A life in art

9:38am Friday 6th June 2008

After running New Blood shows for emerging artists Fran Dibb and Stefania Romaniak at Holy Trinity Church, in York, the ArtSpace gallery is taking over the Goodramgate church walls once more for Vive La Difference.

"This exhibition showcases very different responses to the previously presumed monolithic beauty of York, all in the context of one of the city's most beautiful and ancient churches," says Greg McGee, co-owner of ArtSpace, in Tower Street.

"The paintings promise an exciting balance between York's baroque bombast and its more fluid, feminine sense of fun.

"Holy Trinity is a real gem in York's crown, and hopefully the show will encourage more visitors. The artwork dovetails beautifully with the feng shui of the place: art is balm for the brain, as Sherlock Holmes once said."

The show features oil paintings of York Minster by Richard Barnes; Impressionistic responses to York Races by Malcolm Ludvigsen; the meeting point of York's gothic past and the digital age in Up York! by graphic artist Grafiklee; and beautifully precise pastels by octogenarian Alwyn Joseph Joe' Doyle, from Brayton.

Joe, who flew planes in the Second World War, has exhibited many times in the Royal Academy of Art Summer Exhibition and at Beverley Art Gallery, and is an exhibiting member of Leeds Fine Art Club.

He taught art, first at Read Grammar School in Drax from 1953 to 1971 and later at Selby College. "It's pretty unarguable that Joe is an excellent artist: he has a sensitive eye and a rigorous finish, and he's here to show the little boys how a real artist does it," says ArtSpace co-owner Ails McGee.

"You can't argue with quality like this. It's classic stuff," adds Greg. "Joe deserves as much exposure as any other artist I know."

Joe creates artworks in diverse media, as typified by his retrospective of 50 pieces at York Cemetery Chapel in 2002, where he exhibited oils, pastels, pen and ink pieces, watercolours and lino prints.

He exhibited at The ArtSpace for the first time last year in a mixed show and was delighted by the chance to take part in the Holy Trinity exhibition this summer.

"Greg said he would be putting on an exhibition here called Vive La Difference: Aspects Of York, and that appealed to me as I'd done some pastel paintings of York churches and York Cemetery Chapel, which is a gem of York, hidden away in 24 acres of land," says Joe, sitting in the afternoon warmth at Holy Trinity.

"In the past I've also done a painting of the Chapter House, too. I held an exhibition at Treasurer's House, and while the exhibition was on, I would busy myself taking photographs or making sketches of the Chapter House from the Treasurer's House gardens, and in fact I've sold that painting and it's now in France."

Joe is drawn to the history of York's buildings. "They present history in such a solid form and the ageing produces beautiful textures, beautiful colours.

"The architects had to make a living but you can sense that religion was really important to them too. They must have felt the religious story was there all around them as they were carving the stone, and they would have been imbued with the spirit of religion and I do believe that their work was far better than anything being done in York today," he says, looking at the sun-lit walls of Holy Trinity. "You can gaze at the stone, and really appreciate the different tones."

Joe paints as the mood takes him. "I can only feel that I want to paint or draw when I see a subject that stimulates me. I don't want to paint for its own; I want it to be very personal to me, to mean something to me," he says.

"Like I've been painting a series of watercolours for a book called Clough Dyke. It's a book of 58 paintings, all of them with text, which is just as important.

"I must have visited the same place, Wistow Clough, just outside the village of Wistow, two miles north of Selby, about 100 times in eight years, when I was living in Selby, after I found stimulation in my son wanting to fish at the pond there when he was very young."

Joe studied the prodigious wildlife. "Wistow Clough is a dyke - Clough' means a deep ravine - and it was trimmed only once a year, with all the farmland around it, and the nearest road two miles away, so it was heaven," he says.

"I found a whole range of species of butterflies, damselfly and amphibious creatures, frogs, toads, tadpoles, and I discovered over 80 species of flowers in this spot, growing wild, so I started drawing and painting and taking photos, and I took notes of what was happening on a particular day.

I haven't called it a diary but a window on nature' as they're really just comments on what I saw on a daily basis."

Sessions of York will be printing the book in August, the latest landmark in an artistic career that continues apace in Joe's 84th year.

"I'm enjoying painting as much as ever," he says. "Art has been my life, and when I say art, there is the painting side and the craft side, working in wood, like making a kitchen unit in a 19th century style because it was a period I admired."

Joe has worked in all manner of paints, metal, clay and wood. One design, however, he entrusted to a Helmsley blacksmith to fashion for him. Joe, the wartime pilot, had designed a memorial candlestick for Drax Church.

"There's a memorial window to those who were killed in the First and Second World wars, and I just felt that as it had never had a candle to accompany it, it would be right to have a candlestick, as a candle has life and colour," he says.

Long may Joe Doyle's artwork have life and colour too.

• Vive La Difference, Joe Doyle, Richard Barnes, Malcolm Ludvigsen and Grafiklee, at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York, until June 30. Opening hours are 10am to 4pm, Monday to Saturday, noon to 3pm, Sundays.