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Thirty years with Bernard Amrik Varkalis Saturday
4th March to Preview Friday 3rd March 7-9pm
About Amrik A mature woman artist Amrik Varkalis entered Manchester School of Art in 1970 in the window between Tracy Emin's birth in 1963 and Barbara Hepworth's death in 1975. Unlike Hepworth, Amrik raised her children herself whilst also working as a teacher and an artist. A generation after her, Tracy Emin is unencumbered by maternity and has been able to concentrate on her own career. Amrik has always painted and sold well in West Yorkshire but her younger son's departure to university has unleashed a burst of creativity and productivity All the work is about relationships - between people, to the landscape and most especially for Amrik between herself and her medium. Amrik Varkalis' work is original, exciting, beautiful and evocative. It is also masterly and competent. Like Whistler, her paintings represent 'the knowledge gained from a lifetime of work'. Take time to stop and look at the work of a modest, middle aged woman. It won't shock you but it will enchant you. The Yorkshire Landscape Amrik has lived for thirty years in the highly industrialised West Yorkshire. West Yorkshire is also an area of Pennine hills, pre-industrial villages and a semi rural landscape shaped by human occupation over centuries. She is obsessed with buildings - mill chimneys, viaducts, houses and cottages, walls and fences - and the shapes they form in the Yorkshire landscape. Viaduct The paintings of industrial buildings evoke both the past and the people who lived and worked in them, a feeling of nostalgia, but also a celebration of the area's heritage. In Amrik's work Yorkshire is about levels - the sky, the ground, hills, buildings - and the layers of history that create the landscape Every building exists in its own space, but she can take that space and use it to create a new image that enables people to see it in a different way. And it is that different 'eye' which appeals to so many of the viewers of her work. Put simply the landscape paintings are accessible and lovely to look at in themselves but also awake the viewer to look anew at the given landscape. |
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