Art & Exhibitions

John Mitchell exhibition in Penzance (preview)

29th May 2008

An artist who has been making art for almost half a century, since he was a painting student at Kingston College of Art in the late 1950s, John Mitchell, who has been living and working in Newlyn for five years, makes a welcome return to Penwith's exhibition scene with the collection of his new work in Trereife Gallery.

No stranger to this part of the world, the "60s Space Cowboy", a friend of Terry Frost and one who contributed the catalogue entry for Peter Ward's retrospective held in the Penwith Galleries in 1997, as well as exhibiting his own work in this country and abroad from Camden Arts Centre, London, and the University of Cardiff to the Gallerie Swart, Amsterdam, and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, he has pursued a long career in art education.

An artist whose works are now part of such public collections as that of Leeds City Art Gallery and the Arts Council of Great Britain, he has held two major fellowships: the Gregory Fellowship at Leeds University, 1979-81, and the Senior Research Fellowship at Cardiff College of Art, 1983-86.

Since the mid-1960s he has held senior teaching posts at Coventry College of Art, at Birmingham Polytechnic, with the last, prior to his retirement in 2003, being that of Subject Leader for Painting at Wimbledon School of Art.

While many will be puzzled by the works he is presenting here, lovers of applied mathematics will be entranced by them.

Works that stem from a nine-inch high, painted jelutong, wall mounted object, an "asymmetrical frustum", he made back in 1980, their creation centres around the series of numbers given to us by the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers: as in 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on.

He uses it, as he says, "as a means of deciding, or more precisely, avoiding, subjective choices on such things as size and proportion."

But the puzzlement only begins there. With the Fibonacci series he combines advice from the Johnsian sketch book - "take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it", plus a passage from Molloy by Samuel Beckett: "I had four ways of wearing my shirt. Front to front right side out, front to front inside out, back to front right side out, back to front inside out" as procedural method.

Taken together, as John Mitchell adds, "this amounts to asking the question - what if? I make it flat, round, positive, negative, coloured, floor mounted, wall mounted, in wax, in wood, in bronze, drawn, painted, upside down, back to front, inside out?....ad infinitum."

Difficult to come to terms with, perhaps: Challenging, enigmatic and thought-provoking, whether made in paint or in bronze, the new works he is presenting here, pass the first test in mathematics as laid down by the British mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy, which should surely also be the first test in art, "Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics." Or ugly art?

John Mitchell's "asymmetrical frustums", can be seen in Trereife Gallery, Newlyn, Penzance, until June 13.

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