Painting a mean city

Stoke-on-Trent
is a city with creativity coded deep into its DNA, something The
Artist and the City, curated by
Jean Milton and Anna Francis highlights through its focus on
four artists with links to the area.

These
are George Cartlidge, John Currie, Grete Marks and Terry Shave,
Cartlidge and Marks both designed for the patterns for the once
flourishing local ceramics industry, Currie trained at the Burslem
School of Art and Shave kept a studio in the city for many years. The
exhibition also features responses to their work by younger artists.

The
panels of the Remembered Series (2007) by Terry Shave use a
mix of photography and acrylic paint to create complicated shapes and
patterns that trick the eye. Unfortunately this technique has been
used by less accomplished artists producing work that gets shown as
copies on the walls of dreary wine bars that over-familiarity tends
to blind you to the obvious skill be displays. Far more interesting
is his fiery Ring of Fire
number 15 (undated), which
reminded this viewer of the long since cold furnaces of the city's
former steelworks.

The
oil paintings of George Cartlidge evoke the Staffordshire countryside
during the nineteenth century with Bluebells Cliff Park
Rudyard (1899) and A
Staffordshire Hilltop (1900)
being particularly pleasing, although everything included shows a
sort of stolid craftsmanship that stands the test of time well.

Time
hasn't, perhaps, been so kind to John Currie, the bad boy of the
exhibition, a distinction he earns by having shot first his lover
Dolly Henry and then himself in 1914. His portrait of Henry, given
the title The Witch Dolly Henry (1913)
is rather a let down. She is pretty enough, if a little pleased with herself, but no femme
fatale. Girl from Afar and
Female Portrait (woman with black hair), both
undated, are rather better and have a genuinely haunting quality. The
Red Necklace (1913) is rather
poor though, despite trying for the same effect its subject looks
like she's suffering from indigestion.

The
responses by contemporary artists art a mixed bag, Ali Gibbon's
painting of the Middleport pottery works The Outsider Looks
In (2015) captures the grime and
resilience of a city that has been battered by three decades of
economic change. Dave Bethell and Adam James have created video
pieces that respond to the cork of Cartlidge and Currie respectively.
Bethell's contribution involves a lot of sub Spike Milligan messing
about in Victorian dress and Adams's is noisy, pretentious and often
plain silly; both, since they play on a loop, are at first annoying
and then all too easy to ignore.

By
far the best work in the exhibition is that of Grete Marks, a German
born painter and potter who came to England as a refugee from the
Nazis in the thirties. There is a charmingly innocent quality to her
watercolours of industrial scenes, of which Town Planning
(1943) and Potteries
(1940) are particularly good.
The most powerful of her paintings shown here is perhaps one of the
simplest, it is of a young girl shown head and shoulder as in a
passport photograph, its title is Asylum Seeker (1933)
and it is a reminder that behind every label is a vulnerable human
being.

The
Artist and the City is
on at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Bethesda Street,
Stoke-on-Trent, until 22^nd February