Explore The Beautiful Hidden Artistry In Buildings And Portraits

It is embedded in our nature to desire dear moments never pass or to recklessly indulge in nostalgia. Immersed are we with the need to be remembered; to be cherished. From cave sketches, painted portraits, scenic paintings and photography: humanity never fails to utilise art to make themselves known. However, with a world that seems to never rest, a world brimming with people in a rush, halting time to admire the art behind each building on a street or a photo on display may not cross our busy minds. This feature explores the seeping of art into our everyday lives; from a space solely designed for providing lavish painted backgrounds for West End theatres to how a still portrait photo is anything but still. Read more here in Explore The Beautiful Hidden Artistry In Buildings And Portraits.

This is an article taken from The Family and Community print issue from s/s2007

Unlikely Connections

The idea that everything and everybody is interlinked was no more apparent than when the .Cent team chose the location for our community cover shoot. In a café in Soho whilst meeting with Hugo Martinez (p.37) to discuss his contribution to this issue, the photographer Uli Weber dropped in to discuss the .Cent cover shoot. The connections soon became clear – Hugo’s background of showcasing graffiti works reminded Uli of a graffiti gallery in the West End, which happens to be one of the most unique locations to shoot in and, we soon discovered, was a location which Jo Phillips, the creative director of .Cent, had also previously worked in. The location was chosen. The Elms Lester’s Painting Rooms, one of the most hidden away family run galleries you could ever hope to find – and the perfect place to invite the .Cent family into.

History Of The Painting Rooms

Susana Brown: Mr. Elms Lester built the painting rooms over one hundred years ago. It’s an extraordinary structure, purpose built for scenic painting, which almost bankrupted Mr Lester. His extravagances didn’t stop at building the Painting Rooms either; once the extravagant ‘folly’ was completed to celebrate it’s opening on 14th February 1904, he hired the Savoy for the most extraordinary and lavish meal for hundreds of guests. Throughout its history the building has played host to icons of film and theatre; with visitors as diverse as Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.

Making It My Own

I took the building on in 1984 and since then have worked with one aim: to create a centre for applied fine arts. The two scenic painting studios on the first floor house, four electrically operated paint frames and until the dawn of digital technology were full of an eclectic mix of scenic artists painting backdrops for everything from Royal Shakespeare Company and English National Opera to cloths for advertising campaigns and pop-promos and tours.

Who Do The Rooms Attract?

The Elms Lester’s Painting Rooms have always attracted creative people who feel at ease in the relaxed, quirky atmosphere of the building. It really is an anomaly situated right in the middle of the West End. I run the gallery and studios with my partner Fiona and my eldest two sons also work in the building, so it is a real family affair. One of the highlights in my 11 year old son’s life was watching Rolf Harris paint his backdrop for his Albert Hall show.

Image by No Swan So Fine

Bringing Back Bukowski

In the gallery at Elms Lester’s Painting Rooms, I have built a reputation for staging diverse and novel exhibitions, often focusing on subcultures and genres outside of the mainstream. In 1986 we staged the only ever multimedia exhibition celebrating the life and works of the American realist writer, Charles Bukowski. As with so many of the projects we have undertaken this was a very organic process – I bought a psychedelic art book at a book fair from a book dealer called ‘Beatbooks’, who introduced me to the writings of Bukowski. I decided to contact Bukowski’s widow and after many long tequila fuelled (on her part) conversations, a large box arrived with the contents of his desk from his bottle opener to his spectacles. The exhibition included memorabilia, rare documentaries, scores of family photographs from Linda Bukowski’s albums and we even staged plays of two short stories, with a cast of actors who flew in from Hollywood. We made great friends with Linda and stayed with her in Bukowski’s house in San Pedro in Hollywood.

Representing Artists

For the last 16 years I have been working with some of the finest urban/street artists from London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, Australia etc. including icons such as STASH, FUTURA AND DELTA. For eleven years, I couldn’t sell a single painting by these ‘urban artists’ then 5 years ago they started to sell. Today, I represent thirteen international artists, including probably the most exciting emerging British artist, Adam Neate.

