Above: Echoes of Colonial Cuba’ 2005 57.5 x 47cm 

Above: Seeing La Rioja Alta in a Strange Light 2005 57.5 x 47cm

Above: ‘Hanging Out in Miramar’ 2004 47 x 57.5cm

THE MILLINERY WORKS
May 3 - 22 2005

Christopher Firmstone: A Layered Vision

I’ve known Christopher Firmstone for almost half-a-century. Then we were both young things making our way in our two respective professions, in my case museums, in Christopher’s architecture and design. I vividly recall our first encounter. It was occasioned by an exhibition he designed for Birmingham City Art Gallery in the mid-sixties on the Lunar Society. For that period it was hugely innovative, imaginative and elegant. In the wake of becoming director of two national collections in succession I had chance to commission him to design both exhibitions and permanent installations. All of them had excitement and commitment and, even more, he worked to budget and delivered on time. Those were halcyon days in both our careers, but then something happened.

Both of us to a degree had less run out of steam than suffered from a feeling of ‘been there, done that’. I know everything about the problems of changing direction at that stage of life. It is not easy. In my case I lowered the curtain on thirty years of museums and took up one as a writer, historian and gardener. In Christopher's case all the frustrations of the architectural profession were shed in favour of the painter’s brush, enabling an exploration of his inner eye through a perception of the world around him which he would otherwise have failed to fulfil. He shares with me a keen sense of being as it were reborn through such a decision, a rebirth vividly reflected in the explosive joy of his work.

Roy Strong

For further information please contact us on +44 (0)207 359 2019

View Full catalogue

email art@millineryworks.co.uk

back to Home page