Archive for February, 2009

GERHARD RICHTER OPENING-NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY-24/2/09

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Anne and myself went to the opening of the Gerhard Richter Portraits retrospective on Tuesday night at the National Portrait Gallery. It was a great idea to group together his portraits for a show , I’ve never seen a gallery do this before, most tend to focus on the rather incongrous juxtaposition of his abstract works and his figurative so this was a fresh take. He is regarded as one of the most significant living painters, I guess alongside Freud so this is quite an important show.

I first discovered Richter when I brought Sonic Youth’s still seminal album “Daydream Nation” which used one of his candle paintings on the cover and I remember at the time really liking it. The show looks at his portraits based on photographs from newspapers, magazines, found photographs and family albums. Extremely objective paintings, which is something I tend to aim for. Some people have said to me that my work sometimes looks like Richter’s but I don’t really think so, I think his is more objective and many of the paintings suggest a  blurred movement in the paint which I assume is achieved with a flick of a dry brush while the oil is drying. This is perhaps the most striking thing to me in Richter’s paintings but is rarely talked about.

Crazy magical wizard David Blaine braved the previously stone throwing London public to see the exhibition and is pictured here talking to Richter. If only I had brought a deck of cards with me, he could have taught me a trick or two. Anne is also pictured with Anthony Gormley. We had a pint with James Lloyd afterwards at The Chandos across the road who won the BP Portrait Award in 1997 I think it was.

For more information about the show, click on the following link. Click on the images to enlarge.

http://www.npg.org.uk:8080/richter/index.htm

 

February 28th, 2009

New work- Ken -(Love, Hope, Faith and Peace)

I’m currently doing a drawing of a lovely old man that I first met in 1991 when I was doing my MA on the de-industrialization of the West Midlands Steelworks where I painted a series of portrait studies of old steelworkers. I met Ken at Glynwed Foundry in Cradley Heath – ( long since gone) and we’ve kept in touch over the past 17 years and I went to see him just before Christmas and look a series of photographs of him to develop into paintings and drawings. More to follow soon so when I’ve finished the draing I’ll post it up.

 Anne brought me a camcorder for christmas so I’m hoping to work out how to do some shore video blog entries soon too.

February 8th, 2009

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS- New Acquisitions – The Smithsonian Institution-(2nd Feb-15th Nov 2009)

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The Smithsonian Institution  are currently exhibiting my two paintings of Cormac McCarthy and Murray Gell-Mann which they recently purchased in an installation of new acquisitions at their museum/gallery in  Washington D.C.  It’s a pretty long run and goes on from 2nd February – 15th November 2009.

If you click on the following link it should take you to their museum blog an their is quite an extensive piece about the exhibition.

http://face2face.si.edu/

February 8th, 2009


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