Posts filed under 'Art'
Anne and myself went to the private view of the new Freud exhibition last Tuesday evening at the NPG. I’d been looking forward to it for months and it was even better than I had hoped for. We got there early so that we cou;ld have a quiet look around and for the first 15 minutes it was a very “private” view which was lovely. It’s got basically everything , form his very early work in the 40’s to the last, poignantly unfinished painting that he made in 2011. It’s the best exhibition I’ve been to in the past 10 years I’d say. It made me realise just how powerful and emotive an exhibition created from the human hand and touch can be. So often I go to public art gallery shows which are full of piss boring video loops and “witty” / ironic installations which just leave me cold, as emotionally engaging as a visit to DFS or B&Q. Freud’s show felt real, important, serious, ambitious, demanding, energetic, physical. From this show I think the work he did in the 50’s and 90’s are the most triumphant, his large eyed paintings of Kitty and his huge paintings of Leigh Bowery in the 90’s. Quite incredible. Other artists that I know were at the show including Tai-Shan Schierenberg, Ishbel Myerscough, Stuart Pearson Wright, Mike Gaskell
and myself and I think it’s fair to say that Freuds influence has touched us all in our work as he has hundreds of other artists, he is truely a giant of Britishfigurative art and this show really points that out. There’s a great catalogue to accompany the show too , beautifully illustrated. well woth a visit if you’re in London. runs until the end of May
February 22nd, 2012
I mentioned in an earlier post that I visited Eric Sykes at his London office in Bayswater at the tail end of last summer and spent a wonderful day with him. Here is the first drawing that I have done of him. It’s on a beautiful qulity and quite expensive A1 size paper with a nice deckel edge on all sides and a water mark which I love. It has a certain texture to t too whch I have used to my advantage in the drawing. I enjoyed the scale of this drawing, I usually like to work at 3/4 of life size when I’m painting but drawing materials are more clumsey I find so it’s nice to work a bit bigger and there was so much detail to pack in.
I thought I’d draw him smiling because he is a comedian and comedy writer , an expression I rarely use but felt was relevant in this instance and I haveto say I’m really pleased with it.
February 13th, 2012
A friend of min from Walsall has been chipping away at songwriting for years with varying success but has remained dogged to the belief in his work which is entirely admirable. Here’s his new single which I think is great and has an incredibly ear worm hook. Me and my brother in law Mike are in the video in a pub in Walsall. click on the link.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDtIaKo4YIw
February 13th, 2012
Since we had Scarlett we’ve been playing some chilled out sounds to keep everything nice and calm and I got this beautiful album by The Civil Wars which is the perfect backdrop for a baby if you want to relax, we’ve played it to death. I saw them on Jools Holland and got the album straight after. I know it’s a bit late but a friend of ours brought another beautifully chilled out Christmas album by Sufjan Stevens, it’s a 5 disc set that he worked on annually for 5 years and is a very low fi bedroom studio but is a must for next Christmas.
February 13th, 2012
Here is a recent drawing that I completed just before Christmas. It was commissioned by their father David and these are his two sons and the drawing in the background to the right was a self portrait of their grandfather and the painting to the left was a painting of the interior of the family business. It’s a very large drawing , bigger than A0 and I think is the largest I’ve done to date. I was with the atmosphere of the drawing and the boy’s depiction, Anthony being very relaxed and Nicholas more rigid which created a nice tension in the piece I think. I particularly enjoyed the shape rhythms in the shadows on Nicholas’s hands, they seem to flow very nicely. Most importantly perhaps they both had interesting faces reflecting their Jewish herritage.
February 13th, 2012
Sorry it’s been so long since the last post, Anne and myself had a lovely little girl back in late November and I’ve taken a little time out but am back at the easel now. Many of you already know, but her name is Scarlett and she’s 12 weeks old now and is a little beauty. Thanks to everyone who sent cards and gifts and came to visit, much appreciated.
February 13th, 2012
Here’s a recent drawing of the Birmingham based jazz saxaphone player Andy Hamilton CBE. it’s in mixed monochrome and is on A3 paper. During the sitting he was also playing. I’ve used a framing device on the drawing to give it a sense of spontaneity.
I’m currently working on a double portrait commission drawing which I’m really pleased with, as soon as its done I’ll just make sure that it’s ok to publish and post it up.
October 24th, 2011
I had a sitting with the comic writer and actor Eric Sykes a few weeks ago which was fantastic. He is very much the last in his generation of comics stretching back to Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, and I guess right back to the music hall days of Max Miller, he’s worked with everybody. I would take a few photographs and then he asked me to sit down and have a cup of tea and a chat. He was a very sweet and charming old gentleman and it was a real privilege for me. When you phone his office it is still referred to as “hello, Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes’ office” The British comedy history that had paraded through that beautiful Bayswater office
October 24th, 2011
I’ve been having a series of sittings with my sitter throughout the summer and I’ve finalised the composition now so I’ll be starting the painting next year. Unfortunately I can’t disclose who it is until the picture’s unveiled so this post is not much good to anybody.
October 24th, 2011
Hello, sorry its been a while since my last post, busy at the easel. It’s been some time since Freud died so it’s not very current but I couldn’t quite believe it when Anne shouted down stairs that he had died, I expected him to go on into his 90’s as he was such an active and spritely figure, I heard that he used to run up the stairs to his home studio in Holland park. Rather like Titian and Rembrandt who went on to live incredibly long lives considering the periods in which they lived I always felt that Freud would a) live to their old age and b) stood comparison as a modern master to these two mountains of art history though I’m sure that many would disagree with me. I remember the fist time that I went to a Freud show at the Whitechapel gallery as a recent graduate in , I think 1993? Anyway, I was completely blown away by his new work in the early 90’s and I think it is perhaps some of his finest. The huge portraits of Leigh Bowery uncompromisingly draped around Queen Anne chairs were magnificent, huge in both size and ambition and were a real inspiration for me and many figurative painters at the time. The thing that I also admired about Freud was that he stuck to his guns all the way through his career, through Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Conseptualism he continued to do figurative painting. A weaker artist would have jumped on the band wagon but he bucked every trend and did what he believed in and that always results in the purest work. Towards the end of his career his work was fetching millions, I think one was in the region of £17m which is obscene but in comparison to the factories of Koons and Hirst who also command similar prices, Freuds work almost seems worth it. From conversations with his first wife, Kitty he certainly wasn’t the easiest of people to live with which I think is well documented and he certainly caused her a lot of emotional pain. The National Portrait Gallery are putting on a retrospective of his work in February which I know Sarah Howgate has been working on for some years and I suspect it will have some of his final paintings in too. This will be a real blockbuster for the NPG, I would guess that there’s not a museum around the world that wouldn’t want to put on this show so I think it will be quite magnificent.
October 24th, 2011
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