Joash Woodrow - critical reviews
SUMMARY OF RECENT REVIEWS
"...Joash Woodrow is the genius of late 20th century British art of whom almost no one has heard."
"Woodrows transformation of banality is as lyrical as Chagalls."
"That painterly intensity and high seriousnes links Woodrow to his Jewish contemporaries Kossoff, Auerbach, and Freud; what he now needs is a serious London exhibition to unravel the character and scope of his achievement."
Financial Times, November 5th 2005 (five star review - Ben Uri exhibition)
Jackie Wullschlager, chief art critic
...This revelatory show of fevered, highly coloured expressionist works - bold chalky outlines, distorted perspectives, rich, fat paint that transforms everyday landscapes into the lyrical and elemental - proclaim an unknown master, linked in unbroken tradition to mid - 20th century ~European Modernism: a personal vision triumphant.
Galleries Magazine, October 2005
Philip Vann. Critic, writer.
...He was a paradoxical figure: a highly cultured outsider (his visionary art has discernible roots in, for example, Jewish mysticism, and Chagall, Dadaism and Picasso) whose vastly variegated work is permeated by a wondrous freshness, a disciplined spontaneity, a savage delicacy.
Just as Lowry is known as the visual poet of Salford, and Eardley similarly of the Gorbals, so Woodrow is now being revealed as the surely unrivalled painter of of 20thC Leeds. Small, early gouaches evoke the brilliantly sombre intimacy of now demolished streets in inner city Chapeltown. He later portrayed local suburban allotments - their higgledy - piggledy poignancy of rickety sheds and white picket fences, with a haunting gaiety and an intuitively abstracted use of brushwork that is, curiously, at once infinitely luscious and sparing. In mysterious black contoured portraits of himself, friends and neighbours, in explosive yet refined flower still life's, in magically affectionate renditions of fallow creatures such as birds and goats, and in his views of Leeds, Woodrow's fertile, exploratory joy rings clear.
Writer and musician Danny Padmore remembers his time spent sitting as a model for Joash in 1965 - more >>
Nicholas Usherwood (June 2002) Writer, art critic, curator. Editor of Galleries magazine: previously exhibitions curator at the Royal Academy Of Art and Keeper of Exhibitions at the British Museum.
“…..a story which when told in full will, I believe come to be seen as marking the emergence of a previously unacknowledged and quite astonishingly powerful and creative intelligence in post – war British art.
….the overriding sensation is of the entirely distinctive and individual ‘voice’ that emerges out of each and every work.
….this is no isolated eccentric but, rather, an artist who knew exactly what he was after and, when he found it, retreated into a self – imposed and intensely painful imaginative exile in order to explore it without disturbance, a world complete and entire in itself.”
Nicholas Usherwood (The Times newspaper, May 19, 2003.)
“It is very rare to discover a body of work that is so rich. I was knocked sideways when I first saw the paintings.”
John Russell Taylor. Art critic (The Times newspaper, May 19, 2003.)
“….from what we can see of the examples already released this elected isolation from the art world seems to have done him nothing but good, artistically speaking.
…..landscapes in bright colours that suggest, perhaps, classic German Expressionism; and bold, voracious-looking semi – abstracts that appear to parallel in two dimensions the work Eduardo Paolozzi was doing at about the same time in three. One cannot help wondering whether, if he had stayed connected, Woodrow would have turned out half so original and unpredictable.”
Phillip Vann (July 2004) Author of numerous catalogue essays on modern British and European painters and sculptors. Regular contributor to ‘RA’, ‘The Economist’, etc.
Recent books include a monograph on the artist Dora Holzhandler and ‘Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century’.
“At the first Joash Woodrow exhibition in Harrogate in May 2002, I recall the sensation of magical discovery that here was an artist of exceptional talent.
…... the tremendous scope of his work was at once clear, and the recently-published book on the artist has helped clarify for me the many facets, and the essential nature, of his gift.
……picket-fenced allotments and industrial buildings – which seem to shimmer and vibrate with a rare and poignant poetry; painted and collaged art book pages which display a delightfully original, most cultivated wit; a few assemblages of found objects whose bare simplicity haunts and enchants.
One thing is clear: Woodrow’s unique voice – delicate, quizzical, elusive, full of oblique humour yet somehow impressively self-assured – runs through all that he painted, made and drew.”
Derrick Greaves (extract from a letter to Nicholas Usherwood, January 2004).
Painter and printmaker
“Many of the paintings are, of course, unquestionable triumphs and many of them hint at deep sensitivities even though one would think that the oversized brushes in such optimistic attack would seem to preclude such subtleties”
Glyn Hughes (August 2004) Writer, poet and playwright. Published numerous novels and several collections of poetry. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize.
“When I saw them, in Leeds City Art Gallery and at 108 Fine Art, what swept me away, besides the constant excitement and dash – it never seemed to have deserted him throughout his eccentric life – was the visionary brilliance. There was something akin to Van Gogh, in that each picture gave one the sensation of having scales removed from ones eyes; of seeing for the first time (even if it occurs time after time, in picture after picture) the world in its beauty, as it truly is.
...and some of that output is likely to stand with the best of English art of the past century.
There was perfection without adulteration, and if he had not been so totally removed from the Art Scene, by his nature and especially his inability to face rejection, he could not have achieved it.”
Danny Padmore (October 2004) Writer and musician. Joash painted three portraits of Danny circa 1965
“In the quiet intimacy of our sessions together al l those years ago, I felt, however instinctively, something real and meaningful. Amidst the superficiality of my own young and foolish student days, the brief meeting with Joash represented a signpost nudging me in the direction of a more honest, open and committed path.”
Commenting on Joash’s ‘Images of Leeds’ exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery.
“...I was stunned into silence. Prosaic scenes of factories, warehouses, garden sheds and allotments were bathed in a translucent Mediterranean kind of light, magically transforming the mundane subject matter into items of rare poetic beauty. In some ways you felt inclined to believe the canvas had been lit from behind, such was the brilliance and power of Joash’s colour.
The apparent primitive, child-like boldness of design and colour could not disguise the underlying sense of sophistication and technique in the works. It was as if Joash had to some extent, put to one side, or perhaps relegated, his considerable learning and technique in order to free the work. The power and luminous intensity seemed to come from his “unlearning”.
Award winning novelist and poet reviews the September 2004 exhibition - more >>
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