JULIA BALL AT AKK GALLERY CHERRY HINTON ROAD
The gallery in Cherry Hinton Road
Julia Ball possibly one of Cambridge’s favourite artists will be exhibited at the Cherry Hinton Road AAK gallery this coming weekend. This homage to a great artist shortly after her death at the age of 93, is curated by Ronald Pile, the one-time aesthete- in -chief of the Cambridge art scene in his gallery/shop Primavera . Now the gallery is let out for special events, and this celebration of the work of Julia Ball must be one of the most popular. Works of art are on sale over the weekend , the gallery open until 6 p.m -there is Parking behind Eddie’s Barbers
Back at the end of the 90s The Independent published an account of Julia Ball’’s work. Set in the Cambridge of more than 25 years ago, it reflects the impression Julia’ s work left on the writer. Before the full impact of the internet, Cambridge was under huge change. Julia’s work was the counterpoint to this frenetic activity.
“You cannot rush Julia Ball's painting. It slows you up and calms you down. I fell into the Fen Ditton gallery where her work is hanging, full of a sort of distracted anxiety. It was not altogether my fault. The high-tech hinterland of Cambridge is troubling. A murderous motorway hurtles you past great monoliths of new buildings, temples to the electronic revolution which has rocked the world - and turned some Cambridge academics into millionaires. Cambridge Science has gone global but here the horizon is as horizontal as it comes, while a jumble of supermarkets and sewerage farms lie scattered between road interstices, servicing the inflating demands of a city which has hit boom time in a single decade. No whisper here of the medieval elegance that is Cambridge's shop window to the world. If Gerard Manley Hopkins worried about Oxford's "base and brickish skirt", he would have had a fit at this concrete tutu.
Yet this is the Fen. Here the land is recent and ancient. It's only a couple of hundred years since the Dutch helped drain it; yet, almost two millennia before, the Romans were at the same game, draining the great Cardyke Canal, carving up the landscape, sculpting the scenery. The Fens remain England's mysterious and misunderstood region.
Julia Ball, painter, has been sitting in the same spot in the Fens for 30 years, week in week out; hour after hour after hour, she contemplates her subject. Her long study transforms the detail she observes into the radiance of her subtle, quiet, comforting abstract work. "What may seem boring is really very complicated and therefore interesting," she says. "There's a myriad of greys through to most purples and blues there." She has scrutinised her scene so minutely, the form has dropped away and the colour only is left; marvellous tranquil, dreamy colour. The result is a feeling of sinking into a strong, subtle visual field charged with infinite possibilities. I stayed in the Fen Ditton gallery for hours. I drank a large cup of tea and wandered around the winter Fen scenes in a kind of trance. I read later that the poet Wendy Mulford has described Ball's painting as "the visual equivalence of meditation". That is it. Drifting around Ball's work is a spiritual experience, a cheat's way of achieving bliss. Looking at these paintings drained all the jangling, near-death, motorway hype out of my bones. It was a fast track to peace, almost too good to be true.”
The author, me Anne Garvey in an early foray into the Fens! as I thought of Fen Ditton.
