Three Works Scarborough

Deeds Not Words.

The Blue Plaque went up above the North Yorks Art School space at 33 St. Nicholas Cliff today. It will be officially unveiled this Friday at 2.30pm. A corresponding exhibition at the site all about the Suffragettes will open this. Friday, too, between 2pm-5pm. Join us for drinks.

Gallery 3 was built to pay homage to my first space in Weymouth. I called it Three Works. It’s now a much needed store room, a very pretty one. We haven’t given up on exhibitions. We’re just coming up with a new way to do Three Works which will be paid for and supported by NYAS. Three Works never brought a penny in and was a lonely experience. NYAS is the opposite. The idea is that NYAS will pay for us to do art fairs and meet collectors and carry on with that elitest side of things… but these things take time.

There's just over 24 hours to enter the NYAS Postcard Open Call. We won't take any more entries after 11.59pm tomorrow (Friday 26 May). Packs are ready to be sent out on Monday and those taking part have until Monday 10 July to return their postcard(s) in the stamped addressed envelope included in your pack.

Winning submissions will be announced by Friday 28 July 2023. Up to 20 entries will go through to exhibition and a winner will be announced at the exhibition launch on Friday 4 August. All entries will be scanned and included on the NYAS website where the public will get to vote for their favourite postcard. A People's Choice winner will also be announced at the exhibition launch on Friday 4 August.

Good luck and thank you to everyone that has taken part in this competition. Enter now: https://www.nyartschool.org/opencall

There's a few days to go before our postcard competition closes on 26 May. We send out the postcards and here are a few we're ready to post the week commencing 29 May. Up to 20 postcards will go through to exhibition. They will be framed by NYAS and an overall winner will be announced on Friday 4 August at the opening event.

All postcards will be scanned and available to view on our website. The public will be invited to vote for their favourite and a people's choice winner will also be announced at the opening event.

Money raised so far has been ploughed into the building of our new shop at 33 St. Nicholas Cliff, Scarborough. The shop (opening this coming bank holiday) will sell prints of artwork created by NYAS students. Click the link to get involved: https://www.nyartschool.org/opencall

Three Works’ sister project NYAS is delighted to announce a new national art competition. The results will be displayed in an exhibition at NYAS this summer. For full details on what it's about and how to enter, visit: https://www.nyartschool.org/opencall

Suzy Babington’s exhibition at Three Works is open Tuesday-Sunday 10-4pm until 7 May.

** OPENING TONIGHT – SUZY BABINGTON**

Suzy's new untitled show is without text and it opens tonight at Three Works. Drinks 6–8pm.

Image: Will You Die Trying To Ascertain What You Desire?
Oil on canvas
140x140cm
2023

Texts are difficult and there's no satisfaction in them being used to go alongside Three Works exhibitions, (exhibition titles are something I've done away with, too - ghastly things) but here is one I wrote to accompany Suzy's second exhibition at Three Works. It appeared in Turps Banana magazine in 2018. I remember being asked to expand on it but I couldn't. It's meant to be read fast – Christopher Stephen Shaw.

With Suzy Babington, process is picture. Layering and building paint, creating areas that recede and spring forth; that block and give way. Babington is fearless in putting colour to work; laying down hues in rapid succession; knitting and blending and contorting colour on the trail of a composition that Babington thinks should be hard to undo. There are worm-holes too; tantalising glimpses into earlier stages of the painterly process that double as portals to distant climes. She uses oil paint exclusively, ignoring the rule about fat-over-lean and by allowing the mishaps and mistakes that invariably follow to find expression, Babington creates fault lines, cracks, blobby agglomerations upon, and next to which, passages of real control and painterly intelligence are built.

Babington thinks of her paintings as contraptions. Umbrellas feature regularly in her work, and umbrellas are contraptions – and when contraptions go wrong, as umbrellas often do on windy days, the results are comical and chaotic: think Buster Keaton and his generation of visual gag artists. They didn't need colour at all, of course. Like painting, those old films didn't need dialogue, either. As Norma Desmond crowed in a rare moment of lucidity: 'We didn't need talk, we had faces'. Bloodless faces composed of large, wandering theatrical eyes and overly-knitted, painted-on brows and twitchy noses and moustachioed mouths and lips pursed in fits of pique; coquettish faces; disapproving faces... exaggerated faces. Faces did the talking and so did bodies and limbs – limbs as animated contraptions going into battle with the never-alive: ladders, pianos, umbrellas, even paintings, those dead old things cinema had a new use for, like bashing the madcap over the head with. In cartoons stars materialise and birds circle when madcap characters receive blows to the head. Dorothy's concussion whisks her over the rainbow but Babington knows there's no place like home. Home is down here, defined by viscera and touch.

