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
Gwynedd museum and art gallery in north Wales are showing two of my paintings in the exhibition “The Quality of Things” They are two paintings about my late Grandparents on my mothers side which I made in the mid 1990’s which seems and extremely long time ago now. They were responses to people who meant a lot to me in their old age and subsequent death and these two paintings reflect that theme. Below are the two labels which describe my thoughts about the paintings. If you click on the image they should enlarge.
THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE – GLADYS AND WALTER GREAVES
This is a portrait of my Grandparents Gladys and Walter Greaves in their terraced house in Bloxwich, just outside Walsall in the West Midlands. I knew that they were both getting older and I wanted to capture them both in their home. I made this painting in 1993.
The theme of the painting is “natural forms and synthetic forms”. If you look at the painting Walter is eating an apple which he used to get from the back of the local supermarket when they got rid of them because they were bruised . He has cut the bruises out and it almost echoes the facial characteristics of his face, for example the eye sockets. I made this comparison because the apple is a natural form with natural life cycles in that it is conceived, born, lives , dies. Over on the washing tub there is some decorative artificial fruit and Gladys’ artificial leg because she had both legs amputated through diabetes though she rarely wore the very heavy legs and they were positioned around the house. The fruit and the legs are the synthetic, man made reproductions of natural forms to echo the theme that no matter how technologically advanced we are we can’t compete with nature.
I wanted a sense of “Oldness” in the painting, an old house, old people and old objects with the sense that time is running out. When we talk about “Portraiture” we talk about “Immortalising” somebody and I have always thought that there is a very strong link between Portraiture and Mortality and an inevitable demise which is why I have always felt portraiture to be so very significant.
The portrait is composed in two very basic shapes, a rectangle and a triangle. The rectangle travels around the edges of the painting, up and across the visible and covered pipe work and down the door frame and the triangle is hinted at with the perspective lines of the washing tub and the top of the triangle is the coat hanger above Walter’s head. I have tried to create depth by using both perspective and colour. There is a simple , one point perspective which creates visual depth and warmer reds and oranges in the foreground bring that area closer to the viewer and the oranges and blues, the cooler tones, help the portrait recede in the background area.
MEMORIAL PAINTING -(diptych) – GLADYS AND WALTER GREAVES
In 1995 my grandparents , Gladys and Walter Greaves both died at the age of 90 years old. They were both important to me and I had painted , photographed and drawn them on many occasions.
The first time that I visited their house following their death was quite an emotional experience at the time. It suddenly hit me that they were gone and this momentary core sensation prompted me to make this piece of work which in many ways was a cathartic process.
As I stood in the still and silent living room it brought many memories. It was asif these memories were actually floating around in the room but they were actually floating around in my head . There seemed to be this dual space where the memories simultaneously resonated , in my head and in the room. From this I became interested in seeing the four brick walls as a metaphor for the human skull which contained these memories.
All of their possessions were left untouched in exactly the same place that they had previously been. There was a tremendous sense of absence and emptiness in the house. I began to look around at the objects which provoke these memories and realised how important they had suddenly become as a reference and reflection of their identity. At first glance they are seemingly banal but since their death the personal importance and value of the objects has been elevated and they exist in a new context as an extension and a reminder of them both.
The act of painting these ordinary objects also elevates their importance from the merely banal and I became interested in the relationships between “still life” and “mortality”. Even though there are no figures in this painting I still see it as a portrait
August 1st, 2011
Anne and me went to the BP Portrait Award dinner and ceremony a few weeks ago which was excellent as ever. When it came to announcing the winner there was a live link to Channel 4 news with Jon Snow but there was a delay witha previous item on the news and everybody was stood around in abject silence staring at eachother with raised eyebrows and baited breath for the link to happen which kind of killed the moment a little.
It’s a nice mixed show this year, it’s got more of a feel of the mid 90’s BP Awards about it I think which is much better, I felt it was getting a too photorealist some years. I really liked Al Freney’s painting “At this time of night ” with the Warhol t-shirt on. I really like the idea of a portrait with the figure repeated in two different poses, it’s something I’ve thouht about on a few occasions , especially with very specific sitters who it would work very well with. I like the economy of the painting and the background resonates extremely well I think. Isobel Peachy’s portrait of RH is lovely too, very traditional, I guess Rembrandt / Sargent esque but like Mike Gaskell’s portrait of his son it has a real warmth.
Edward Sutcliffe’s portrait of Glenda Jckson is a very striking portrait. Edward comes from my neck of the woods and as an enthusiastic A Level student came to my studio a few times to pick up tips and write an essay for his A level project. That must have been over 10 years ago now, I think I was painting “Harry Coleman” the first World War veteran when he came. I don’t think I’d like to have been at Glenda’s unveiling though, my God, Tony Blair’s tenure has surely taken its toll on her because she looks so old.
I have really admired Alan Coulson’s work over the past few years, infact I met him briefly and was a lovely guy. I like his detatched portrait of the lady in beautifully coloured turbon. I was a little disorientated by the coloured eye lashes initially but I think they add something to the portrait now.
It’s on until the end of September so if you’re in London and have a free hour drop in , it’s free too.
July 13th, 2011
The National Portrait Gallery has just released a new book charting the last 20 years of the BP Portrait Award which makes it Britain’s longest running sponsored competition. I haven’t got a copy yet, I ment to get one when I was in London last week but my train was too close to leaving so I couldn’t call in. It’s a lavishly illustrated hardback and I suspect there’s about 4 of my paintings in there. Here’s a link to the page;
http://www.npg.org.uk/business/publications/500-portraits-bp-portrait-award.php
July 13th, 2011
I remember the first time I saw John Salt ‘s work. It was as a keen 14 or 15 year old in Bloxwich library around 1983. There was a fantastic huge thick book on Photorealism and it had Chuck Close in, Richard Estes etc… I guess Chuck Close hit me hardest but I saw John’s paintings and thought , ( aside from admiration for the technique) “wow, those paintings are so creepy”, and I imagined what crazy people lived in those caravans in those trailer parks. Now I still think that when I see them…although, in the passage of time they also make me think of “My Name is Earl” too. I still find it strange how people find eachother and end up doing and founding things together, how John left Birmingham in the late 60’s for America and ended up founding super realism with Chuch Close. I guess in the internet days relationships are built much more easily but back then it must have felt a bit like a voyage. John shows in the same gallery as me and is deply admired by all of the artists who came up for the show from all corners of the country as you can see in the pre show drink.
May 9th, 2011
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