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| Creative Art Gallery |
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When you enter the gallery it is a surprise and a delight to experience the elegance and the sophisticated yet comfortable environment. The Creative Art Gallery is housed in a beautifully renovated old building on Oxford Street in Woodstock, complete with exposed beams and interesting, uneven proportions. While it is relatively small, it was certainly not crowded, and space was easily found to stand back from the work to appreciate it properly.
The ethos of the gallery seems to one of quality, exhibiting interesting and thought-provoking work, instead of the sentimental, un-engaging soft-focus skyscapes, etc. that are often the norm in provincial towns. So on first impressions, instead of your heart sinking into an insipid sea of mediocrity, your spirits are lifted, you feel intrigued and engaged. You feel the things that most people would want to feel when looking at artwork.
The gallery provides a strong platform for Oxfordshire artists too, whose work is immediately qualified by the context of exhibiting in the same gallery as such famous artists as Eric Gill (1882-1940) for instance, whose fascinating retrospective was exhibited from November to December of last year. It was an unusually large exhibition of Woodblock Engravings by the controversial artist, many of which are rare early proofs, signed by Gill himself. One biographer said about the artist, “Gill emerged as one of the twentieth century's strangest and most original controversialists, a sometimes infuriating, always arresting spokesman for man's continuing need of God in an increasingly materialistic civilization, and for intellectual vigour in an age of encroaching triviality.”
The exhibition covered a wide selection of Gill’s religious subject matter including some of his more risqué pieces, ranging in price from £65 to £3000. Alongside Gill the exhibition also includes three Welsh slate alphabets cut by the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, whose original founder David Kindersley was an apprentice in Gill’s workshop. Other works by new artists and sculptors included Paul Mortimer, sculptor; Tom Kemp, artist and calligrapher; Tom Clark, sculptor; Bernard Johnson, sculptor and Emma Maiden, sculptor.
The exhibition “A Chip off the Block’ of Eric Gill Woodblock Engravings and new work by other artists and sculptors inspired by the Gill tradition was open from Saturday 22nd November - Sunday 7th December 2008. For current exhibitions, visit the Gallery’s website.
Reviewed by Kieran Stiles |
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