Plus One Gallery in Chelsea are now representing me in their beautiful triple space gallery in London. They exhibit realist and photorealist works and will be dealing with my personal, none commissioned work -( for example these 4 Doppelganger paintings). www.plusonegallery.com
Portrait commission requests are still delt with directly with me through this website and in America with Andreeva Portrait Commissions.
January 24th, 2009
The National Portrait Gallery are having another fund raising gala evening following their 2006 event to raise funds to purchase a number of new key portraits for the collection , such as David Hockney’s “Self portrait with Charlie” which they brought with the proceeds from the previous event.
They are staging a “mystery postcard” exhibition during the gala where they ask artists to do a portrait on an A5 postcard and sign it on the back . They are then displayed all together but totally anonymously , so you just choose which image you like best rather than the artists name. All are professional artists and some extremely famous so you may just bag a bargain.
The gallery invited me to do a postcard for the event and sent me 2 A5 cards – ( incase I made a mistake) – so I decided to do 2 portraits for them.
I can reveal my 2 portraits on 4th March and here are the reverse sides of the portraits. They will be exhibited throughout March at the gallery.
January 16th, 2009
Here is a new press release from My gallery in Santa Fe ,Andreeva, regarding their recent successful sale of two of my paintings to The Smithsonian Institute in Washingto DC.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Smithsonian/portraits/prweb1263134.htm
I’ll be posting some new work in the next 2 weeks or so.
September 11th, 2008
I went to the opening of the BP Awards last week and the announcement and dinner on Monday evening which was lovely. Ian Hislop announced the awards and gave a great speech…extremely funny infact. “I don’t know a lot about art…..no that’s it” was his opening gambit.
Overall I enjoyed the show but as many are now saying there is a little too much photorealism. I remember back in the mid 90’s when there was only the excellent Philip Harris and me doing it and and then the show was criticised for being too much like Freud and Euglow in style. It has certainly turned right around but those mid 90’s shows did seem more varied. I think it is the impact of digital photography over the past 5 years or so has made a big impact. It has absolutely revolutionised the way that I work and I love photography more than ever before now. The digital revolution is just wonderful and I think artists/ painters are captivated by the ease and absolute control you have with digital photography and it’s seemingly limitless possibilities that they want to incorporate it into their work. Certainly I never leave the house without a little snapper, even the cheapest little cameras give excellent quality results and I’m snapping and thinking all the time and the images are so disposable you can take as many pictures as you want and review them when you get home. Just incredible, and I think this is the reason that we are seeing so much photorealism at the moment, artists are just responding to modern technology, as I think they should.
My own personal favourites are Jason Walkers “Natalie” which I think should certainly have made the shortlist again, great use of pattern in a painting and beautifully muted tonal colour and the Mexican artist who came second in 2006 Raphael Rodriguez Cruz with a portrait of a woman with so much pain in her expression it almost reduces you to tears just looking at it – very powerful I think and nice to see Paul Benney again, one of the past heavyweights from the competition with his beautifully composed Californian looking swimming pool portrait.
June 22nd, 2008
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC have puchased 2 of my paintings for their permanent collection. It is reputed to be the biggest museum in the world and this is my first acquisition into a major American collection so I’m delighted to have some of my work represented there.
The 2 paintings are both portraits of very eminent American figures; Cormac McCarthy and Murray Gellman.
I first met them in 2004 when my gallery invited me over to Santa Fe, New Mexico to do a portrait based project exploring “The people of New Mexico” where I drove around the state looking for interesting faces. Cormac and Murray were based at a “think tank/ research unit ” situated in the middle of the New Mexican desert where they develop their own projects and hold philosophical discussions around tables.
I would like to thank The Andreeva Gallery in Santa Fe and especially Pam for her relentless enthusiasm and professionalism in placing the works into the Smithsonian’s collection over the past few months and also special thanks to Francisco for his generosity and kind gesture.
Cormac McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the greatist living American writers. In 1992 he wrote “All the Pretty Horses” which was later made into a film starring Matt Damon. In 2005 he wrote “No Country for Old Men” which more recently was made into a film directed by the Coen brothers starring Tommy Lee Jones and won 4 Academy Awards at this years Oscars including “Best Film”. In 2007 he won The Pulitzer Prize for literature. He is notoriously reclusive and very rarely gives interviews so I was incredibly lucky to get him to sit for me in Santa Fe, I think something just clicked between us and we seemed to get on.
Murray Gell-Mann is a world renowned Physicist who has made discoveries and developments in “Quantum Physics” and in 1969 he won the Nobel Prize for physics. I loved his “eccentric scientist” look and the fact that he wore a Native American Indian bootlace tie.
