WITHOUT
Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons, Gaston Bacherlard The Poetics of Space.
For the past year, Charlie Cobb has been working out of a studio in the belfry of St Mary Woolnoth, a Hawksmoor church in the heart of the City of London. The building is surrounded on all sides by large financial institutes, never-ending building and road works and a constant stream of buses and taxis, bicycles and pedestrians. Tube trains passing through bank station burrow deep into the clay beneath the foundations of the church. The belfry itself rises up like the prow of a boat. In the centre is the fanlight window of the studio, like an eye watching over the City.
The thick 300-year-old walls protect the contemplative atmosphere of the studio space from the noise and stress of the 21st century City. The space is inherently vertical, with wooden ladders rising up to meet the huge oak joists of the next level. While being on a ladder is to be in a transitory place, and constantly moving up or down, they are themselves static, rational. Geometric forms which measure-out the space.
These ladders are found in several paintings from the exhibition. Paintings which are works of the imagination. The world outside dreamt or recollected from within the belfry, and sometimes 'found' in the process of creation. Wax sculptures help to establish more concrete images, and allow the chance to play with figures and ideas in a way reminiscent of the use of the model box in Theatre Design.
Nature bares herself during winter - in the architecture of the trees and the exposed soil. This provides the setting for these paintings - places far removed from the inner city. Sometimes barren, sometimes densely wooded, they are uneasy and lonely places. The characters of the paintings are reduced to a shape, a silhouette bounded by an outline. As with the walls of the belfry, the line is a membrane between internal thoughts and the world without.
Charlie Cobb
Charlie Cobb has painted around this area of London for a number of years, exhibiting in Throgmorton Street in 2005 as well as at the Centre for Recent Drawing in the same year. In 2006 he exhibited at The Albemarle Gallery. He has been working from his studio at St Mary Woolnoth since 2007.
He studied drawing at MA level at the Prince's Drawing School in 2004/5. Previously he worked in the film industry within Art Department's, after completing a BA in Theatre Design. He continues to do painting commissions for feature films.
