Envy Lines - art at the Grosvenor pub

Last week I caught a small exhibition at the Grosvenor pub in Stockwell, thanks to a friend’s passing comment about meeting up with a group of students from Camberwell College of Art.

The Grosvenor is one of those remnants you find all over London, a Victorian pub clinging onto its corner pitch, surrounded by blocks of much newer flats. Inside it’s untouched by modern minimalism, the wallpaper is crimson and embossed, the furniture a comfortable muddle of bar stools and banquettes. Although the setting isn’t as grand it’s easy to imagine Manet’s famous barmaid from the Folies-Bergere materialising and asking what you’d like to drink.

Tina Hutson, one of the exhibiting artists, said her picture of a young Victorian woman emerged as a result of her interest in the Grosvenor’s history. She discovered Ada Baker, an 18 year old barmaid, lived and worked at the pub in the 1880s. Ada’s life symbolised the new jobs and opportunities that were starting to open up for young women in the late nineteenth century. Compared to domestic servants barmaids had more freedom and the chance to increase their wages through tips.

Tina told me, “When I imagined Ada I saw her as proud and independent and well-dressed. I think she was probably interested in fashion like a lot of young women. She’s trying to make her own way in the world and show that in her appearance.”

I was drawn to Tina’s picture of Ada because it has a photographic quality. Like many photographs it seems to collapse the time span between viewer and subject, making you feel as though you are reaching back into another era and yet at the same time looking a face you could have seen on the tube yesterday.

Ada’s formal pose gives her the aura of representing something more than herself, like the carefully placed and arranged figures in religious icons. Tina explained that, as with icon painting, it often takes her several days to prepare the base she is going to paint on. Ada is painted on hessian and the raised, two-dimensional floral motif behind her is copied from the Grosvenor’s wallpaper.

I was also rather intrigued by Alison Drewitt’s drawings. Alison strikes me as being one of London’s visual flaneurs, wandering the city and producing masses of delicate drawings. Many of these pictures are fragmentary and focus on one element in a scene - a window, a door, the shadow of a chair on a floor. They may have a surreal touch, as when a tiny elephant gazes at a block of flats.

The way Alison assembles her work is as interesting as the pictures themselves. Sometimes she cuts them up and clips them together as small booklets that can be carried in a pocket  like a sort of aide-memoire - is this the estate where elephants roam? Or she draws on a long, panoramic strip of paper which she then folds into pleats - unravelling these pictures makes you feel like a spy or voyeur easing open a door to see what lies behind.

The Grosvenor exhibition has finished now but if you’d like to see some more of Tina’s work just let me know. She is building a website and Alison writes about her work at adrewitt@blogspot.com