A brush with the past: artists reunite at Islington Arts Factory

Published: 18th March, 2011
by PETER GRUNER

A GROUP of 11 artists, many of whom were students at Hornsey School of Art, will be meeting up again – some for the for the first time in more than 50 years – for a new exhibition of their work.

Old Contemporaries, an exhibition of paintings by a group of friends who first met in the early 1960s, is being held at the Islington Arts Factory in Parkhurst Road, Holloway, from March 25.

The artists are Christopher Chapman, Clement Griffiths, Susan Herivel, Philip Hood, Terence Howe, Pauline Jones, Gerry Keon, Margaret Kirschen, John Richter, Timothy Wilson and John Pearce.

Curator artist John Pearce, 69, who is organising the event, said he is pleased that despite life’s difficulties, all the artists are “still painting after all these years”. He added: “A group of us met at Hornsey art school in 1960-63 in the days before sit-ins and The Beatles. We were beatniks, which were early hippies, and worried that we would all be blown up in a nuclear war.”

Many of the group found work as teachers, glass blowers, picture restorers, sign painters, illustrators and, in one case, a park-keeper. Another worked first as a water bailiff in Scotland, then on a trawler off the coast of Senegal.

• Old Contemporaries Islington Arts Factory, 2 Parkhurst Road, N7, until April 15.