Rosemary Wels’ final exhibition at the Nottingham Society of Artists is as educational as it is impressive as you walk through the story of her career from school sketches to Nottingham rainy-night landscapes.
‘A Retrospective’ is an appropriate name for Rosemary Wels’ final exhibition, tracing decades of work from the schoolgirl sketches of a fifteen-year-old in British Guiana to the rain-soaked streets of Nottingham. The artwork is intentionally displayed in a chronological sequence that leads you around the room, starting with amateur drawings of flowers that show Wels’ remarkable artistic promise at the age of 15-16. If you inspect more closely, you may spot the endearing red pen markings made by her school teacher awarding her an 8 or 9 out of 10.
It is immediately clear that this isn’t trying to be an exhibition of Wels' greatest hits; it states as much in her statement at the door. It tracks her development from a schoolgirl artist in British Guiana, now Guyana, to the artist and educator she became.
“In a way, the show is meant to inspire people,” Wels tells me. “I should be paying great attention to selling because I need to cover my costs, but I've never been motivated by making money. I've never done any artwork especially for money, and sometimes I don't want to part with them!”
Past the school flower-sketches, you reach the pieces from Wels’ time in Brighton, where she studied on a two-year Foundation Course, and Kingston upon Thames, where she received her Dip Ad in Fine Art/Print. The sketches here are more intense than her school ones; particularly, a nude done with graphite stands out to me amongst them.
“I was always with a graphite stick in my hand. Graphite was very popular on the Foundation course,” she informs me.
Wels’ work experiments with different styles and media; a large abstract painting with bold primary colours was created out of the necessity to pass her degree, a style that is much unlike the rest of her works as it goes against what seems like her instinct to paint what she sees. Asked if her surroundings have been her biggest inspiration, she replies simply, “Absolutely.”
“I have always said that it's looking and seeing that's been my joy, really,” Wels continues. “I get pleasure from things that I see, and so I want to record them, and for many years a lot of us didn’t have cameras, so I just drew everything; even the recent work, even though based on photographs, is based on direct observation. David Hockney talks a lot about looking and seeing; it’s a preoccupation of many artists, isn’t it?”
Wels art follows her travels, from a giant, vibrant oil painting documenting her time in Portugal to the small sketch of Robin Hood Bay in her black paper sketchbook
Small pixel drawings, made by running a sketch through a pixel engine, mark her move to Nottingham post-education to become an art teacher. The colourful purple and pink squares make out a demolition site in Radford during the night. Working-class Nottingham is painted in a variety of different artworks, and I recognise the familiar sights of Basford.
Wels art follows her travels, from a giant, vibrant oil painting documenting her time in Portugal to the small sketch of Robin Hood Bay in her black paper sketchbook; one of the first black paper sketchbooks to be sold in Nottingham, she tells me. I found the sketchbook particularly interesting because it captured the night beautifully, with silvery colours against the black pages. It was around this time in Wels’ art career that she decided to make the night-time her signature, or more specifically, the rain at night.
Wels mentions that technical variety was useful in her practice as an educator; acrylic on glass picture frames makes the raindrops pop from the painting beneath them in one piece, and the minuscule dots of letratone give the illusion of ripped mesh in the window in Wiped Window.
My favourite pieces, however, were the playful Car Wash 1 and Car Wash 2 paintings, which evoked exciting childhood memories of sitting in the car and watching soap suds drip down and create patterns on the windows. Unsurprisingly, Wels confirmed it is a favourite amongst children, but I guess we all are at heart.
More views from Nottingham in the rain are recognisable as you reach Wels’ more recent artworks such as Fletcher Gate, Rain, but the final painting, Of Night and Light and the Rain, sums up Wels’ series, Seeing Through. Though she reminds me that one painting cannot define her - her entire body of work tells her story.
At the end, I ask if there was a definitive point in her career where she felt like a real artist. “The answer to that is no; I would never feel imposter syndrome,” Wels answers confidently. “I'm not the sort of person to do something so lightly that you would be called that. But who will I think I’ve been on my deathbed?
“In fact, I did one of these online quizzes with my children, and I come out more teacher than artist because I might paint, but I also spend hours explaining them and inspiring other people to do something.”
The exhibition isn’t just a visual narrative of an artist's journey; it is Rosemary Wels in every sense, including education. The model at the heart of the room gives insight into the planning of the exhibition you’re in, and the beginning and ending motif becomes clearer. Overall, the exhibition is a fantastic final representation of Wels’ character.
Rosemary Wels: A Retrospective is exhibited at Nottingham Society of Artists until Sunday 4 October 20206.
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