The Pallant House Gallery in Chichester has become a favourite of mine because of the beauty of the old merchant’s house, the new gallery, and the exhibitions that they put on.
But also because of their incredibly innovative use of artists and art to spread support into the community through their projects. I shall be writing more about that in a few weeks because the way that they have used the creative arts for social justice and opportunity deserves a whole story.
I went last week to meet Gordon Roddick and his granddaughter at the gallery, and to look at two exhibitions that are worth the train journey into the Sussex hinterlands. It’s 50 years this year since Gordon and I met in an Edinburgh pub and 26 years ago that we founded The Big Issue; and radicalised poverty through ‘turning the handout into a hand up’.
Gordon has still got his hair, and by the looks of it mine as well; certainly there is scant evidence of my earlier life when I looked like a handsome version of Russell Brand. After the usual insults, that are always in place of compliments that passes for badinage now that we are into our antiquity, we fell to discussing the plight of the world. And then went to look at the works of Australian painter Sidney Nolan.
What an eye-opener. I had only seen a few of his works over the years. He was very popular in the ‘60s with his paintings of Ned Kelly, and I got zonked out with the same images. But art did not stop for Nolan, and he went on to paint large works of desert and nature, desolateness that really do take your breath away.
Ned Kelly was an outlaw and took on the state and the British Empire’s local Australian representatives, in a land chock-full of ex-convicts. Or so they would have us believe. Ned Kelly made himself very popular, and has probably almost become the only patron saint that Oz had produced.