Painting Exhibition By Graham Barton

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32313, 3 June 1970, Page 18

Painting Exhibition By Graham Barton

Graham Barton, the Christ-1 church painter exhibits 351 paintings and drawings in a' one-man exhibition at the! Canterbury Society of Arts! Gallery. The work in the exhibition has been produced over a 12-month period and is executed in a variety of media including pencil, oil. water-colour, pastel, ink and acrylic. The three main themes of Barton’s work are swimmers, land and sea and lake fragments. No. 11 is the most successful of the “swimmer" series: the swimmer’s body is well formed and its movement is consistent with the broken images experienced when looking through water. The success of this painting is not repeated in No. 21 “The Swimmer and His Family.” The figures are too much part of the opaque surface of the water and appear to slither rather than swim: a similar result occurs in No. 12. In No. 10 “Swimming Group” the figures are arranged in rows resulting in a static decorative arrangement.

The “Lake Fragments Series” are best handled in three small studies Nos. 18,19 and 20. In these the forms are simple and related to one another; colour is used with

discretion as a unifying factor. In the larger works on this theme the divisions created by mounting separate segments of the paintings on a white ground cause difficulties that are not resolved. Of the “Land and Sea" paintings No 4 “Land from the Sea” is the clearest state ment in what Graham Barton has made essentially a matter of texture. Nos. 23 and 24 are relatively minor works that deal with an eye-level view of the mini dress and to the extent that subject allows, these are the most contemporary works in the exhibition. The exhibition will remain open until June 14. —G.T.M.