Encounters at the Eagle Gallery

We have an interesing exhibition opening at the Eagle Gallery tomorrow. Encounters features work by members which have been created as a response to works by well-known artists. Great for knocking you out of your comfort zone and into a different groove! As well as creating a work for the exhibition (it certainly knocked me out of my zone!) I also designed the poster (see below).

So... what did I come up with? After a lot of thought I decided to take a look at one of my favourite artists, Chagall, because I share his love of personal symbolism, unreal spatial juxtapositions and use of shapes and geometry to carve up the canvas. It wasn't hard to pick his 'I and the Village'. Running with the theme and the idea of strong attachment to place, I came up with something filled with my own personal symbolism, I and the Hill:

I and the Hill © Sue Wookey

We have each been asked to write a piece to go on the wall with our artwork, explaining why we have connected with it:

Painted the year after Chagall came to Paris, I and the Village is his nostalgically symbolic response to his childhood in a Hasidic community outside Vitebsk. It is painted in his personalized version of Cubism. "For the Cubists," Chagall said, "a painting was a surface covered with forms in a certain order. For me a painting is a surface covered with representations of things... in which logic and illustration have no importance."

I chose I and the Village because my own work also uses symbolism and geometry to reveal the inner life below the surface of the ordinary world. So my response, I and the Hill, is also a deeply symbolic reaction - in my case to the Chiltern Hills which I’ve grown up amongst and which are a constant source of artistic inspiration for me. I’ve used personal symbols and my love of harmonious shapes and circles to weave my own ‘surface covered with representations of things’.

19 July - 16 August

Encounters

The Eagle Gallery

101 Castle Road

Bedford MK40 3QP