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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Glen Baxter
Art Exhibition
Verdict: Subtly undermining comedy
Glen Baxter's new London exhibition shows a selection of his recent work. His area is gentle and subversive comedy, combined with fabulous line and colour.
'"I've assigned two men to remove the offending falafel" reassured Sven'.
'Jim was keeping an eye on the third aubergine'.
The first caption comes with a dramatic drawing of the Indian Army in action, discarding a bulbous falafel. It was the Count Arthur Strong's least favourite food in Count Arthur Strong's Forgotten Egypt, and the Count and Glen Baxter share similar territory. It's a highly perverted recollection of the 1950s and before, with Biggles grappling manfully with the Hun, or in Jim (above)'s case, watching out for a renegade aubergine on the wing-tip.
Glen Baxter's drawings feature reassuring 1950s dads, in plus-fours and worse; adult schoolboys from Tom Brown's Schooldays; art-loving, though critical, cowboys (looking at a mural of daisies: 'The critics spotted the bogus Rothko almost immediately'); cowboys with a keen knowledge of literary structuralism ('"We don't hold with no Derrida round here, Stranger" Warned the Librarian'); men and women with pipes. It's Boy's Own, Billy Bunter, Rupert Bear, Arthur Rackham, TinTin, Roy Lichtenstein mixed into a sinister melange, with captions going in an altogether different direction.
17 pictures are hung, one about 5' x 4'; the rest at 77 x 56.5 cm; and a portfolio of 6 more. They're wax crayon and ink on rough-edged heavy watercolour paper. Glen Baxter uses strong black border on the page to define a painting area pretty much to the Golden Section - the same width-to-height proportion used in classic cinema (Academy Ratio). There's a strong feeling of the cinema and an even more intense theatrical feel about the images. Each has the sense of a still from action that's in mid flow - and the production would be comfortably in the Twilight Zone.
Glen Baxter's colours glow. There's glorious craft behind the seeming simplicity of the images. Backgrounds, for example, have real touchability. It's as if the texture of wall and tree would scratch the hand. He'll mix the expected range of soft pastel shades with sudden electric bursts of colour - vivid yellows, reds and green, which make the characters leap from their surroundings. In others, the people almost blend to their rooms and prairies. It's the work of a master colourist, easily able to compete with Renaissance painters in the understanding of how to make technique bring out the precise intended effect on the viewer.
Glen Baxter was born in 1944; his dad was a welder. He studied and Leeds College of Art. He's had major exhibitions throughout the world, and books of his drawings include Blizzards of Tweed, Jodhpurs in the Quantocks, and The Billiard Table Murders
His first major exhibition was at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1980. Po-paced punters at this were uncertain whether to laugh, but one suddenly did, and the artist's career soared. Sly digs perhaps at the ICA's perplexed Guardian-loving clientele include 'Angus knew precisely what to do with the Tofu platter', and 'The wearing of corduroy in the immediate vicinty of Chetworth Manor could often lead to unpleasantness'.
The glut of ironically-captioned bizarrely-drawn greetings cards was founded solely on Baxter's work, just as Beryl Cook launched a thousand fat-lady copyists. Glen Baxter's work is unique, but he's in a family with a distinguished tradition of British artists subverting previously blameless areas: Ronald Searle (demonic schoolgirls, St Trinians), Gerald Hoffnung (orchestras), William Heath Robinson (machinery), Bill Tidy (The Cloggies, northern clog-dancers), and the fractionally gentler Norman Thelwell (Shetland ponies).
These pictures are from approximately 1983 to 2003, the majority recent. It's deftly up-to-date: some may find '"Folks round here don't take too kindly to Irony, Young Feller!" Warned Belinda', made-to-measure for a nominally Labour Government waging colonial war.
At 60, Glen Baxter is producing some of his most original and technically accomplished work. What a relief - we need him more than ever.
Credits: Artist - Glen Baxter. Flowers Central - Francis Burrows
END
John Park
reviewed Tuesday 18 May 04 / Flowers Central
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
