Discount at Red Box Gallery
Dec 8 2006 By The Journal
Red Box Gallery is pleased to offer 10% off for Culture Club members for two weeks from December 11 to 22, 2006. If you are looking for a really special and original gift this Christmas, why not go along and have a look?
`Sea', paintings and drawings by Virginia Bodman and Robert Soden is showing at Red Box Gallery until January 12, 2007
This current show at Red Box Gallery is dramatic and varied. The main gallery provides a spectacular opportunity for four huge canvases by Virginia Bodman to be shown together, while elsewhere Robert Soden's coastal watercolours and prints are shown against a more intimate backdrop.
Robert describes himself as "a painter of contemporary themes in the tradition of Cotman, Girton and Turner". He works entirely out of doors. Close study of the coastal subjects allows him to observe the weather at it's most volatile. Bob Johnson, the Tyne Tees weatherman said: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
"Robert Soden has done something; he has captured the colours and the landscapes of our Great British weather."
The paintings in this exhibition allow us to enjoy the magnificent skies that can be seen off the coasts of the North-East, Suffolk, Somerset and East Sussex.
Virginia Bodman's work responds to the physicality and presence of the sea. Three of the four works on show at the Red Box Gallery are based on charcoal rubbings that she made directly onto canvas from wave formations left by the receding sea on the beaches at Spittal, near Berwick-on-Tweed and The Bents, Sunderland. These rubbings or traces are later developed in the studio. In the work `Seapieces' she introduces elements of painting including coloured panels and painted images of seaweed and fruit. In the painting `Beach', keepsakes from a day spent by the sea are closely observed and are given new spatial contexts.
Here then are two complementary points of view. Robert shows us the grandeur of the bigger picture, albeit on a small scale, and Virginia, whose initial contact with the sea is more intimate, presents us with dramatic, enveloping forms developed from the energy and potential of the natural world.
Red Box Gallery is at St Nicholas Chare, Newcastle, NE1 1RJ and is open from 10am to 4pm Tuesday to Thursday. Access is via Red Box intercom at gated entrance to the left of the Old Post Office building, opposite the West door of St Nicholas Cathedral. For more information please call (0191) 245-7121 or email sarah.furniss@redboxgallery.com
Red Box Gallery is part of the Own Art Scheme. For more information please visit www.artscouncil.org.uk/ownart
