Blackbird Rook

Marilyn Hallam was born in Yorkshire in 1947. She studied fine art at the University of Reading where she met and married the painter Clyde Hopkins. She lives and works in south east London and St Leonards-on­Sea and has a space in the APT Studios in Deptford. Through a career spanning five decades, Marilyn Hallam has consistently produced thoughtful, intelligent painting, sourcing the luminosity and touch of Matisse and Bonnard and the collaged construction of more contemporary painters.

"I have always admired and been fascinated by the intricate, slow way that Marilyn builds her paintings. Looking in on her various studios over the years I marvel at the layers of drawing, tracing and photocopying, the collaging and reconstruction that goes on. This exploratory work accumulates and is sifted through, well before she begins to paint on canvas. That is what intrigues me - how her search leads to resolution, her preparation to realisation. The completed paintings are airy, with light flowing through them, and for all their complexity they are vividly direct, immediately radiant.”

Mali Morris, RA London © January 2014

“…‘drawing’ was enhanced or exhilarated by colour. I had to learn to trust it, slowly, by introducing colour cutouts to my grounds – anything to move away from naturalism or ‘common sense’ in my depictions. It was important for me to keep the painting open and revealed – no obliteration, covering over or opacity, but keeping some sort of dynamic relationship with the ground colours.”

Marilyn Hallam in an interview with Mali Morris for Turps Magazine, 2021

““Going into the studio, I could wish that, after all these years, I had a system or fail­safe mechanism that would allow me to execute daily portions of work in a finite and cumulative manner. However … I am always glad that I do not have this safety-net, though I am slow and timid without it.” (Marilyn Hallam 1998)

At a time when the visual arts can seem dominated by populism and the cult of personality, it is startling to find an artist talking about her work with such naked honesty. This determined rejection of a reliance on habituation or a repertoire of manners, is likewise true of the work itself. One consequence is that each painting comes as a surprise, each with its own resolution of convincing pictorial identity. Another is that, despite Hallam’s doubts, the continuity which unifies this oeuvre has the strength of a steel cable, marked by a series of works of impressive conviction.”

Cuillin Bantock, © 2008

“Motifs recur in Marilyn's work, echoing fascinations that painters have always had - a window that takes the gaze outside, or the mirror that brings space and light. and perhaps a figure, back into a room… There is a double intimacy in these paintings that I find strange and distinctive. The domestic interior; with its array of objects loved and used and looked-at, sets a personal, almost autobiographical tone. But what we also have is a construction in paint on a flat surface, which has involved the artist in a process of intense scrutiny and analysis, thorough, but intent on keeping the painting fresh, alive and luminous. The activity of looking has been questioned, the process of seeing fragmented and re-made, in order to understand more of what painting tells us about painting, at the same time as it tells of the world. What we are shown is a small part of the world, a table top, or a balcony, but the painting of it reaches far into thought and experience. The commitment to breaking down pictorial language and putting it back together again is clearly evident, but not fetishised. It is an exploration, and it has been shared with us.”

Mali Morris, RA London © January 2014

“Hallam’s choice of subject matter is conservative, even pointedly commonplace: views through a window, interiors, still life, people by the sea. However, there is nothing conservative or commonplace about the treatment. In 1994 I wrote of this work: ” … treated here without a trace of that secondhand softness that sometimes tries to pass for the Bonnardesque … (the paintings are) tough and put together with a cool lightness of hand which conceals the lucid pictorial intelligence which has gone into their making.” What I had not taken wholly on board at that time is the highly evolved artifice involved in these complex works. Despite being figurative, or ‘depictive’ as Hallam prefers, these are not naturalistic paintings. Every component is subject to the demands made by considerations of scale, surface flatness, edge and design, the literal facture and objective truths of what a painting actually is.”

Cuillin Bantock © 2008

“Oil paint is marvellous. Luscious even before you start, it is tempting for a painter at once to give way to the siren seductiveness of the stuff itself. Hallam eschews this obvious route. The paint is used quite sparingly, the palette is high-key, the chroma exploratory, and the gaze considered. The actual touch of the paint on the surface is both exact and steady. As a result, this painter can integrate pinks, reds, ochres and violets which in other hands could be self-indulgently over-heated, or just plain fussy. Instead, we are aware of a cool astringency informing the entire picture-plane and which lifts the overall image to a new and discursive level of ‘representation’.”

Cuillin Bantock © 2008

Solo exhibitions include presentations at Sim Smith, Patrick Davies Contemporary, the Bakehouse Gallery, the Vortex Gallery, the Smith Jariwala Galleries, Against the Grain SE I Gallery in London and the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne. Group exhibitions include the Castlefield, Manchester with Paul Tonkin and Jeff Hollow, Art in Hospitals Project Hastings with Clyde Hopkins, opened by Adrian Berg and Three Artists, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Platform 72 MOMA Oxford, curated by Nick Serota, the Whitechapel Open selected by Bert Irvin, the Contemporary Art Society Market. The Spirit of London, Rooms curated by Jenni Lomax of the Whitechapel, Watercolour Curwen Gallery, curated by Joan Key.Art 91 Olympia, Mode in Greenwich, curated by Cuillin Bantock (catalogue), the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. the Stormont Studios, Rye, Delight at the Holden Gallery. Manchester; curated by David Sweet (catalogue), the Royal Academy Summer shows 2003 and 20121 Clifford Chance with the University of Greenwich 20 I I (catalogue), Small is Beautiful Flowers East 2013 and Open Studios GASA and APT 1979 to date.