The cool mechanics of cinema, its white light and celluloid, is far from the hot colour and mud Babington uses to transport herself and her audience. Music adds fuel to the fire of these awake-dreams. Babington's paint is permeated with the R&D (rhythm and desire) brimming in classics like Love Come Down by Evelyn "Champagne" King, Got To Be Real by Cheryl Lynn and, of course, Bad Girls by Donna Summer. Babington can't keep still as she smears, squeezes and spreads paint as if it were cream cheese on crackers, or jam on rye. In her approach lies acceptance of a world that often stinks, a world that is silly and muddled and a bit trippy. A world where restraint, dignity, tradition and order is punctured by slapstick at every turn. Babington skips along the fault lines surveying the divide... and if oil and acrylic weren't so readily available, then it's as if s**t and sick, cream cheese and jam, and all sorts of other worldly secretions and substances, would have done. 'No fear' appears to be Babington's mantra in the studio and she isn't the least bit shy there. What she is in person is a different matter – a private matter – but when painting, Babington is confident, rude, rambunctious; qualities that, if not shot through with concentration, would leave her paintings untethered. Unlike Dorothy, whose dreams of escape are attainable only through the portal of slumber, Babington has access to a world of colour and imagination every time she visits her studio. And with her mixtape playing and an assortment of paints at the ready, she inhabits a space all her own and of her own making – a unique, rare, generous space – one, astonishingly, conjured up out of the endless corridors of grey matter that exist in her brain.

8 years of Three Works.

Suzy Babington opens this coming Friday with the 52nd Three Works exhibition.

Join us for Suzy's show this coming Friday. She's showing three new big paintings. Drinks served between 6–8pm.

Below top: Felix Bahret (from the 32nd Three Works exhibition at South Street, Scarborough).
Below bottom: Lee Sarah Rose Pritchard (from the 19th Three Works exhibition in our old Weymouth space on Trinity Street).

++CHANGE OF DATE++

Suzy Babington's exhibition at Three Works will take place next Friday 31 March (not Saturday as previously advertised). Join us for drinks between 6–8pm.

Also, the adjoining NYAS SHOP has been reconfigured... so there's that, too.

In the Three Works/ NYAS gallery. An exhibition by organiser Christopher Shaw until 26 Feb.

Victor Payares and Richard Meaghan's 2022 Three Works exhibitions have been uploaded to the archive (which is still under construction, but visible).

Exhibitions | Three Works A list of exhibitions that have appeared at Three Works since 2015.

It's the last weekend of Cuban-born, Berlin-based artist Victor Payares at Three Works. Victor tells me he'll be showing in London soon which might be of interest for fans of Victor's work in the UK. Thanks to all the visitors that came to see the exhibition.

A local perspective of Victor Payares's Three Works exhibition by NYAS artist Mike in the latest edition of the Yorkshire Times. Mike's an opera buff, ordinarily, but he's open minded about all sorts of other things. He tells me he makes a note or does a drawing of one beautiful thing he recognises every day. https://yorkshiretimes.co.uk/.../Three-Works--Victor-Payares

Images
Left: Three Works by Victor Payares.
Right: A View of Pompeii by Mike Tilling.

A few unpolished words and sentences the Three Works organiser wrote last night about Victor Payares' exhibition which opens tonight at Three Works. Please join us at the drinks reception between 6–8pm.

I first saw Victor’s work in 2016 when he was doing an MA at the Royal College of Art. His work was different then. Much tighter. Lots of tape-tearing to create torn tape effects. Small found objects stuck to the surface; a miniature Incredible Hulk half-buried in the thick grainy modelling paste Victor was using at the time.

The new pieces have an improvised quality and frustrate any sort of attempts at interpretation. They hardly seem to occupy our sphere of existence. They could be glimpses of life lived at the level of the microbe; of alien inner worlds or outer ones 2001: A Space Odyssey-style.

The paint is attractive and shiny; luxurious and toytown – a trip to Bond Street via the Young V&A. Like plastic to a flame – first hard, then liquid, then hard again. Transformed and without direction or digestible shape, they are a riot of colour – a darting dragonfly caught suddenly in the hot, quick tongue of some amphibious slimeball.

The paint is not poured on and splatterings are contained. These are not mere bursts of energy. To be sure, there are moments of quick-bodied movements where paint is disturbed. There are scars and smears... but there are quiet moments, too. Head tilted at the broken links and non sequiturs. Careful daubs from the wrist and fingers.

Victor’s work hangs on a morning glow sort of colour. He chose it. Light but yellow enough to expose the white patches of paint. The hang is centralised and symmetrical, each work measuring 200x180cm. In a space as hermetically sealed as Three Works, it all equates to an assault on the senses.

