We joined local Colour Factory artists in the heart of their award-winning creative space for a series of interviews with each of the artists currently exhibiting collectively at the City Space in the Arc, Winchester. In this first interview, painter Rosie Parmley discusses her working practice and the dynamics that lead to the successes of the Colour Factory, including in their exceptional exhibition The Colour Factory Artists: The Every Day, open alongside the exhibition Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives.
The Colour Factory, a collective of talented artists working and teaching together, currently occupy the old park keeper's lodge on the edge of River Park in Winchester.
Tell us about your practice?
I've been working in oil for a long time now, and I make sure that I make time for myself to paint. My favourite artist currently is Alice Mumford, and she's a contemporary of the Scottish colourists.
Colour and how you use oil paint are really important to me. But also, the meanings behind the paintings. It's not just about creating. I'm trying to get a sensitivity and a feeling of being there in front of objects. It's more than a photograph.
It's to transport you to that moment and hopefully resonate with the audience. That's what I'm trying to do, like a lot of artists I have admired over the years, the Scottish colourists, Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and the Bloomsbury artists.
I'm trying to follow that tradition, so that's why I really love the Scottish colourists. In my practice, I try to work every day. I work from still lives or from a location and then come back, and I'll do several studies. Sometimes I have twelve on the go, and they end up being memory paintings. When you have several on the go they move into another realm and I hope an authenticity. Visitors to exhibitions don’t always comprehend that an individual painting is part of a journey, a body of work.
I think that the best way to teach is to have a practice. I paint and teach. There are lots of institutions where you go, and the artists don't really practice; they're solely teachers and the other way around too. I think teaching and practice go hand in hand. Samuel Peploe taught too and his students went onto become some of my favourite artists too -Willamina Graham Barnes and Marget Mellis.
Our studios and teaching space at The Colour Factory are a friendly and immersive place. People feel safe here – it’s not an institution -university or college. It’s an honest park keeper’s cottage where we share our practice with our students. To learn alongside an artist who is practicing is the best way. I tell all my students to visit as many artists as they can.
The Colour Factory: The Everyday exhibition is open alongside the Scottish Colourists: Radical Perspectives. This pairing of shows reveals itself as an intentional move in many ways via brushwork, use of colour, subject matter and more. What other connections exist?
Peploe and J D Ferguson worked together closely; they even shared some of the same objects, same jugs from Woolworths or something. I find that fascinating. We have that kind of thing going on at the Colour Factory. When we put the work together, we hadn’t realised that e.g. we were using the same turquoise and yellow. It is what happens in a studio, we end up using similar themes. And it also just happens that we are all women.
Like the colourists, we all have different skills. Different things that we bring to the table, and we all share in the running of the Colour Factory because we don't have an office manager or someone that takes out the rubbish, there's a lot of teamwork and meetings.
How did this translate into the City Space exhibition?
When we found out we were going to do the show, Emily and I immediately started planning. We have worked together for a long time, and we understand how to put on a show. We made a model and printed out photos of the work to scale. We knew exactly where the paintings would go. We based it on colour to make sure each painting sat next to a another that was warm or cool in some way.
We had a countdown and we were quite strict about when things needed to be submitted from the other members of our group, and it worked. I've said this so many times now, but it felt like winning the lottery to get an exhibition space linked with the Radical Perspectives show and hang with professionals to hang - a milestone. Emily and I are use to hanging our own shows (Handmade in Waterperry Gardens, Oxford) and it can take hours. It was such an absolute joy at the arc gallery having access to a specialist crew and support from Kirsty Rodda and yourself. They even placed our paintings on cushions – they’ve never had that luxury before! It was great.
There are lots of parallels between the shows. I mean, still objects, landscapes most artists through time have similar themes. But recently I’ve been working from a view beyond my studio window and it's been my look out for the last 12 years, onto the River Park leisure center. It went from vibrant hub in the community to a disused and closed off space that gets broken into.
I think it's an interesting building, and it's such a shame that been allowed to just sit. In my memory painting I heighten the colours and try to show what I see at all times of the day particularly the twilight when the green is glowing against the pink sky’s or yellow ochre of the trees. The feeling of capturing that moment, not a photo but more than that with a brush. I imagine it being a Cypriot café in the mediterranean, my ancestors’ roots. I have my pots that I throw in that painting too, just as Vanessa Bell has a Omega pot in her painting in the Radical Perspectives show. That's a lovely parallel.
The final piece Rosies Studio View of the RIVER PARK and the view that inspired it.
The Colour Factory: The Everyday runs until the 26th of July. Artworks are available for purchase.
