Refuge and Meanings: Rachel Mercer | Julie Held

A conversation between two painters, Julie Held LG NEAC RSW and Rachel Mercer

4th - 21st September 2025

Through painting and drawing both artists explore gardens and shopping centres, these subjects reflect two of the many facets of London living. They are places where people seek refuge and pleasure, both hold promises of the future. Gardens reflect the cycle of life; shopping malls allow one to project our wishes and desires, and provide another place of mystery, pleasure and delight. Julie Held probes the threshold between our inner and outer world. While Rachel Mercer is motivated by the action and movement of figures through space. Both artists bring these subjects to life through lively colour and brushwork.

Painting Affinities in N8

by Andrew Dempsey

The writing part of this exhibition derives from the time Rachel and I met as ‘sitters’ for the painter Michael Broughton. We went to his studio in Hackney on Wednesdays, me in the morning and Rachel over lunch, the timing necessitated by Michael’s regular task of collecting his son from school. Occasionally Rachel and I would meet at the entrance to the studio. One in and one out.

Julie Held and Rachel Mercer know each other as painters, though they are from different generations. They have a past, as Julie taught at the Royal Drawing School when Rachel was a student there. They have come together for this exhibition as they both find themselves, and each other, living in the London ‘village’ of Crouch End. But more than this coincidence, they have become friends, sharing a commitment to painting and its possibilities.

The subjects here are gardens and allotments, market scenes, clothes shops and the River Thames. Julie’s modest but dense garden, cultivated over many years, is depicted here on a small scale in a series of accomplished oil sketches, although the word ‘sketches’ might demean the deliberation and the skill required to make such compressed images which retain both coherence and a sense of scale. 

Rachel’s characters originate in the old market in Stratford, a rich subject, developed in the studio from rapid drawings made in the market under the watchful and supportive eyes of stall-holders. They are not simple transferences from drawing to canvas. That is only the beginning. The image is developed in the studio, in the sometimes trance-like act of painting. It is then that the figures develop their odd elasticity, a quality that gives them life. These images, predominantly of children, pre-date the birth of Rachel’s daughter Matilda who was with us when Rachel showed me the more recent market paintings and I realised that she had been painting children with special insight and love, before having a child of her own. Matilda’s eyes were wide open when we looked at the newer paintings and I couldn’t help thinking how prescient this subject has been for Rachel. Her last exhibition was brilliantly titled ‘In the cities, life is smaller’, a quotation from Fernando Pessoa:

“… my village is as large as any town

For I am the size of what I see

And not the size of my height …”

Her garden series begins in Pignano, a hamlet near Volterra in Italy on an estate celebrated in our (art) world for the paintings of Euan Uglow, whose two ‘Pignano’ landscapes, made in 1972 and 1973, responded to the rhythm of the hills. Fifty years later, under a new owner, the property is used by the Royal Drawing School. During a short period as painter in residence Rachel worked from the gardens and the gardeners. These paintings, begun on canvas in Italy, then travelled to London where they began an odd transmutation into the world of English allotments. They are losing the aroma, or aura, of Italy but gaining some Constabular earthiness.

There are three large paintings here by Julie; her garden, again, a painting that retains at a different scale something of the compactness and balancing fluidity of the small paintings; a view of the Thames, and the shelves of what is apparently a clothes shop. The Thames view, originating with a drawing made on the south bank, downstream of Tate Modern, is curiously ephemeral. Fluidity again, a painting of atmosphere as much as substance. And of course there are antecedents. We were all looking at Monet’s paintings of the Thames at the Courtauld Gallery last winter. It is brave for a serious painter to tackle such enduring subjects. The clothes shop has the same evanescent brushwork. Here is an arresting subject with echoes far beyond its origin in one of the stores at the new Battersea Power Station. There is an untidiness, and an absence of the owners or wearers of these garments. In the same way that old battered suitcases have come in art to represent the tragic migrations of the modern period, these garments hanging from rails are oddly evocative. It is not clear whether the artist intends them as a metaphor or whether she cannot help, with her family history in the very midst of the terrible twentieth century, evoking such associations.

Here is something germane from Wallace Stevens’ great poem about ways of looking at a blackbird, a stanza that might be interpreted as being about the complexities of art:

“Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.”

In this new exhibition we are seeing paintings as they enter our world, always a special moment, like the first night at a theatre. The rehearsals all done, and now the performance or the presentation. Who knows what will happen, how they will be interpreted. They might find new homes, they might return to the studio awaiting another curtain call, they might get scraped down and have another life. They are part of an old and distinguished and continuing tradition.