Three large paintings by Victor Payares arrived in Scarborough (from Berlin) today. I've just taken this detail on my iPhone.

Three Works by Victor Payares opens at Three Works next Friday (21 October). Please join us for drinks between 6–8pm. www.threeworks.org

Coming 21 October: Large paintings by Cuban-born, Berlin-based artist Victor Payares. It's Victor's second appearance at Three Works after first showing alongside James Collins and Deme Georghiou in 2016.

Hope you can join us.
www.threeworks.org

Newsprint 2 at NYAS closes this coming Sunday 2 October. Thanks to everyone that came along to see the exhibition and thanks to all the artists that took part.

The image is taken in Room 2. It features the work of L-R: Clive Birnie (The Fleshmaker and Her Wife); Matilda A. Bevan (Hay 1922 Bedford); Jane Greening (The Discovery); Linda Polkowski (The Agony in Stony Places); Mary Hall (A Matter of Perspective); Linda Martin (Ferris); Nigel Fairbrother (The Typist); Andrew Fletcher (Aphrodite By The Old Harbour); Julia Turner (Kandinsky as a Starting Point 2).

Newsprint Open 2 starts tomorrow - Friday 12 August / Drinks reception 6–8pm - in the NYAS/Three Works galleries. Join us!

Picture: Detail of two large pieces by Eleanor Bartlett. Tar and brown tape on newsprint in Room 2.

It's the final weekend of Richard Meaghan's exhibition at Three Works. Saturday and Sunday 12-4pm. Pictured: 'Street Boogaloo (Keep Left Stay Left)' / Charcoal and pastel on Arches paper / 2021. I asked Richard what he painted:

Ah, what do you paint? Good question. I suppose I paint what it feels like to be human. I paint me. Over the years my work has changed a lot, always in a linear way; a direct result of what I had been doing before. My art education was firstly ‘atelier’ like. Grounded in Old Master techniques, understanding colour and how to desaturate it to make naturalistic colour. Mixing paint was very important and understanding hue, value and chroma. Drawing was huge too. A model was always available, so I remember most weeks we would draw from the model every day.

Later I was taught by an artist who was taught by Frank Auerbach. His drawing and painting approach was very considered and very physical and there was a real air of seriousness - that painting was important. He left his mark on all of us and to this day the ‘hard won’ image - a kind of painting that makes itself or a battle between painting and painter - is still very much the crux of my work.

At that time landscape, whether urban or rural was what I did, people walking in the streets, the hustle bustle of the everyday. After college I won a 5k travel grant and took myself off to Italy and was enamoured with the huge renaissance freezes and I learnt how to make paint in a monastery, and I taught myself how to glaze. I came back and made huge abstract landscapes with isolated figures. I won an award and I started getting exhibitions and being collected. There was something that felt too easy about it all, so I needed to break that, and that has been a constant theme, breaking painting. Always fighting with myself not to be too repetitious.

A few years ago, I found out I had prostate cancer, I’m lucky I can live with it but the reality of any invasive surgery or radiotherapy for a man had a huge effect on me and I started to paint about that, the effects of the illness itself and its impact on masculine identity. The paintings at Three Works are an extension of this, drawing on a world that promotes highly moralistic and repressed beliefs, and in which we are no longer free to express ourselves without fear of insulting or offending. My work confronts this cognitive dissonance with reflections of a deeply personal nature and sardonic observations of a dysfunctional society in a way that mirrors Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the post WW1 artists of the Weimar Republic; Beckmann, Grosz and Otto Dix. The concepts and compositions of these artists are particularly important and are specifically incorporated into my work to mimic their dark realism that exposes the moral degradation occurring in society.

The next exhibition - Newsprint Open - opens August 12.

TWO WEEKS until entries for the Newsprint Open have to be in. There's no time for extensions this year so if you want your work to be considered for what is shaping up to be a good looking show (opens Friday 12 August 2022), then now is the time. Thanks to the 55 people that have so far signed up. Your taking part means small outfits like us that get no funding can continue offering bottom-up, DIY culture. Submit your entry: https://www.nyartschool.org/opencall Image: by Matilda Bevan.

Richard Meaghan's show at Three Works closes June 26th. We're open Thursday–Sunday 12–4pm.

Chris Shaw: Richard, talk about your influences.

Richard Meaghan: Lockdown allowed me to reflect away from the visual glare of the studio. I had wanted to write about Picasso for some time and this was part of an essay I wrote entitled, ‘A Crisis of Masculinity - Picasso and Painting Me’.

My interest in the late work of Picasso was initially born not from my diagnosis (as I had no idea at the time that Picasso had prostate problems) but from their form; their overriding physicality and capacity to evoke emotion and a s*xual leitmotif that connected at a deeply primal level.

