Art - Spring Show

First thing on a gloriously sunny Monday morning I make my way to HQ Gallery, for a preview of its Spring Show. There are three exhibitors: Hazel Brook who does strikingly bold, abstract paintings (see VLH 6); Georgia Hayes, who produces Costa-Rican inspired ‘tin-paintings’; and Lorna Vahey who I meet at the gallery. Vahey’s pictures, which are propped up on every surface, teem with activity. “I like to tell stories”, she explains, “I jot things down when they happen and produce paintings from there.” Many of them are based on her Hastings childhood, and there is an old story-book charm to the world that she evokes. She points to a large board called ‘Camping with Sofas', “it’s about a large Irish family that I used to know”, she tells me, “they used to run a second-hand furniture shop and when they went on holiday they would turn up in a huge van and unload all this bric-a-brac in the middle of the field where they were camping.” Another, called ‘Mairzy Doats’ shows a cluster of figures sitting on a mattress rigged up on some scaffolding over a pig pen. ‘This was where we held our secret society meetings”, she tells me. Others immortalise novel-ish characters like the eccentrically-dressed Mrs Pocock and the scary Mr Monterdale.
I can’t let Lorna go without asking about her recent celebrity buyer - Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen, whose purchase was filmed for national TV. “Well, it was his wife actually”, she says laughing when I put this to her. “And judging by Lawrence’s face at the time it may have caused a bit of a domestic!” ER