetles comments on their unique combination of monumentality and homeliness - and his drawings are often of an unusually large size. ‘Bell Ringers, Lavenham Church’, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1963, is a technical tour de force, with Brill displaying his absolute mastery of pen and ink.  

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We held our first exhibition of Michael Taylor’s paintings in our gallery in Cork Street back in 2006, and it proved such a success that we returned to Michael’s studio later that year for further ex-catalogue works. His stunning composition, ‘Attic Room, 1997’ was one of the paintings we came across, and it sold immediately. We are delighted to have just re-acquired it.

Until fairly recently Michael’s compositions were heavily influenced by the attic room in which he painted – the slanting eaves and beams above, the cracked floorboards with their suggestion of light below, the uneven and flaking whitewashed walls. And within these intimate confines his strange and highly personal iconography would gain in resonance. ‘Attic room, 1997’ is a painting of huge complexity, defying the natural laws but with a perspective all of its own as the central forms intertwine and behind them the vertiginous staircase climbs in a not entirely logical manner up to the attic.

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We are delighted to have represented Duncan McCormick for the past year, an artist whose paintings are enjoying a great surge in popularity in his mid 40s. Duncan makes paintings that are pointedly and deliberately upbeat and optimistic. His chosen subjects are, as he says, “like long-remembered daydreams”: memories of childhood holidays at Salcombe Bay on the Devon coast become more redolent of California and the Mediterranean; Scottish mountain landscapes under snow are re-imagined as Alpine scenery; and the sun always shines as it often seems to in people's childhood reminiscences - those blue remembered hills, the land of lost content etc from A E Housman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’.

Coincidentally (I think) Duncan now lives and paints in rural isolation in North Shropshire. These paintings were originally part of McCormick’s conscious response to the onset of Covid and lockdown. Having married and become a father of twins, he and his wife had moved from the London suburbs to rural North Shropshire. With his isolation redoubled by the outbreak of Covid, his subject-matter moved from complex narratives, laden with symbolism, to more simplistic and deliberately escapist scenes, and instead of the oil paints that he had applied in numerous layers he sought the immediacy of painting in acrylics.

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Richard Eurich has at various times been compared to both Giorgio Morandi and the Italian Modernists, and to Franz Radziwill and the German ‘magic realists’. His paintings often appear disarmingly simple, and are imbued with a delicate and highly personalised sense of mystery and wonder, but they remain quintessentially English.

We are delighted to exhibit a group of 25 oil paintings by Richard Eurich, including a group of charmingly eccentric small portraits, two of his New Forest scenes, and a number of the distinctive coastal and beach scenes for which he is best known.