May 5th, 2008
I made this drawing very recently for a charity art auction in aid of Leukemia research at the Queen Elizabeths Hospital in Birmingham. It is a drawing of a Voodoo Doll that I brought in New Orleans who now sits on my shelf in the studio. I haven’t been cooking up a voodoo hex on anybody, it’s just a lovely piece of magical iconography which to me is extremely aesthetically pleasing.
The main auction is on 20th May at St Paul’s gallery in Birmingham and there will be a few days prior to this where you can take a look at the full body of work which will be auctioned.
Dig deep and bid hard.
For more information about the event please take a look at the following website.
April 20th, 2008
I made these drawings while I was working on the large portrait painting of Ronald last year. They weren’t really preliminary drawings, more getting to know his face. It was a wonderful commission to work on and I was very pleased with the images from the original sitting and wanted to develop them a little further. While the painting is lit with natural light coming streaming in from the large window I used very strong, directional light for this series which created very dramatic chiaroscuro style shadows which I love.
The triptych drawing is currently on display in The Wales Portrait Award which is touring around Wales for the next 2 years. It is yet another carbon copy of the BP Portrait Award promoting figurative painting and there are some strong pieces in it including former BP Award winner Peter Edwards with his portrait of Ryan Giggs.
(click on the image to enlarge)
March 6th, 2008
Artists Process – National Portrait Gallery, 4th Dec 2007 -1st June 2008 (rooms 37 + 37a)
is an exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery showing how artists put a painting together, including roughs, photographs, preliminary drawings and paintings, diaries, design notes and ideas, final compositions etc… They are showing my painting of Neil and Glenys Kinnock together with all of the support work and material.
link http://www.npg.org.uk/live/woartistprocess.asp
2. Labour Intensive – The New Art Gallery, Walsall – (12th Jan – 11th May 2008)
Group exhibition featuring work inspired by Black Country industry. There are a few of my very early paintings from my MA project back in 1991 when I did a big project based around the de-industrialisation of the West Midlands Steel Industry and its affects on the community. I visited may of the old hot press rolling mills, foundries and chain makers and focused on the people. You will see a distinct change in style from those days to the work that I do now but the human figure still predominates.
3. Paintings and drawings – Andreeva gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. (until 1st March 2008)
A selection of paintings and drawings will be on display until 1st March which are predominantly portraiture based.
4. The Wales Portrait Award 2008 – (2 year touring exhibition of Wales).
Triptych portrait of the late Ronald James, also the subject of a recent , larger painting.
5. Bandanna will be on display at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition at The Mall Gallery from 24th April – 11th May 2008.
January 17th, 2008
Anne and myself and Jane, Mike and Kathryn went to the opening of The Naked Portrait at the beautiful Compton Verney gallery by Warwick. It was such a good exhibition, so much to see and very well curated/selected, though I would have tried to have got a Ron Mueck for this show, would have been perfect. As ever these days I was increasingly interested in the photography, some great portraits by Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and an incredible series of tightly edited large self portraits by an elderly photographer (Who’s name I made a special effort to remember but now I’m writing this I’ve completely forgotten) , they were large close ups of his hands and knees and a very origionnal self portrait from the back with his head seemingly missing (bent downwards) and his hands sticking above his shoulders, almost like a rectangular Rothko composition. Just when you thought you had seen every possible posture for a portrait another fresh one comes along, this is why portraiture is so endlessly fascinating, it’s about people, internal and external ,and thats all you need to keep you busy for a lifetime. Fantastic.
Anyway it was certainly value for money, I spent about an hour and a half looking around it and was ready to do it again once I’d finished. I love the way it is split up into 3 different rooms, feels like you are walking around someone’s house.The old classics were there, Freud, Bacon, Kossoff, I’m sure there was an Aurbach and some rather interesting contemporary New European photographers who’s pictures really did show up the differences in basic home comforts between new and old Europe. Again I love that idea of portraiture and domestic objects juxtaposed and working hand in hand.
The pictures show the 5 of us mentioned earlier and me and Anne with our old friend and new (ish) director Kathleen Soriano.
Make a visit to this excellent show it’s great and the venue is magical.
October 3rd, 2007
My show at The New Art Gallery, Walsall closes on Sunday 2nd September and all of the drawings and paintings will all be going their own seperate way, never again to be seen in the same room together ( that sounds a little dramatic) so if you would like to see the show it will haveto be over the next 2 weeks ( but the gallery is closed on Mondays).
August 20th, 2007
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