Graham Ovenden's sensuous, dreamlike perception of Ophelia is set within a mystical marshland, which the artist describes as a synthesis of an area much worked from by yours truly, the water meadows betwixt the Dean and Fob Down in Alresford (Hants) (Mss letter from the artist to Sally Burgess, 10 November 2000). Drawing back her long, flower-braided hair, Ovenden's Ophelia evokes the femmes fatales of the Pre-Raphaelites and European Symbolistes. His model was the fifteen-year-old Sophie Dyke whose tender yet powerful looks had first inspired him six years earlier for his painting, Sophie & Jenny. First exhibited in 1980, Graham Ovenden's masterpiece, Ophelia was, in every sense, destined to shock. Although the artist refers back to the subject matter of the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolistes, he has made an image in the language of our times. The hard-edged impact of Ophelia has more affinity with modern advertising and contemporary cinema than the craftsman-like attention to detail of the mid nineteenth century. It still retains the same ability to provoke the viewer twenty years later. Amidst the changing fashions of the 1970s that still relegated Pre-Raphaelite paintings to musty attics, Graham Ovenden abandoned London on the 21st March 1975 for the West Country, where he co-founded a group of artists who cultivated a new Romanticism. They openly acknowledging the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, calling themselves 'The Brotherhood of Ruralists'. Alongside Graham Ovenden and his wife Annie were Peter Blake, his then wife Jann Haworth, Graham Arnold, Ann Arnold and David Inshaw. The Brotherhood of Ruralists held nine exhibitions between 1976 and 1992, each one the subject of a chosen theme. The first of these shows was Ophelia. The group were inspired by Sir John Everett Millais' Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece Ophelia of 1852, focusing their paintings and sculptures around the vulnerability and innocence of this fated figure, whose destiny had been manipulated by the corrupt court of Elsinore. A writer himself, Graham Ovenden frequently draws his muses from literature. In collaboration with Peter Blake, he painted a series of hallucinogenic paintings for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which they exhibited at the Waddington Galleries in London in 1970. In 1975, he held a one-man show inspired by Lolita; paintings based on the novel by Vladimir Nabokov and in 1983, The Brotherhood of Ruralists were commissioned to design covers for the New Arden edition of Shakespeare.
Everard Read, South Africa to 1996
Bristol, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Ophelia, 1980 (partially completed due to illness) Cambridge, Trinity College, The Wren Library, Ophelia, 1980 London, Piccadilly Gallery, Graham Ovenden, March?April 1981, number 2, illustrated on the cover of the brochure Bristol, Arnolfini Gallery, The Brotherhood of Ruralists, April-May 1981 (ex catalogue); and travelling to: Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, May-June1981 Glasgow, Third Eye, July-August 1981 London, Camden Arts Centre, August-September 1981
Nicholas Usherwood, The Brotherhood of Ruralists, The London Borough of Camden and Lund Humphries Ltd., London 1981 Christopher Martin, The Ruralists, Academy Editions, London, 1991, illustrated page 48 Tom Cross, Catching the Wave, Contemporary Art & Artists in Cornwall, Halsgrove, 2002, colour illustration page 174 Victor Arwas, Clive Aslet, Graham Ovenden, Academy Editions, London, 1987, illustrated page 70 Jerrold Northrop Moore, Laurie Lee, Peter Nahum, The Ruralists: A Celebration, Ruralist Fine Art, 2004, illustrated page 24