Clive Walley

Paintings, Photographs and Video Installations

16 September - 15 October 2022

Open  10.00am - 4.00pm Wednesdays to Saturdays

Clive Walley was born into a Cheshire farming family 79 years ago. His first degree was in Engineering at Manchester but it was the post graduate Dip. Ed.year in Bangor which fixed his future. The option to do Art as a third subject along with Maths and Physics opened the door to the arts. A new convert with almost no education in the arts has a lot of catching up to do. Immediately the work of American artists like Jackson Pollock and then Jasper Johns and the editorial they aroused in the press and art circles excited him. Regular shows of painting in North Wales followed, the 1968 immersive environment called Tunnels of Lovely and eventually artists films for TV all arose out of a bid to join the critical furore of the time.

This present exhibition is a selection of pieces made over the years which invoke the uneasy relationship between Painting and Photography. The keystone art-form for Walley has always been painting, perhaps because that is where the early debates used to be focussed. His adventures into Photography-land featured here, were to help understand the nature and changing predicament of painting. He never claimed to be much of a film-maker: it was always about what might be learned from making paintings which could move. The recent paintings in this show are warily related to photography and related to it in different ways.

The installed video of Michael Bennett’s triptych painting is a camera admiring a wonderful work of painting: in John Beeching’s photo survey of one of Walley’s recent paintings it is remarkable how much of the painting survives the onslaught.

It might be worth a visit. There is art to play with and art to sit and watch, like TV, and it might give rise to thoughts you didn’t know you had.

John Beeching – Artist’s statement

For much of his childhood John was brought up on a small Mediterranean island, in a material poor but intellectually rich environment, by his writer parents. Later, after buying a camera for 6d from a vicarage jumble sale, he was captivated by its possibilities and frustrated by its limitations; his first exhibition was while still at school. At university John had further exhibitions and made a film based on the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. After two years travelling in Latin America pursuing his personal photographic work, while also earning his living from magazines and teaching photography, John returned to the UK for further study and research. John has degrees from Durham, Bangor and Warwick, and has held academic posts at Cambridge and Bath in plant molecular biology. During this time, he exhibited his photography in the UK and internationally, and published several books. These recent collaborative projects with Clive Walley enable him to explore intellectual and practical relationships within visual art.