…with excitement. I’ve heard his name, seen his work, but yesterday I saw his Camden Town paintings for the first time and have been totally inspired to start a series of photographic portraits using his signature style.
The main reason for visiting the Courtauld Gallery, London was to check out Richard Serra’s new drawings. His enormous sculpture installation at the Gagosian gallery a few years back was awe-inspiring, but would have breathed more happily in the wide expanses of a park. But sadly Serra’s work stood out like a sore thumb alongside the great ‘masters’. The room was noticeably empty of the Courtaulds typically senior visitors. To be honest I wouldn’t have been bothered to visit the collection if it wasn’t for Serra’s work but the £6 door entry was a snip for what we discovered on the way to the drawings.
Walking from room to room it felt like we were at a celebrity party. Every room revealed world-class paintings by the masters. Rooms, filled with Ruben, Monet, Cezanne, Manet, Gauguin and Van Goghs, displayed paintings of enormous significance in a fantastically succinct way.
A family portrait of one of Rubens friends, had such a tender stroke to his painting that none of his other works in the room had. 
We spent ages looking at Manet’s – Bar at Folies-Bergere, text books of theories are written about it but nothing beats spending 20 minutes soaking it up. Monet applied his sensational colour work to a French industrial town, refreshingly not one of his iconic water lilies series.
At first glance Serra’s drawings at the Courtauld aren’t his most inspirational work. They need time, and get better with age, but lack some of the earthy spiritualness that his other work eschews.
The revelation of the day was on the top floor in a dark, discreet, back room where I discovered a small selection of gloomy Walter Sickert paintings. The London based artist lived and worked in Camden Town at the beginning of the last century, he depicted the gritty urban landscapes using his signature shades of subtle grey.
But it is his use of light that totally captured my attention. His thing was to backlight his subjects. Thin beams of light highlight his models. I wonder what we’re really supposed to be looking at in these paintings. It’s almost as if we aren’t really invited to see what is happening.
I’m so intrigued by his uninviting style which is so contrary to how we taught to create images, particularly commercial images which are bright, well lit, simplistic compositions to invite audiences in an instance. He even makes beach huts look like a bleak, coal town.
His beach huts and urban London-scape make me want to revisit the series of beach hut photos I did at West Wittering over the Christmas holidays. I wanted to capture the brightness of the beach huts against the winter stormy skies. But next time I’m going to photograph them on the gloomiest of gloomy days and avoid the stereotyped brightly coloured holiday beach huts, because – who cares? We’ve seen colourful beach huts a thousand times. And for the same reason Richard Serra looks to push boundaries, who was inspired by the visual leaps Cezanne made in his work, he wants to go beyond our understanding of the visual image.
Lucy Kane 