By James Brewer
Stepping out for 60 minutes from her customary role as artist, Marta Boros posed for a fellow painter, the virtuosa portraitist Julia Sterland, during the latest Parallax art fair in London. Julia is a devotee of the alla prima style where the practitioner’s rapidity captures the essence of the sitter and of the instant. Her impression in oils of Marta, channelling the latter’s dynamic spirit and strongly committed creativity, proved a much-appreciated souvenir of her participation in the vast three-day exhibition on July 1, 2 and 3, 2022, staged in the smartly outfitted Kensington Town Hall.
Julia’s skill is attested in this mode, because more than other mediums oil has unforgiving properties that do not allow for hesitation, repetition, or deviation, as a radio panel game co-incidentally stipulates. Julia says of such depictions: “Often the best ones are painted very quickly as the time limit imposes decisiveness.” Even so, technical skill and compositional prowess amid spontaneity are of the essence. “What really interests me is the power of this kind of painting to keep you in the present moment whether as artist or viewer. There is plenty written about the importance of living in the moment but less about how to do this. This is what does it for me.”
The one-layer, direct painting technique has a heritage of distinction: Velázquez, Manet, Degas, Monet, and Van Gogh turned their brushes to it.
Based in Hertfordshire, Julia has a strong portfolio with landscapes, still life, nude, and animals in addition to portraiture, employing water colours and oil. She is an admirer of Rembrandt. She says: “I am a figurative artist. I paint from what I see, whether it is portraits, still life or landscape… More than anything I want my paintings to convey the energy of life.”
Marta Boros, who was showing her work in a nearby booth at Parallax, applies her artistic language to a different although arresting genre. Her unambiguous output comments on the roles and expectations of herself as a woman. She declares: “My paintings are about my type of femininity, about female body and female personality; also, in one of my latest, about another woman.” That woman is the Queen, whose head is seen in a fragment of banknote, and for Polish-born Marta that is “symbolic of the country that is supporting my art.” Having already participated in many group shows, Marta in November 2021 had her first solo exhibition in London, at the gallery in The Tabernacle, a community arts centre in her home district of Notting Hill. At the Parallax exhibition she displayed more of her starkly autobiographical images, signing the canvases variously Lola and Mandy, after names her family called her during her childhood.
She was one of a group at Booth 5 under the auspices of Tashi Khan, a London artist and interior designer with an online gallery (www.tashizart.co.uk), who pursues “a narrative that resonates a sense of precariousness that has come to signify our times.” That being so, it was unsurprising that one of her themes was the UK’s response to the pandemic, entitled We Have no Identities. This caricatured (now ex-) prime minister Johnson, Sir Chris Whitty the chief medical officer for England, and the disgraced former health secretary Matt Hancock, with their ‘stay alert’ messages, beside representations of nine masked faces.
Tashi experiments with themes that find expression in simple, angular shapes, her canvases including the touching Family and A woman, her baby, and possessions. She is an enthusiast for hats of many types, which feature in her portraits such as Rainbow Girl, in mixed media, and four studies under the title Chapeaux de prima donna.
She says that her work “challenges the sense of the immovable, the permanent. It embraces vulnerability and fragility. The focus shifts from the changes that are observable and felt, to those that are often unacknowledged and immutable, a sense that the beliefs and certainties that defined our world have changed irrevocably. Yet it is not a lament.” New forms emerge and refresh what seems momentary or constant. This reflective exponent grew up in India in a family of scholars and artists, “watching spellbound their talent and brush strokes” as poets and artists stayed for long periods; and she graduated from Aligarh Muslim University, where her late father was dean of the law faculty.
The energetic Tashi has organised and participated in many group shows and art fairs, including the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, World Art Dubai, Spectrum Miami, and a museum display in Las Vegas, Nevada.
A member of her collective, Johanne Narayn, showed one of her beautiful, large-size canvases, Tropical Haven Trinidad, celebrating denizens of the rainforest. The daughter of a Trinidadian father and Irish mother, Johanne was born in the UK and is proud of her mixed-race heritage, which has “a very positive aspect for me. I put that down to the positivity of my parents, the life I have had since a child.”
Her painting at Parallax was a burst of luxuriant forest colour derived from the Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad’s Northern Range of mountains. That tropical reserve has 2,200 species of flowering plants, and to the delight of birdwatchers, 400 species, specimens of which Johanne salutes in vibrant colours. Hers is a blazing interpretation of the nature centre, which was once a cocoa-coffee-citrus plantation. The property was bought in 1936 by an oilfield engineer and his wife who considered it their Garden of Eden; and sold later to a man named Newcombe Wright and his Icelandic wife Asa. Asa managed the plantation and its oilbird cave, home to a colony of the only nocturnal, fruit-eating birds in the world. The term oilbird derived from the young birds which grow fat, and which were once rendered down for their oil by indigenous people and early settlers.
Johanne relates on her website her excitement as a child in London at meeting relatives visiting from Trinidad, who told her of an exotic island in the sunshine and the exquisite-sounding hummingbird. She was given a pencil engraved with the family name joined with the ‘magical’ word Emporium. “For a child who was desperate to be part of one of Enid Blyton’s circus stories, the word Emporium conjured up all sorts of dream scenarios. I already loved to draw but never had such a grand looking pencil to make my marks with.”
Standing before her depiction of the Trinidadian treasure-house of ecological gold, Johanne declared: “The aim of my work is to show that nature empowers and what a lovely feeling you have by being among nature.” Her brand, Flamingo Arts Emporium, showcases her colourful art. Including prints and greeting cards.
Parallax is billed as Europe’s largest fair for independent art and design, with some 300 international exhibitors of fine, decorative, and applied art. Masterminded by art historian Dr Chris Barlow, the fair grew out of a research exhibition called Parallax in London in 2010. He contended that when visitors walk through the fair, they are walking through an artwork and that they themselves are part of the show. A word of Greek origin, parallax is the effect in which the position or direction of an object appears to change when seen from different angles.
The fair boasts free entry, no commission, and no selection committee: “Everything we do is about putting control back into the hands of the people that buy and display products as well as those that make products,” says the publicity material. “We have helped many of those creative entrepreneurs to have the confidence to set up their own businesses and exhibitions.”
