‘Painting to me is like a room of the imagination. It’s up to me what I do with it […] I adjust the temperature, open the windows, shut the windows, throw things out, change the lighting.’ - Roy Oxlade
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown is painting in her studio. She paints a chair, a bathtub, a rubber duck. As she works, through the window of her studio, the sun comes in and lies angular on the wall and stretches across the canvas on which she works. El-Kadhi Brown looks at the painting with the light across it, and, as the window allows the light inside, she allows the familiar spirit into the painting by rendering the light as she sees it. As the morning progresses and the sunlight moves away, a yellow angular shape remains on the painting: light shadow: a shadow of light.
In this account of El-Kadhi Brown’s practice, we see a playfulness that characterizes both her and Roy Oxlade’s paintings. In their honest, frank depictions of everyday objects, there is an excitement in something ‘happening’. In the capturing of some sunlit moment – or perhaps in ‘happening’ itself – the two painters find an affirmation of life, a desire to breast these waves of arrival. It is a generous, immediate kind of painting, which in many ways exemplifies what Roy Oxlade called ‘hidden art’, an art of clarity.
Both Oxlade and El-Kadhi Brown have an interest in what the poet John Ashbery called ‘the experience of experience’. Objects, both physical and fantastical: a table, a chair, a vase, depicted with playful simplicity, we imagine they are recorded in the heat of apprehending them. Both painters seem to find pleasure in the ever-opening of the present moment.
This immediate kind of painting, the desire to capture the object as it becomes apparent to us, is especially felt in Oxlade’s work Black Brushes in a Pot with Two Chairs. We can see a layered palimpsest of previous attempts covered, re-painted, altered, smudged, scribbled over, and painted again. Oil paint muddied by the urgency of this fervent attempt to capture ‘likeness in unlikeness’, which are the results of this fascination with the ever-shifting present moment: now this, but this too, or not really this but that, and now and now and now. As though there is an insistence on life, here, now, held in the objects faced with daily.
El-Kadhi Brown paints spaces: rooms within rooms, paintings within paintings. Kitchens, bathrooms, of some dreamlike home, which are furnished in turn by domestic-but-slightlyhaunted dream-objects and fantastical details: a blooming volcano in a window in Day’s Journey into Night, or her strange nebulous figures ambiguously reclining on a chaise lounge or ascending some stairs. We are unsure who, where or what these ghosts are, but they show us a dream world, surreal and charmed. Many-faced, bald, genderless, we are unsure if these familiar spirits are one or multiple. There is a sense of nostalgia for a past, memories that are vague, collapsible, and full of poignancy. Oxlade, on the other hand, paints objects directly, seldom within any context, close-up and isolated, never drifting into surrealism. It is the painting itself which houses these objects.
In this exhibition, El-Kadhi Brown and Oxlade’s work can be thought of then as exercises in phenomenology: they consider how objects appear, how life happens, and through the painting of these lamps, beds, chairs, tables, paint brushes, these quotidian objects become animated with spirit; they open up to hold within them some essence, some strange working of the soul.
‘They must participate in an inner light which is not a reflection of a light from the outside world…. Painting like this is, therefore, a phenomenon of the soul.’ – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Text written by Noah Swinney
About the artists
Pippa El-Kadhi Brown (b.1996) is a London based artist who explores the enigmatic dialogue between domestic space, consciousness, and the human psyche. She graduated from MA Painting at Royal College of Art (2022), after studying BA Painting at The University of Brighton, School of Art (2018).
Her work has recently been exhibited at Lychee One Gallery for her Solo Exhibition Walls Who Whisper (London, 2022). Other solo exhibitions include Where the Dust Settles (CBU Gallery, Taipei, 2022), Around You, Within You, or Nowhere at All (Ashurst, London, 2020), and House Plants (Creekside Projects, London 2019).
She received The Ali H. Alazzi Scholarship Award (2020), The Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize (2020), The Art Pegazs Taste of Life Award (2019) and The Creekside Graduate Studio Award (2019). She was a finalist for The Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2023) as well as The Chadwell Award (2022) and the Global Design Graduate Award (2022).
She has taken part in residencies internationally; The Organhaus Residency (2019), Chongqing, China, and the Creekside Graduate Residency (2019), London, UK.
Roy Oxlade (b. 1929, London, UK; d. 2014, Kent, UK), played a critical role in the history of twentieth–century British art. Having initially come to attention in the 1950s, he worked across six decades producing paintings and works on paper that were rooted by his experiences of the physical world around him. ‘The artist has to in some way defeat the inevitable,’ he commented. ‘I want authenticity, clarity and a certain peculiarity’.
Oxlade’s work is inextricably entwined with his home and studio in Kent, which formed the foundation of his pictures. Articulated by recurrent motifs – scissors, jugs, lemons, lamps – selected for their aesthetic and functional qualities, domesticity and ritual are central to his oeuvre. The artist’s wife, fellow painter Rose Wylie, also appears regularly in his pictures, in her role as lifelong muse. ‘Roy’s painting depended on personal imagery,’ she remarked. ‘He was very careful when selecting objects’.
Oxlade’s creative process was fuelled by instinct and immediacy – qualities that stood in opposition to what the artist termed ‘the artiness of art’. Although himself a prolific and hugely influential art educator, renowned for the summer schools he taught in Sittingbourne, Kent, Oxlade was wary of the ‘baggage of learning how to do things’. For him, the future of art meant going back to basics – of returning to ‘primitivism’. Drawing was a critical tool; he referred to the medium as the essence of his practice.
Creating clarity on the canvas was an important objective. Oxlade was keen to give his paintings a sense of narrative structure. However, the possibility of interpretation was vital. ‘I have no interest in the window–on–the–world kind of painting,’ Oxlade commented in an interview with Marcus Reichert in 2003. As a result, the artist described his pictures as offering a synthesis of thought, feeling and poetic imagination.
His unconventional and highly critical stance regarding what he thought passed for art flourished in the essays he published throughout his lifetime. He contributed regularly to Modern Painters, Art Monthly and The London Magazine. Oxlade also produced his own self–published pamphlets, Blunt Edge and Blunter Edge, which existed from 2001–2009. In 2010, Ziggurat Books published Art & Instinct, Selected Writings of Roy Oxlade.
