Celebrating Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres
Green Grow the Rushes, O!
1990
Oil on canvas
138.1 x 414 x 4.1 cm
4ft 6⅜ x 13ft 7 x 1⅝ in.
Signed

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t be filling yourself up, making yourself happy, enjoying yourself.” - Gillian Ayres, 1995

HAPPY! opened at the Hatton Gallery last Saturday, including work by Gillian Ayres and Prunella Clough, amongst others. The exhibition explores and celebrates how artists discovered their vocation as makers. Ayres was insistent that her work aimed to make the viewer happy – a positive force of colour and vitality that is influenced by the landscape and environment in which she lived. As such, the New Art Centre wishes to highlight her joyful and evocative painting: Green Grow the Rushes, O!, which is on display in the Design House.

The painting takes its name from a traditional English folk song: 'Green Grow the Rushes O'. Its exact age and origins are unclear, and the lyrics vary between sources, yet all variations possess a rhythmic repetition that Ayres emulated in her painting through recurring shapes and colours. The painting grew through repeated gestures. Working fast and driven by feeling rather than image, she applied thick layers of paint to canvas with brushes, hands and palette knives. Scraping paint back to be reapplied speaks to the organic reworking and rewriting of the song. The song's unusual blending of Biblical, astronomical and Pagan references is met by the paintings energetic field of colour, where greens dominate, but encounter reds, yellows and blues with a surprising harmony. Thick, swirling paint, overlapping colour and shapes render the painting to be in constant motion. With no clear focal point, Green Grow the Rushes, O! possesses an ecstatic energy; our eyes travel ceaselessly around the canvas.

Gillian Ayres was awarded an OBE in 1986 and elected as a Royal Academician in 1991. She had a successful teaching career, being the first woman to head the art department at the Winchester School of Art. She was made an Honorary Doctor of English Literature by London University (1994), a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London (1996) and received a Sargent Fellowship from The British School At Rome in 1997. London’s University of the Arts made her an Honorary Fellow in 2005. Gillian Ayres lived and worked in Cornwall and London until her death in 2018, aged 88.

Head to our Instagram to see footage of Gillian Ayres' Green Grow the Rushes, O!