It's all in the family down in Wooler
The Northumberland Connections of the mixed media exhibition on at Gallery@ No 6 in Wooler are mainly family ones – the extended one of ArtWork writer Nick Jones amd his wife Ana
Knitted hats and handspun, naturally dyed wool by Ana Balfour
IS TALENT inheritable? Cesare Lombroso thought perhaps. In the Man of Genius, he cites Francis Galton, the founder of British eugenics, who calculated a ratio of 250 geniuses to every million in a population. He considers the phenomenon of the Bach family, Aristophanes' two comedic sons, Dumas pere and fils. Yet other examples make the contrary case. Rembrandt's son Titus abandoned painting. Walter Scott's son boasted he'd never opened a book, and Mozart's offspring claimed the tinkling of money was the only music he enjoyed. Artistic talent is inherited, Lombroso concludes, except when it isn't.
A student of the question would do well to visit Northumbrian Connections at Gallery @ No 6 in Wooler, or go to the website after it closes on November 16. The seven exhibitors are three generations of the one family, the family in question is the Joneses with extended branches and alliances.
Work by Nick Jones
The organising factor is Nick Jones, (a contributor to this very paper) who categorises his clan into "young ones", "the middle", and "the ancients". He is one of the ancients, along with his wife, Ana Balfour and sister Meredith Ramsbotham. Nick and Ana's two children, Harvest Rose and Kittie, make up the middle, with the youth being Harvest Rose's children, Rowan and Poppy.
Rowan Harris-Jones photos on the far left, Meredith Ramsbotham paintings left and right of window, Harvest Rose feltmaking on far right.
I have known the family for over two decades and first visited the Watermill exactly twenty years ago. The Watermill was a kind of Jones gesamtkunstwerk, a beacon of warm pink and brilliant blue blazing against the dun and green of rural Cumbria. Churning at its centre was one of the few working watermills left in the UK, and around about swirled a Jonescapade of bread-baking, artmaking, wordsmithing, type-printing, goat-milking, food-fabrication, and so on and so much more. The Watermill has since been passed into other hands, but the family's activities have not ceased, as the Wooler show shows.
The youngest represented is Poppy Harris-Jones who has just left school and paints a reclining cat against long planes of milky blue. The feline is fluffy, languorous and faintly sullen. Very catlike. Her brother, Rowan, is a cheerful railway zealot and has learned the craft of photography to record choice trains. His photographs zoom up to a breath away from their subject – a fish-gobbling puffin, a sprinting hare, and their motion is captured with incredible crispness.
Their mother, Harvest Rose, shows densely coloured felts, like slabs of gemstone into which, somehow, has seeped the image of a bird. You might be familiar with Kittie's seascapes, her monotypes of fanged rock, raucous with birdlife. She is well known as an artist in Scotland. She rolls ink in great crags of colour, mixed, always, to a shade slightly beyond the expected. Her work in the show has an uncharacteristically limited palette: tumbling perspectives of rain-dark cliff and expanses of glorious green-gold.
Kittie's aunt, Meredith Ramsbotham, also shows shorelines, though of a very different variety. These are vast sweeps of sea, smooth against flat sand, seen from odd high angles. There are interiors too, windows, oblique along corridors, whose panes are hazy and opaque. Her palette is chalky white, salmon and grey. Compare with Nick's quayside scenes and window-side ledges. These pictures brim with boats or odd containers, an elegant spindly line loops over the white page, circling areas washed in summery blue or raspberry.
And finally, Ana – her clothes are a joy. Woollen-ware, coiled like pots. What if they were the national dress for a whole civilization? They would be a rugged people, possibly living in burrows like Skara Brae or the Shire, and their homes would be banded with dusky pink, tangerine and brilliant azure. They would be obsessed with colour, they would be very snug, and very happy.
But what does it all tell us about that question then? Does talent run in the blood? You can certainly track resemblances between the artists in the show. Waterfronts, birds, a sensitivity to colour, an affinity to particular forms. Though it is as possible that certain families sprout artists because they cultivate their children in the right conditions (aka the Watermill), they are exposed to culture and nourished with encouragement. Yet that approach too is mysterious. As Lombroso shows us, as hard as he tries, there is no predicting how humans cast off into the world.
As good a comparison as any might be with dialogue – each generation is a response to the one before. Artistic offspring might sometimes agree with their parents, a stylistic touch, or a choice of arranging perspective; sometimes they might rail against the previous generation, turn everything their parents stood for upside down; alternatively, they might consciously ignore them.
One thing is certain, they are always aware of the past, they are always part of the conversation. It's interesting how the humanist approach, of appreciation via artistic individuality, is actually accentuated when that individuality is blurred by family similarities. As though the differences are heightened.
Most beguiling about a show like Northumbrian Connections, is the opportunity to chase connections, a fleeting resemblance, like a smile or a frown that flickers through a family, through a great assortment of facial features, and, often, employed for very distinct moods and in different circumstances, and yet emerges as unself-conscious and as natural to those within that family as to be invisible.
At Gallery@No.6, 6 High Street, Wooler, Northumberland NE71 6BY until November 16. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays 10am to 4pm.
www.jonesnick.wordpress.com/2024/09/18/northumbrian-connections/
ROBERT POWELL