Over the years, in addition to the thousands of scenic artists who have worked here, many exhibiting artists have spent periods of time painting in the historic painting studios under the ten metres high glass roof. Brooklyn based graffiti master STASH has been here painting a huge ‘wildstyle’ canvas, which was cut into pieces and individually framed as part of our landmark exhibition “ICYGRAPE no.1924” in 2004.

In October and November last year the legendary Phil Frost came here painting for three weeks prior to and during his first UK one-man show called ‘Seeing is Believing’. Phil literally lived and breathed the Painting Rooms, sleeping on the couch in the office, and sharing Indian takeaways with us out in the Painting Rooms. The atmosphere at Elms Lesters can be credited to the unique way we work, inviting artists in as a part of our family and offering a secluded creative hideaway within the centre of the West End.

The Elms Lesters Community

Elms Lesters was a home away from home for me when I left the National Theatre’s scenic studios to become a freelance artist. I have many fond memories of the place, the people, the long conversations and the laughter. I remember Paul playing me Charles Bukowski tapes late into the evening to keep me company on a long job, his son practising on his drum kit on the landing and there always being a warm atmosphere. I have painted there, shown my paintings there and attended exhibitions of painting there.

Elm Lesters painting rooms is a living museum; a rich patina has been painted, splattered and sprayed on to its interior walls and surfaces. Built in 1904 to service the West End theatres it retains its original features including its free standing stoves to heat and dry the freshly painted cloths, wooden paint-frames and suspended floors and giant gas rings to cook rabbit skin size for priming. It is situated just off Cambridge Circus on the edge of Soho, a perfect location for coffee breaks in ‘Bar Italia’, lunch in China Town and a trip to the cinema at the end of a long days work.

My earliest encounter with a professional portrait photographer was at the age of four. Posed before a sky blue screen with my elder sister, we were smiling as broadly as we had been instructed; a hundred other children queuing in the school gym behind us to take their turns. I loathed the experience of the annual school photograph, a conveyor belt of forced smiles.

In contrast to this rigid format, Norman Parkinson’s photographs succeed in capturing children’s vivacity and energy, even in a moment of enforced quietude. In Parkinson’s 1967 photograph of the Guinness siblings, the young children have been stilled yet their energy and a sense of movement remains in the wisps of hair caught by the wind; Loel Guinness’s sideways glance and cheeky expression – as if he could dash away at any moment. The close cropping removes any distractions and the viewer is invited to focus entirely on the children’s faces to marvel at their close family resemblance.

Such animation was almost impossible to achieve in the early decades of photography. As a consequence of lengthy exposure times, sitters in early Victorian portraits were required to hold a fixed pose for some minutes, frequently resulting in a wooden expression. Moreover, early photographers tended to follow the conventions of Victorian portrait painting, in both the formal arrangement of figures and use of props and painted backdrops.

One of the first and most successful photographers to challenge this tradition and to create more adventurous narratives within portrait studies was Julia Margaret Cameron, who frequently posed her sitters as characters from literature and mythology. Her photograph of Hattie Campbell is one of several beautiful portraits Cameron made of Campbell in 1868, which Cameron variously titled ‘The Echo’, ‘The Vestal’, ‘The Dedication’ and ‘The Guardian Angel’. The angelic image of Hattie, her direct gaze and natural flowing hair, rarely seen in formal Victorian portraits, remains in the mind long after the eyes have turned elsewhere. While Cameron’s portraits of men primarily depict well-known figures of the period, the women and children she captured were often less famous, or entirely unknown. However, the ethereal beauty and spirit of these works ensures them historical longevity, regardless of the sitters’ status.

It is impossible to define the elements that create a memorable portrait, but my school photographs – all opportunities for spontaneity quashed by a mass production approach – cannot be great. Many portraits attain longevity not by virtue of their artistry but, rather, as a testament to the fame of the sitter. In my opinion, the most fascinating portraits are those that tell a story, be it real or imagined, biography or fairy tale.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Brian Hinton: Julia Margaret Cameron was born in Calcutta in 1815, to a family descended from French aristocracy, English adventurers and an Indian princess. She was tutored privately, partly by her grandmother in Versailles, and received a thorough grounding in the great painters of the Western tradition, whose influence is paramount in her photographs.

