Echoing Green
Karsten Schubert London, Room 2
44 Lexington Street London W1F 0LW
16 July – 13 August 2021
Echoing Green is a two part exhibition, please click here to view part two.
“I stare at these growing treasures for hours at a time... noting them shivering in a breeze, their opening petals with every fraction of a degree of warmth, to almost see them push up from below.”
Extracts from the catalogue text and haiku poems
written by Rachel Spence.
Petals. Branches. Leaves. A concise, mysterious slab of blue sliced by an ochre band like the ghost of a fresco flaking off an ancient wall. The calligraphy of line, colour, arabesque flows and stutters across the surface. Barely a shadow. As vital as a teenager dancing alone in her bedroom; as frail as an elderly lady making her daily pilgrimage across her garden. These rituals all the more precious because they are unwitnessed. Neither rehearsal nor performance. Simply life at its most essential, hovering between blossom and decay.
Buds, 2020
oil on canvas, 90.3 × 150.5 cm
‘I paint intuitively,’ she says, her voice as shy as one of the buds she has captured on the verge of opening. Attentive viewers differ. Take Echoing Green (2019), a diptych inhabited by an airy, undulating tangle of weeping birch and roses that arcs and swoops across a surface whose washed grey, dusty sand and sea blue suggest the timeworn hide of a medieval Tuscan church. But Verity troubles this Mediterranean idyll with enigmatic intruders. The sky-blue rectangle striped with honey bands could have migrated from a tiled wall in a sunlit kitchen. And what of those ice-white panels shadowed by fluctuating sprays of stony-grey leaves? These spectral interlopers mean that the radiant botanical explosions above them have never looked brighter or more vulnerable.
Echoing Green, 2019
oil on canvas, 87.3 × 220.6 cm
From Above, 2020
oil on canvas, 90.5 × 120.5 cm
Verity too plays with time. On the one hand she could not be more rooted in the linear evolution of her world, spending hours, days, months in her garden, watching its flora unfold through its ordained cycle. ‘Essence of the place is change within a structure’, she writes in the journal she kept of her year’s residency at the Garden Museum in London, during which she spent day after day in the garden designed in memory of John Tradescant, father and son. ‘Unity of place’, she continues, ‘Things move very quickly, fleetingly, barely noticeably. How to respond?’ .
Remembered Light, 2019
oil on canvas, 90.2 × 150.6 cm
These are threshold blossoms, always on the verge of becoming other than they are: withering, swelling, floating, toppling.
This is Plenty, 2020
oil on canvas, 90.5 × 120.5 cm
Hinge days, hovering
between seasons, when summer
looms, we look elsewhere
Yet Verity is no flower painter. Her craft has little to do with the tradition that emanated from the great Dutch seventeenth- century masters who captured their vanitas of blooms with such glossy, majestic realism.
When we talk in her studio, behind us sprigs of weeping birch and holly surge and tumble spikily from jam jars, their leaves crisp and blackened. The plants may be dead, but this was never a study for a still life. Nothing in a Verity painting is ever motionless. The plumbago in Ponder brightens to burning azure and fades to snow-flecked cerulean before our eyes. How Verity achieves this sense of movement – birth, growth, blossom, decay, four seasons on a single surface – with such an economy of subject is what makes her a truly contemporary painter.
Ponder (Plumbago), 2020
oil on canvas, 90.5 × 150.5 cm
On one level then a painting such as Ponder (Plumbago) (2020) could be a response to Pablo Picasso calling for pictures so real you could ‘drive a nail’ through them. As the blue kernels of Verity’s flowers spark, flutter and tinkle across the surface, their fierce yet gentle retinal cleansing so intimate and familiar, would you even need to look out of the window to see the plant itself? Yes, because nature is its own raison d’être. But the real plumbago will be forever entwined with the painted image in your mind’s eye.
Later that Summer, 2019
oil on canvas, 90.2 × 150.4 cm
Calico white, frayed
unravelling, tomorrow
over, unready
Charlotte Verity: Painting as a Matter of Urgency, conversation with Tess Moldan published in Ocula Magazine, 14 July 2021
Please visit Karsten Schubert London website for further information
For appointments to visit the gallery between the hours of 11am and 6pm Monday to Friday please use this link or call 020 7734 900