Interstellar Horizons — The Art of Nina Garstang and Michelle Cobbin
Visions from Brighton’s King’s Road Arches
Brighton-based Nina Garstang creates visual artworks which are at once existential captures and explorations of the unconscious mind. Utilising the sense of creative calm following meditation, she ensures there are no obstacles to the pure expression of whatever is inside coming out.
The results, often on two overlaid planes, possess a depth that makes her work not strictly paintings, working in three dimensions. This can be evocative of Stanley Kubrick’s interstellar sequences in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey — and in her Interstellar Intercellular, a single drop of liquid is focussed on, all its inner life exploited in an image that resonates with purity.
Much of the work in Brighton’s King’s Road Arches exhibition was made during lockdown, when perceptions of society and reality were turned inside out. Her work reflects the necessity to live in the moment with no expectation or ‘edge’, to truly experience a kind of oneness, and its spatial feel achieves that with panache.
Suffolk-based Michelle Cobbin also strives for purity of vision as experience, but achieves this through very different means. Traditional person-sized canvasses mainly deal with the horizons of her beloved home county, and through colourfields of greens and pinks the serenity of Marc Rothko is achieved — perhaps minus the sense of dread often present in the doomed abstract expressionist. The confidently reflective space demands the viewer take time and gaze, and wonder at details like a pink box here and a calloused surface there, visual disruptors dropped in to introduce a sense of questioning.
Both Garstang and Cobbin are environmental artists in the least politicised of ways, revelling in a wonder of nature while acknowledging that their immersion in art can come from dramatic life changes such as lockdown or epochal changes in personal circumstances. Beyond their own artworks, the atmospheric history of the curved-roofed arch plays its own role, providing a historical, museum like grandeur and calm within skimming distance of a blowy (on the day your author visited) English Channel.
So while the world squabbles and bickers in political realms and on social media — and Cobbin’s pink painting put me immediately in mind of the new Barbie film, out that weekend — these two makers from nature are happy to reflect the exquisite calm of nature back to their viewers, glorying in the moment.
See more of Nina Garstang’s work here: https://www.ninajosephinegarstang.com/
And of Michelle Cobbin’s here: https://www.michellecobbin.art/
Sean Bw Parker’s States of Independence: From Pop Art to Art Rock and Beyond is available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/States-Independence-Pop-Rock-Beyond/dp/B0B45DXC98/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
