All at sea: Derek Ogbourne’s Last Gasp Infinite Oxygen exhibition, in partnership with Martin Searle Solicitors, will be open for one week next month
KEN TOWL meets an artist whose latest exhibition is about much more than just his paintings
When Derek Ogbourne’s friend threw a dustbin at a front door many years ago, she set in motion a chain of events which culminated in the artist’s latest exhibition, Last Gasp, Infinite Oxygen.
There had been an argument at a party inside, Ogbourne and his friend left, she made the fateful decision to express her anger and when the host came outside, he punched Derek in the eye. Very hard.
When I spoke to Ogbourne this week, he described the scene.
He was standing there, his entirely white clothes now covered in blood. And so, “physicality and a sense of human being is at the heart of everything I create”.
It is a useful insight. There is a palpable undercurrent of trauma in Ogbourne’s work. He shows me image after image of work he has created over the years, leading up to his latest collection of seascapes. There are surreal disembodied ectoplasmic figures and, in many, the repeated motif of the human eye. He seems to be watching us watching him.
As I watch, grey backgrounds turn to blue, taking us below, and then up to the surface of the sea.
Afraid of the sea: artist Derek Ogbourne
You know how in every seaside town in Britain there is a gallery that sells an anodyne painting of waves? Well, Ogbourne’s seascapes are not like that. He captures the stormy power of the sea’s movement but combines this with trademark surreal elements which add another dimension to the art.
I ask if the images were captured at sea. They were not. “I’m scared of the sea,” says Ogbourne. And it is a scary sea that he envisages; in one a host of red eyes seem to peer at us from beneath the waves, in another there is something reddish, visceral, meaty, just below the roiling surface.
As a reference he cites Delacroix’s The Raft of the Medusa, the painting of desperate and dying shipwrecked sailors hoping for rescue, and I can see what he means. This allusion to another kind of trauma is apt. The exhibition, being staged at the Brighton Fishing Quarter Gallery (201 Kings Road Arches), is sponsored by Martin Searle Solicitors in aid of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
As one of the firm’s lawyers, Fiona Martin, put it, Ogbourne’s “sea inspired paintings show the danger and intensity of the sea. This resonates with the thousands of refugees who have died at sea on their journey for a better life”.
Martin is a solicitor who appears to combine an appreciation of art with a keen sense of justice, not bad attributes for a lawyer. I asked her why, of all the events she could have promoted, she chose this one. She said, “Standing by and doing nothing to help Palestinian people is unthinkable.”
She refers to what is happening in Gaza as genocide.
I ask her why she thinks politicians are reluctant to use this terminology. Her answer is stark: “While the UK is continuing to provide military weapons to Israel, they are unlikely to categorise what is happening to Palestinian citizens as genocide. Just think how many lives would have been saved if all politicians had insisted on a peaceful solution and refused to back Israel in annihilating Palestinians, many of whom have never supported Hamas.”
Most of us feel powerless as our governments continue to facilitate violence against the people of Gaza, of the destruction of their hospitals and what looks like a policy of the deliberate starvation of children. There are little things we can do. We can express what we feel to those who represent us, we can write to our MPs, join a demonstration.
We can also donate, and Fiona Martin is asking for donations to the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.
And why not reward yourself with a trip down to Brighton to see Derek Ogbourne’s paintings for yourself? The exhibition is on from Tuesday July 8 to Saturday July 12, open from 11am to 7pm.
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