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DICK LEE
Watercolours, Etchings and Notices

Private View Saturday 8th September 2007 noon - 5.00pm
Wine served - All Works for Sale
Exibition Finishes Sunday 30th September 2007

Where enquiries of prices are made on the gallery, the work is subject to availability and the price to change.


Cows in Field, Ingleville, France. Watercolour c.1986-1990 27 x 44cm

         

Christ Crucified between Two Thieves after Rembrandt
Etching
11x14 £275

Cezanne Catalogue
Gouache
21x30 £1,100

Compotiere, Tea Pot, and Bowl
Gouache
17x25 £950

Studio, Lichfield Street
Gouache
22x31 £1,100

 

Dick Lee was one of the most sensitive and uncompromising objective painters of his generation. His brush could discover a kind of touching grace in subjects that others might overlook and his paintings were both tough and tender. Light-hearted self-deprecation, an effervescent sense of fun and an unwavering moral approach to all questions of importance made him a great and much-loved teacher.

In a series of intriguing 'notices' he alerted Camberwell students to important forthcoming exhibitions. These constructions were made from scrap timber, broken china, electrical flex, discarded brushes, dismembered toys and other bits of junk which Lee accumulated for the purpose. The instantly recognisable caricatures of fellow artists and their work are a singularly important record of some of the key participants in post-war British painting. Notices for shows by Frank Auerbach, Robert Medley, Patrick George, Tony Eyton, Frank Bowling and others are present in this exhibition and demonstrate Lee's irreverent delight in the quirky individuality of his colleagues and their professional obsessions.

None of this gentle satire ever found its way into the paintings in which he was engaged in a battle to put down the essence of the subject without self-conscious markmaking or overheated colour. There was a moment of purity at which the picture should be finished and beyond which it would be 'overcooked'. Contour, proportion, direction, colour and tone were tackled simultaneously. The brushwork was kept open throughout the painting process and the work finished when the subject was firmly present in all its richness. In Lee's paintings there is therefore an unusually attractive visual tension between the thing represented and the means of depiction. This is what links the paintings to the assemblages where precisely the same mechanism is in operation. It is a question of unlikely objects, fragments or marks achieving in combination a kind of vivid likeness.

Lee was at his most radical in watercolour, oil pastel and gouache. These pictures have, as in many of Turner's and all of Cézanne's works on paper, the quality of private meditation. The watercolours possess a supreme economy of means; thin fluid washes floated across the paper until the subject emerges with gentle force. Gouache was for Lee a convenient alternative to oil and he was able to combine its opacity and transparency with the dash and verve that gives his larger paintings such intense life. Oil pastel, an intractable medium, accorded well with the painter's desire to grasp the essentials of the subject without overworking. There is nothing obvious or banal in these paintings. They disclose nature with faithfulness and love. It is from work like this that the argument for objective painting can still be made.

John Maddison 2007

DICK LEE

 
1947-50
Student at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts
1952
Awarded Abbey Major scholarship
Travelled exclusively in Italy, Spain and Greece
1953-82
Joined the staff of Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts
1983
Moved to Norfolk
2001
Died

 

SELECTED ONE-MAN EXHIBITIONS

 

1970/72/78/
82/85/87/92
New Grafton Gallery, London
1978
Camden Arts Centre, London, Notices
1983

Gillian Jason Gallery, London, Dick Lee's Practical Dada

1988/92/95
Cadogan Contemporary, London
School House Gallery, Wighton
2000
Chappel Galleries, Essex
2001
Browse and Darby, London, February
2002
Imperial War Museum, London
2007
Chappel Galleries, Essex

 

MIXED EXHIBITIONS

 

1961
John Moores
1966

Camden Arts Centre, Artists of Today and Tomorrow, London

1978
Kettles Yard, Cambridge
1982
Gillian Jason Gallery, Collages and Constructions, London
South London Art Gallery, South Bank Show
1983

Tolly Cobbold Eastern Arts

1985-6

Exhibition tour: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Christchurch Mansions, Ipswich; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Cartwright Hall, Bradford; Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

1988

Past and Present, Arts Council Touring Exhibition

1989
Ken Howard's Choice, London
1990/92/93/
94/95/96
Royal Academy, London

 

PRIZES

 

1985
Winner: Anglia Award, Tolly Cobbold
1992
Hunting Group/Observer Prize, London

 

WORKS IN COLLECTIONS

Arts Council
Trinity College, Cambridge
Royal Academy
Reading Museum
Ministry of Public Buildings and Works
Southampton Museum
Devon County Education Authority
Beaverbrook Foundation
Cadbury Schweppes Limited
Imperial War Museum: Catch 22 set of 25 paintings in collection at 02.08.2000
 
 
 
 
 
 
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