joseph scissorhands: Swinging London

Sunday 13 June 2021

Swinging London

Peter Blake - Roxy Roxy, 1965-1983

I really like Pop Art. It encapsulates a particular time period, and celebrates aspects of popular culture that the artists who created it engaged with when younger, in the infancy of their careers. We all identify with aspects of Pop (even if we don't particularly like the art of the movement) - the popular music, film, and television stars, and printed ephemera which shaped our youth, no matter which age we grew up in. It is an excercise in nostalgia, and that is exactly what I found, (and appreciated) in this small survey of Swinging London in the 1960s. I certainly identified with many elements of the artworks in this small show of artists who came to prominence in that "decade that went Pop!". It was a clear case of recognition/identification. My newer works have incorporated spots/circles, like those seen below in the works here of Richard Smith, Howard Hodgkin, and also the Ben-day dots of Gerald Laing's paintings which I employ in my use of certain found papers. I have also near exclusively been using endless sheets of gold leaf as seen here in Peter Blake's Gold Painting. Most of the work here seemed familiar stylistically. A complete unknown and real revelation to me though were Richard Smith's rather splendid, large, hand-made collages made from paper pulp which did deserve a room to themselves. Though not strictly of the "Swinging London" era of the 1960s, (having been created in the 1980s), I found their complex, layered, zig-zag shapes across the picture plane to be really dynamic, emphasised through Smith's choice of bold colours. They are a part of Smith's oeuvre that demands further investigation. They recall the vibrant patterns and rhythms of Francis Davison's collages (here).