Life updates

2020

It is now more than three years sInce I moved back to Barry Island. The move from Newcastle and Teesside after thirty years of working there, could perhaps have been foolish. However it wasn’t.

I am a figurative artist and years ago, in Israel, the symbolism in various images touched me. It was the presence of a vessel, like a chalice called the Heimweh. The presence of this symbolised a longing for home. It acknowledged pining, yearning, a sort of nostalgia and a form of home sickness.

Whether this is a longing for the past, the familiar, the heart’s ease of home, or a promised future, I still don’t know. But I recognise it and it is something I seek to sometimes imbue a painting with. While it is evanescent, it matters.

When I first moved from Wales, it was temporary, but when all ties were cut, I could haunt the home I left, walk into its pantry and smell the slate shelves. I was in fact profoundly home sick for thirty years,

If all Paradises are Paradises lost, and much as I loved the North, would I miss it so when I returned to Wales? I hoped not.

My studio once more looks over the sea and the house is simple and large enough to provide studios for drawing and painting. I sleep to the sound of the waves and love full moons.

All one needs is inspiration.

Inspiration comes from many sources, sometimes a line of poetry, sometimes a situation, other times a seen event or something that one has been told or remembered. Some such will resonate with me and there is a rightness and excitement about exploring them further.

My work revolves around drawing, pencil on paper and painting with oil on canvas. It is drawn to a reality that engages with metaphor and imagination. Take for an example a bridge, it might be the passage from one side of a river or road. But it is also the metaphor for moving from one conscious state to another.

The paintings combine vision, dream and reality and they reference other worlds, other states and inner thoughts. So they reflect both an exterior world of what is there and an interior one regarding how the world is perceived.

It has been suggested that this might be termed “unreal realism”, a selection of ways of picturing the world from the point of view of the fabulous, the mythical, the near-surreal or the fantastic.

I am always mindful that a painting is read as much by how it is painted as what it depicts. A practice perhaps more readily understood in abstract work, but also remobilised in figurative painting.

Of late the work has been about the game Hide and Seek, and the Tzarina’s Clothes.

There is a now a collaborative description of emerging young artists and older artists relatively under recognised.

Wherever I fit, I hope you will enjoy looking at my work and will join my new mailing list so that I can send you updates on my work and exhibitions. I am always delighted to have feedback and comments.

Gerda Roper

July 2020

2017

It is fifty years ago this month that I first began to inhabit Art Schools, a habit that has endured subsequently. My Foundation year was at Gloucestershire College of Art in Cheltenham. An exciting and overwhelming year, where for two or three days a week we drew from 9am to noon, from 1pm to 4pm and from 5pm to 6.30. The other days we pursued various skills such as etching, sculpture, and painting. The more senior students work was fantastic, the production values were very exacting and strong. I loved to go around the Painting studios. Carel Weight was the External Examiner, and most of the painters went on to the Royal College of Art (RCA). The Film Club was brilliant and I saw quantities of Bergman, Fellini, and Robert Altman films, together with the Sunday matinees at the local cinema of Greta Garbo, and Marx brothers films.

I blossomed at my Degree Course at Exeter, it was reputed to have a propensity for literature and art. The Head of Painting was Alexander Macneish, known as Mac, who was always pleasant, jovial and enterprising. The studios were in Gandy Street and on St Davids Hill, where I had a 3rd floor studio. Accessed by an outside iron staircase, embedded with Braille, as it had once been rooms for a School for the Blind. Mac had many contacts in the Fine Art world, so tutors were Aubrey Williams from Guyanna, William Crozier and John Bellany, who gave me the good advice that if you were not working full out in your twenties and thirties, imagine how limited and pathetic your production would be in your later life. Advice I sincerely took to heart. Devonshire was beautiful with wonderful places to live and gorgeous train journeys to take every day, notably Exeter to Dawlish.

Following Bellany’s advice I continued to paint for the next two years and work part time teaching and lecturing Art and Art History. I visited my student friend Stephen Davenport in the West Indies before moving to London, where I saw many glorious collections. At first I shared Basil Beattie’s (who is my lifelong, closest ally) studio in the East end, before getting a Space Studio in Kings Cross, reputedly Kray territory and now precisely where the British Library is. London is undeniably lovely, but I find it exhausting and after interviews with Professor Peter de Francia at the RCA, and at Reading University with Professor Martin Froy and Terry Frost and being offered places at both. I plumped for Reading and was not disappointed.

Reading University was terrific, we had studios in individual huts on the London Rd. The University had a host of amazing lectures going on, on the history of ideas, psychology etc. It was an exciting and stimulating environment to be in. I was awarded a University Research Scholarship in my second year which was a big help. Many fellow students remain friends and the External Examiner William Scott, had a good supply of reminsinces about living in London with Dylan Thomas

I came back to Wales in 1975, I had a studio in Chapter and then an ADAR studio in the centre of Cardiff, where I shared a floor with Tom Gillespie and Barry Cooke.I worked part time (3 days a week) on the BA Fine Art at Newport College of Art where I stayed until 1984.

In 1977 I moved to Barry Island, and continued to split my week painting and teaching. I had a series of exhibitions. I also worked regularly in Sheffield Polytechnic, Hull College of Higher Education, Goldsmiths College and Croydon School of Art.

In 1980 I was able for a year to cut down all my teaching and to work full time as a painter. That year I showed a hundred drawings at Llantarnam Grange, and the following year one hundred and thirty works at Newport Museum and Art gallery. On the back of this I was invited to exhibit in The Arts Council 'Women artists of Wales' show curated by Maura Vincentelli that toured Wales.

I moved to Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1984 with my small son Nicholas who was 5 at the time. I worked then as a Course Leader for the MA in Fine Art until 1989, when I became Head of Painting at Sunderland University, before returning first as Head of Fine Art then as Head of the School of Art at Northumbria University and to the continuing rigours of a full time Job.

I found work with students to be thought provoking and enjoyable. Throughout this time I always had a studio at home, which was more convenient, however spasmodic and Sunday Painter-ish, one had to be. Like many women I was a mother, but I was also a single parent with sole financial responsibility for the child. So I worked hard to keep the job and to stay afloat. I value the art work I produced then, as it was hard won.

I went as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Media to Teesside University in 2005, a job I loved until retiring ten years later. In 2016 I moved (back) to Barry Island, where my studio once again looks over the sea, and I am able to have the luxury of being able to paint or draw every day,

September 2017