Looking further into these works and the hundreds of etchings he made during this time, it transpires that Picasso had prostate problems, maybe cancer, that resulted in an operation in 1965. This new information and my own connection with the possibility of losing one’s virility provided me with a deeper understanding of why he created these masterpieces.

The late work of Picasso, so often dismissed as the daubs of a dirty old man, had new meaning and a significant context now that Picasso was faced with life and art as an impotent man. They take on a different stance to the stereotypical, s*xually confident, aggressive male assessing and devouring his muse, his prey. His late work is all about a crisis of masculinity, the fear of the unknown and the pain of a covetous fate.

With the advent of a new, politically correct 1970s and the rise of the conceptual and feminist movements, Picasso and the ‘bravado’ painters of post-war Abstract Expressionism were deemed barbarians. This coincided with the ‘death’ of painting in the form of the grey monochrome, a painting devoid of any emotional content or signature style. This further resigned Picasso to the annals of history, his oeuvre made redundant.

The result of this is an art world where painting is cold, dissociated from emotion, detached from those base needs and feelings that Picasso painted about. This ‘death’ of emotional male painting is where I begin.

Three Works Scarborough updated their phone number.

Looking at Richard Meaghan's exhibition at Three Works. You can see overlappings, pairings and disparities in the pictures. It's something to be lured in by the bright colour and expressive application and something else being kept distant by the bruising content. Like going ten rounds with Henry Cooper. Some leave uneasy, uncertain of Meaghan's politics. Who's jabbing who? There are faces frightened, compliant, complicit. Devils. Hollow-headed Cardinals. Martyrs. S*x dolls. Forced pe*******on (can we use the R word on Facebook?). The pictures emerge in the strange museum-like light of a Three Works space painted green. The installation is seductive without the visitor understanding or caring about the work. The show is on until 26 June: Thursday-Sunday 12–4pm.

Richard Meaghan's exhibition at Three Works is open today 12–4pm and continues Thursday–Sunday 12–4pm until 26 June.

Image: The Grey Cardinal’s Last Act / Richard Meaghan / Charcoal and pastel on Arches paper / 2021.

Richard Meaghan: "A few years ago, I found out I had prostate cancer and I’m lucky I can live with it but the reality of any invasive surgery or radiotherapy for a man had a huge effect on me and I started to paint about that, the effects of the illness itself and its impact on masculine identity.

The paintings at Three Works are an extension of this, drawing on a world that promotes highly moralistic and repressed beliefs, and in which we are no longer free to express ourselves without fear of insulting or offending. My work confronts this cognitive dissonance with reflections of a deeply personal nature and sardonic observations of a dysfunctional society in a way that mirrors Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and the post WW1 artists of the Weimar Republic – Beckmann, Grosz and Otto Dix.

The concepts and compositions of these artists are particularly important and are specifically incorporated into my work to mimic their dark realism that exposes the moral degradation occurring in society".

There's a rare opportunity to see Gig Depio's 2019 oil on canvas masterpiece Rewriting Barry at the Three Works/ North Yorks Art School site. It's a mammoth 366x273cm and has never been shown in its entirety before. It will be on display for a month or two before Room 1 is turned into a new life drawing and painting facility. You can also see Richard Meaghan's Three Works exhibition.

Many thanks to everyone that came to Richard Meaghan's opening at Three Works last Friday. The exhibition is open Thursday to Sunday 12–4pm and by appointment until 26 June.

It's been awhile but.. tonight at Three Works: Richard Meaghan. Join us for drinks between 6–8pm.

A reminder that Richard Meaghan's exhibition at Three Works opens next Friday 6 May. Drinks will be served between 6–8pm.

The drawings contain graphic references to s*x and violence and may not be suitable for everyone. Join us!

There are 62 days to get your entries in to the 2nd Newsprint Open at NYAS. So far, just over 30 people have paid the £11 entry fee. All proceeds go back into NYAS, which is a bottom-up/street corner kind of art education facility/exhibition space which answers to no authority and where no panel of experts have been consulted. Join in by clicking on this link: https://www.nyartschool.org/opencall. This ad features a detail of last year's winning entry by Uzma Sultan.

A reminder that Richard Meaghan's exhibition at Three Works opens Friday 6 May. Drinks 6–8pm.

Richard's will be the 51st exhibition almost 7 years to the day Three Works opened in Weymouth back in 2015. Join us!

THREE WORKS returns next month with an exhibition by RICHARD MEAGHAN. It's back to the old Weymouth days with a single room format. Room 2 will now be a SHOP and Room 1 will be, in time, a PRINT ROOM. The idea is also to take Three Works to other suitable venues across Britain. Join us at the 51st Three Works exhibition for drinks between 6pm–8pm.