A view across the spiral

Victor Pasmore: The quiet river:the Thames at Chiswick

  1943-4

I love this painting, and have had a postcard for many years.  I suspect that I bought it on my first visit to the Tate Gallery in the late 60s.  Victor Pasmore is an artist whose work entranced me all those years ago.  I was attracted both by the early figurative work, and by the abstract paintings.  The power of his compositions combined with a kind of quiet poetic appeal which somehow can also be found in his sculptural work.  I even found, and find it in the Apollo Pavillion - no matter that it spent so long decorated with graffiti! 

I was delighted when I found that one of my favourite venues was to have an exhibition of Victor Pasmore's work.  I have a view of one's progress through life as a kind of up a spiral - rather like walking up Frank Lloyd Wright's Manhattan Guggenheim - so that we can look back across in memory at various events and influences.  I also think that I believe that our taste during our formative years stay on as something special, and if not disturbed by subsequent more informed or experienced scrutiny, remaining as core influence.

So, it is always with a kind of nervous anticipation that I go to exhibitions of work by those early artistic 'crushes' of mine.  But I need not have worried.  I knew that the late spray paint works would still be as powerful for me because I have encountered them over the years - too rarely for my liking.

Victor Pasmore: Untitled, 1992

In the Artist's House gallery at Roche Court (open by appointment) there are also prints, which with my newly acquired specific interest in printmaking I was eager to see.

Victor Pasmore: Points of Contact, Transformations No.1,  Edition 5 of 60

I was particularly apprehensive about seeing the three dimensional work and the work on plywood because such pieces do not always age well.  Plastics used in the last century have not always worn well.  And the materiality too often then - for me, at least - gets in the way of full appreciation.  These are occasions when I would deploy a magic wish: the desire to know how the work would appear at the time of making.

Well, once more I was delighted.  Indeed given my recent more sideways-directed thoughts on three dimensional wall-mounted work, the pieces were inspirational.

Victor Pasmore: Abstract in White, Black and Maroon,  1962

And if this were not more than enough to keep the creative juices bubbling; on our way out of the Artist's House gallery we met Laura Ellen Bacon busy up a ladder weaving part of her upcoming exhibition.  We were so wowed by her fabulous work Growth Tip at the Sainsbury Centre basketry exhibition in Spring this year.  Already there is so much to look forward to in 2012.