Posts filed under 'Art'
Every Sunday morning in Yoyogi Park in Harajuku hundreds of punks, greasers, costume playgangs and generally trendy young things congregate like peacocks and strut around in all their finery.
This is a drawing that I made recently of a guy that I met at Harajuku station. I wanted a really fresh and lively feel to the background because it was a travel project. I wanted it feel more spontaneous and immediate and juxtapose that to the very tight portrait drawing of the figure which gives the portrait a very fluid context. I was looking at it the other night and the spontaneous lines of the background suggested more memories to me of the actual experience than I got from looking at a photograph of Harajuku which was quite strange and certainly unexpected. I think perhaps your brain is wired differently to interpret a drawing and it fills in all of the gaps where as with a photograph it’s all presented to you in a totally objective manner.
click on the image to enlarge
March 19th, 2009
This is my latest drawing of Ken Billingham in his house in Cradley Heath,West Midlands. It is on A1 size paper and the drawing is approximately 31″ x 23″ ( charcoal, graphite and carbon on paper ).
I met Ken about 18 years ago, man alive! I can’t believe that, in 1991 while I was doing my MA project at Birmingham Art College. I was looking at the deindustrialisation of the west midlands steel industry and the effects it had on the Black Country’s communities.
I met Ken at the foundry where he worked in Cradley Heath, Glynwed Foundry I remember it was called, long since demolished. Ken used to tap the furnaces and catch the moulten steel in metal shanks. I never felt that I really captured him properly back in 1991 so I asked him if he would mind sitting for me agian, which he did just before Christmas.
He is a deeply religious man and has had a series of profound religious experiences so I wanted to bring this out in the drawing of him where I have used the ceramic crucifix which is on his wall in the front room. I wanted to make a drawing which was connected to Rennaisance art and religious imagery, especially with the atmospheric lighting used by Caravaggio so I wanted to create quite strong shadows and contrasts. Ken gesticulates with his hands while he is talking and this is something else I wanted to work on, almost in thoughtful conversation. He’s got such fantastic, big hands which were formed in the foundries of the Black Country and were an integural part of the portrait. The title comes from the candle holders on the ceramic crucifix which I felt was very the way Ken has lived his life.
If you click on the image it should enlarge.
Look at my next entry for the development of the drawing
March 5th, 2009
I made and entry on my blog in January saying that I had done 2 portraits on postcards after the NPG approached artists to do so for their fundraising gala on 3rd March which I think they were selling for £200 . I can now reveal which 2 were mine.
They are about 8″ and the first is a B/W painting of a woman I met in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo and the second is a drawing of a dear friend of mine, Ken Billingham who also features in the next entry.
(If you click on the image they should enlarge)
March 5th, 2009
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
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
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
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
My sister in law, Jane, drew my attention to this article in last weekends Sunday Times magazine by Waldemar Januszczak. It’s a great article about Kitty Godley and he talks about Freud and his relationship with her and my triptych of Kitty which he was amazed to find out was Kitty 60 years later when he was judging the BP Portrait Award in 2006.
Click on the link to see the article.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5244861.ece
December 2nd, 2008
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