Excerpts from exhibition notes
2005
John Chambers' painterly concerns are usually centred on resolving colour and textural relationships within a tightly organised framework, but in recent constructed reliefs he has emphasised a number of numerical divisions that together make up the final composition. The large white reliefs on show, built up from the surface plane with pieces of discarded framing and joinery off-cuts, are intended to complement the three dimensional scultures of Gordon Allen while at the same time to pay visual homage to the seminal 1930's reliefs of Ben Nicholson. The smaller pieces incorporate a number of 'found' objects picked up from beaches and then arranged and painted with colour to form a highly expressive relationship. He has always made a special point of using non-fine art materials, in the present case using industrial enamel applied to an mdf base. His use of Cornish titles is inspired by the work of Agan Tavas, a Cornish language organisation, the spellings used based on published work by the eminent St. Ives Cornish language scholar R. Morton Nance. As the ancient Cornish language has no ready made words for modern art practice, John has had to settle for what he considers to be appropriate Cornish language equivalents, i.e. 'balegy' being his preferred Cornish term for 'a constructed relief'.
2008
As an artist John Chambers prefers to paint abstracts, though in this exhibition he has tried to accommodate aspects derived from his walking experiences. The exhibition title 'Fordhow', literally 'Paths' in Cornish, can be seen as a visual metaphor for the network of footpaths that criss-cross our southwestern peninsula, while also signifying solidarity with the overall aims of both the local walker groups and the Cornish language movement. The exhibition reflects his confidence that such collective efforts reflecting important aspects of Cornish social culture will continue to prove of real and lasting significance for future generations.
For many years now, John Chambers has given his paintings Cornish titles, though stressing that the paintings are first and foremost visual statements about a particular personal painting process and about solving questions in order to arrive at some kind of compositional balance. Even so he is happy if they are also seen as alluding to aspects of the unique natural beauty and physical character inherent in the Cornish peninsula, and of perhaps making an oblique reference to aspects of the Cornish social and cultural environments.
He states: I am not alone in believing that we are children of our own time and that our individual lives are in many ways fashioned by the constraints and alternative opportunities that operate within human society. Further to this, and as an artist, that our national culture has long been dominated by literary based factors, with the result the British, when not indifferent to visual matters, seek to impose literary values onto art criteria. British critics and art historians in general tend to indulge in misplaced conjecture and mistaken conclusions about art and artists. Surely art is about making a visual statement which is essentially an exercise in non-verbal communication, an act that can often be exceedingly difficult to then transcribe into text. Can I suggest that the best approach to looking at paintings is to just look and to try to refrain from imposing a story line or narrative onto what you see. So-called 'meaning' or sets of 'meanings' can only hinder any appreciation of what is after all a visually sensuous experience, simply try to be open to the visual pleasure that hopefully comes when looking at a painting and then tracing the various pictorial elements, deciding whether they interact or not, and then the extent to which the different elements work together winthin a satisfactory compositional whole. I hope these visible elements can create a visual dialogue with the viewing spectator.