Hastings Arts Forum
Technically speaking the newly rebranded Hastings Arts Forum is in St Leonards, but hey, who wants to split hairs? Certainly not a group desperately trying to jell together the various strands of artists and craftsmen now working and living in this corner of East Sussex.
As part of their re-launch they are hoping to make more of an impact on the local and wider arts scene as well as continuing to hold their annual members-only exhibition – running until February.
As with most things on our doorstep, I have yet to go, although in my defence the first I had ever heard of the Hastings Arts Forum was when I bumped into an illustrator at the Cartoon Gallery in London. Like the rest of us, he was there to celebrate the work and genius of the late Martin Honeysett, himself a lifelong resident of these parts – if you discount a spell in Japan teaching bemused students the art of English satire.
He was wearing a badge saying HastingsAF, designed as merchandise for the Arts Forum’s makeover. But as his teenage daughter helpfully pointed out, AF is also shorthand for an unprintable social media phrase. It certainly made him memorable. It also threw into relief the complex cultural landscape along this coastline, a place where traditionally the young and disenfranchised attempt to make their own mark.
The further round the bend you go, the more complex this split between rusting harbour towns and imported cultural chic becomes. Dungeness is the largest area of shingle in the world outside Cape Canaveral. The film director Derek Jarman lived there in a wooden shack, attracting art-house acolytes alongside a community with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the South East. Keith Purser lives just off the Dungeness shingle and travels the area daily capturing the changing mood of the often unforgiving point at which the land meets the sea.
Occasionally he ventures up to Hastings, sitting quietly with his paints while the fishermen haul the hulls of their wooden boats up and off the foreshore. The resulting paintings, a nuanced mix of figurative and abstract, manage to lay bare the bones of the place without making it look as unwanted as the discharged fish heads that litter the sand. I’m not sure if he is in the HastingsAF but he is certainly in the UKTopTen.
Next week: Walmington-on-Sea
As part of their re-launch they are hoping to make more of an impact on the local and wider arts scene as well as continuing to hold their annual members-only exhibition – running until February.
As with most things on our doorstep, I have yet to go, although in my defence the first I had ever heard of the Hastings Arts Forum was when I bumped into an illustrator at the Cartoon Gallery in London. Like the rest of us, he was there to celebrate the work and genius of the late Martin Honeysett, himself a lifelong resident of these parts – if you discount a spell in Japan teaching bemused students the art of English satire.
He was wearing a badge saying HastingsAF, designed as merchandise for the Arts Forum’s makeover. But as his teenage daughter helpfully pointed out, AF is also shorthand for an unprintable social media phrase. It certainly made him memorable. It also threw into relief the complex cultural landscape along this coastline, a place where traditionally the young and disenfranchised attempt to make their own mark.
The further round the bend you go, the more complex this split between rusting harbour towns and imported cultural chic becomes. Dungeness is the largest area of shingle in the world outside Cape Canaveral. The film director Derek Jarman lived there in a wooden shack, attracting art-house acolytes alongside a community with one of the highest rates of unemployment in the South East. Keith Purser lives just off the Dungeness shingle and travels the area daily capturing the changing mood of the often unforgiving point at which the land meets the sea.
Occasionally he ventures up to Hastings, sitting quietly with his paints while the fishermen haul the hulls of their wooden boats up and off the foreshore. The resulting paintings, a nuanced mix of figurative and abstract, manage to lay bare the bones of the place without making it look as unwanted as the discharged fish heads that litter the sand. I’m not sure if he is in the HastingsAF but he is certainly in the UKTopTen.
Next week: Walmington-on-Sea