London II: David Inshaw at The Redfern Gallery

     Another artist that stands in the long and continuing tradition of English 'spiritual' art is David Inshaw, though of a different more pastoral vein. Paul Nash seems to be the great influence. Inshaw is one of those artists largely ignored by the media - not modern enough and not controversial in a sort of shark in formaldehyde sort of way - but is popular with the public. (The BBC in particular seen only content to parrot the art establishment line.)  Inshaw's most famous painting is the painting originally called, quoting Thomas Hardy, 'Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame" and now 'The Badminton game".

     Inshaw started out as a Pop-artist but in the Late Sixties, at, I suppose, the same time as David Hockney, Inshaw eschewed the fashionable and changed to the lyrical and figurative. Though, of course at that time Hockney was not that interested in nature and the rural. In 1972, along with the Pop-artist Peter Blake and others he was a founding member of the 'Brotherhood of Ruralists', and although the Brotherhood is now defunct Inshaw continues to paint in the figurative tradition, which, let's be honest, has been central to the story of British art in the 20th century. His brushwork freer than it used to be. As with the work of David Hockney of that Late Sixties/Seventies period there is a element of distance, even disengagement, between the painting and the viewer in Inshaw's work. In Hockney's work that is partly a result of practice - he worked very often from photographs - and the intellectual (he was heavily influenced by the work of the French film maker Alain Resnais in particular the strange and mesmeric 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad'). I do not know the influences working on Inshaw's work. His work though has a quiet, slightly haunted quality. An emptiness at times. Meaning perhaps is just over the hill or round the corner. But it is there none the less.

     Before meeting an old friend for lunch at Brasserie Zedel (my first visit) I had a wander along Cork St taking in another couple of exhibitions - both figurative. I have to say I was not at all disappointed with Zedel. Eating as a near theatrical experience, the restaurant being housed in what was once the vast ballroom of the Regent's Palace Hotel. A terrific opulent space built between the Wars in the best Beaux Art Tradition that seems to ennoble the most ordinary of things - having lunch - and transforming it into an occasion.  I feel the need to return.  Afterwards we ambled up to Nordic Bakery for coffee stopping off at a gallery to look at something that was a sort of installation/action piece. The contrast could not have been greater, or telling, with the intensity and vision of what I had experienced that morning.