Painting by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron

When her husband retired to England, Mrs Cameron took part in Sunday afternoon soirees at his sister’s home, Little Holland House and it was here that she met the poet Alfred Tennyson and the painter G.F. Watts. Both were to prove mentors. Watts taught her how to create complex allegories in pictorial form. Tennyson persuaded her to move with her children near to his home in Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, and many of his poems were turned by her into visual images.

Indeed, it was at her home, Dimbola Lodge, that Mrs Cameron turned the chance gift of a camera by her son-in-law to a new career, using an old hen house as her studio and her coal hole as her dark room. She used her own servants, local children and celebrities drawn to visit Tennyson, as models and deliberately used soft focus to give a painterly quality to her photographic images. In 1875, she travelled to Ceylon with her family, to administer their tea estates and died four years later. It is said that her last word was “beautiful”, as her bed was taken outside, under the night sky.

Her work was rediscovered thanks to her great niece Virginia Woolf, who published a book of her photographs through the Hogarth Press. She has been reinvented as a feminist icon and there have been major retrospectives, in particular a major show which travelled from the National Portrait Gallery to the Getty, tying in with the first complete catalogue of her work. Julia’s former home, Dimbola Lodge, was saved from demolition in 1992 and is now a major gallery, hosting exhibitions by the likes of Linda McCartney, Lord Snowden and David Bailey and a museum to commemorate Julia’s life and work.

Of all of Mrs Cameron’s work, it is her portraits, of the famous and the beautiful, which have proved the most lasting and are an acknowledged influence on contemporary artists, from Bailey to Robert Mapplethorpe. Julian herself described her artistic credo in a sonnet, ‘On a Portrait’.

Genius and love have each fulfilled their part

And both unite with force and equal grace,

Whilst all that we love best, in classic art,

Is stamped forever on the immortal face.

Mrs Cameron prided herself on being not simply a portraitist, but an artist who dramatised her sitters, so that they represented virtues or emotional states or recreated scenes from the Bible and from classic literature. The photographs of young Hattie have titles like ‘The Guardian Angel’, ‘The Dedication’ and ‘The Echo’. In all of them Hattie stands upright, her long dark hair flowing behind her, dressed in white robes, to suggest purity – and with an unreadable expression, pensive, solemn and ethereal.

Portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron

Some scholars have tied the subject matter of this photograph to the classical myth – retold by Ovid – of the nymph Echo who distracted the goddess Hera from Zeus’s philandering, and was punished by having her voice removed, so that she can only echo the words of others. She clasps a hand to her breast, as if expressing her loss. All photographs, of course, are silent.

This is the one portrait of Hattie in which she gazes at the camera in full face, lit only by a shaft of sunlight and thus seeming to emerge from darkness. This suggests a living figure emerging briefly, like a ghost, from myth or history or oblivion. There is a beautiful contrast between Hattie’s dark hair and the dark fabric she cradles, and the chalk whiteness of her face and her dress. The image is like a pillar, with Hattie leaning slightly to the viewer’s right, balanced by the stillness of her hand and her hair which flows away behind her. Julia wished to ‘attest beauty’ and, in the portrait of this unknown young woman, she has achieved this to perfection.

To evoke emotion and to capture emotion; two fine artistry techniques used for centuries. An eternal manner of art that can go unnoticed due to its sheer involvement in our lives. The Elms Lester Painting rooms and the home of Julia Margaret Cameron remain a reminder of our architectural builds being more than simply bricks and how beautiful portraits, illustrated or captured, hold more than a frozen moment.

Susanna Brown is a writer, curator and educator. With broad knowledge of theories of photography and specific research in portraiture, exhibition making and fashion, Susanna presents lectures internationally on the history of photography. She is an author of 8 books and has contributed to thirteen others.

Brian Hinton is a poet, author and musicologist. He was honoured in the late Queen Elizabeth’s birthday honours in 2006 , with an MBE for services to the arts. He has published over thirty books, with the biggest selling title being the ‘Van Morrison Biography.’ ‘Brian has featured numerous times on both radio and television, as well as being the inspiration behind ‘Dr TCP,’ a character in Ian Sincalir’s novel, ‘Downriver.’

If you enjoyed reading Explore The Beautiful Hidden Artistry In Buildings And Portraits, then you may enjoy Painting with Musical Notes: A new breed

.Cent Magazine London. Luxury Mindset