Tuesday 6th October 2020
Eddie Sedgewick brought back art in Bermondsey with a shattering show called CUCKOOLAND. It’s over now unfortunately but it happened. Eddie has never done anything like this before: raw, devastating, a single brushstroke perhaps, primeval shapes, paint, scrubbed, furious, catastrophe blasting with a new exciting energy. The inspiration was Fahrenheit 451, so right, for what we have seen in this horror is that the arts are not a luxury extra or even in some kind of contrast to ‘life’, but life itself.
The paintings individually have further literary or historical reference but having limited brain resources I’ve fallen back on my own vision of the works in my comments. As Nancy Mitford said when criticised for her biog of Louis XIV: ‘I suppose I could have brought in the peasants and so on more but it’s all a matter of temperament.’