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
I recently made an inspirational visit to Japan, 14 years after my first visit when I won the BP Travel Award and had a solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in 1995 with the resulting work based on the Nissan car workers in Tokyo.
I had wanted to go back for many years and now just about felt like the right time. It was a grueling 10 days exploring every district of Tokyo with the main aim of getting portraits and contextual material. 2000 photographs and experiences later I have got more subject matter than I can shake a stick at.
I went to Tsukiji fish market again which is just about hanging in there ( about to be moved to another part of Tokyo) which is one of the main reasons I wnated to make the visit now before it goes because I still maintain that Tsukiji fish market is one of the most visually inspiring places and experiences on earth and it certaoinly didn’t disappoint 14 years on.It was barely asif a day had passed, it has a timeless almost Dickensian quality like the ancient temples and shrines. I went to Harajuku and met some of the punks there and made loads of portraits. You really haveto be very alert when doing street portraiture , not a genre I particularly like because most of my set ups are extremely controlled in terms of lighting and composition and pose, there is a kind of “winging it” approach and you just haveto take what you can get and hopr the lighting works. I certainly worked my way through a lot of punks and groovers and psychobilly’s , and ravers and costume play girls who congregate there on a Sunday morning, even with a hang over. I had some business cards printed up in Japanese before I went over saying basically I’m an artist from England doing a project on Japanese people, can I take your photograph please. I handed the cards out to peolpe on the street, in cafe’s and bars, in zoo’s, in temples, jazz clubs, everywhere I went and they read it and 9 times out of 10 they obliged.
I love travelling with a camera because it really makes you look at everything twice as hard and completely hightens the visual experience of travelling, I’m always looking , like they say about authors they are always analysing people at dinner parties for their next character or plot. I’m always looking for the next picture and then onto the next, it’s almost like a drug to me.
I also went to Kamakura where the fantastic and huge Daihatsu Buddha calmly sits. Man alive, they knew something about sculptural spirituality back in the 9th century. That whole area is filled with temples and shrines and is the most beautiful place. I got some great portraits of monks there, again just winging it.
I met up with my old friend Anthony from my foundation course in Stafford 20 years ago. He lives in Tokyo and took us to a great underground Japanese Jazz club in Tokyo (ticked that box – as Anne said) . Akita’s club – Dark, dingy and holding an audience of about 20 people. I had pre -arranged to take some portrait photographs of Isao Suzuki. He has played with the giants of American jazz including Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Art Blakey – ( indeed he was one of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the 1960’s, good chops and credentials for sure) He’s in his 70’s now but still looks super cool and I got some great shots and will definitely be doing a portrait of him.
Other areas I especially enjoyed were Asakusa and Ueno, they felt particularly authentic and in many ways the working class areas of Tokyo I guess, in comparison to the gloss of Ginza , Shibuya and Roppongi.
So, lots of inspiration and subject matter, I’m just digesting it at the moment but I know that there is a a lot of potential paintings and drawings there, it’s a case of strict editing I think. For the past 6 months or so I’ve been thinking endlessly about my next big project. While I walk our dog Max twice a day I’m constantly thinking about my work and the next projects. I never sit at a drawing board or easel and wait for the “muse to strike”, ideas come all the time and at any time and never sitting infront of a desk with a white page sketch book. So, I’ve been pacing the streets of Walsall with Max thinking about which direction to push the work. I knew that it was going to be about portraiture, my first love but who. For months I thought about comedians, musicians, outsiders, Hells Angels , Tokyo portraits etc, etc, etc…….. The ideas always come thick and fast and I have problems sorting out the good from the bad like all artists but my usual rule is that if it still seems like a good idea 6 monthjs later then it’s going to work. I felt that a neat, comfortable group of portraits , eg like musicians would work well but after much thought, deliberation, sketchbook work and attempts to contact people I decided that the project would be about PORTRAITURE. 6 months of walking and thinking and development, around my core commission work, and the answer was Portraiture, which I knew all along. I want to keep it open and organic. It’s great to do a full project on Tokyo people or comedians but I enjoy the ecclectic mix of portraits and people. I always say that you can travel 1000’s of miles to find good subject matter but it’s on your own doorstep if you look for it. I love the serendipidy of walking around your own environment and finding interesting people and I didn’t want to neglect that aspect of portraiture. I want to keep it alive and as I say , organic , and constantly growing and open. This will be an ongoing project, certainly not over night so just hang on in there and watch this space.
Finally I’d just like to say thanks to Alex and Eun Ju and Anthony for there kindness generosity while I was in Japan.
November 30th, 2008
I’ve been looking at Leonardo’s sketch books and liked there image text combination and thought process. By no means comparable to Leonardo, just an idle doodle really, “a bit of fun” as Rob Brydon would say.
November 30th, 2008
The endlessly inspiring Bandana.
November 30th, 2008
I had a walk around one of the many allotments in Walsall recently because I thought I’d meet some interesting looking people there. This is a portrait that I finished yesterday so it’s hot off the press. It’s a portrait called “Ron in his Greenhouse”
Ron in his Greenhouse – charcoal, carbon and graphite on paper – 56cm x 49cm
October 14th, 2008
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