Empty Streets

Recent painting, oil on canvas, 60 x 45cms

Anxious times. Empty Streets. A lot of my paintings seem to have a different resonance at the moment as we all (well we should be shouldn’t we?) head indoors for self-isolation. I’m sure it will need to be lockdown next week.

I was sent home from college last week. I left with a sudden sense of loss for the students I may not see again and those positive, creative relationships you build with many of them as their teacher. It was a sense I saw in many of their eyes too. A sense of loss mixed with shock and sadness. 

Recent painting, oil on canvas, 60 x 45cms

Last week I did these two paintings. I particularly like the one of the bus stop (yes, that’s what it is), but the other one which depicts a delivery van, it’s interior light opening up its insides onto the empty street in the evening rain like some weird spacecraft, would seemed the most prescient as it was based on a photograph I took several weeks ago.

New Exhibitions....

A recent drawing in the studio, approx A1 in size

I’m pleased to announce that I have been offered two exhibitions later in the year, both in libraries, but of quite differing sizes. The first one is in September at The Hive in Worcester, Europe’s first joint University and public library. It’s a pretty big place, and has a lot of visitors so that’s a real bonus. I’ve also offered to hold a few workshops and talks with Fine Art students from the University of Worcester. This will be a large exhibition in which I aim to curate with new and older work to show a broader range of my paintings, but also to attempt to contextually frame my work involving the landscape/places a bit differently. This is inspired by a lot of recent reading but also other connections and links that I’ve been mulling over for the last few years but have found difficult to give a better shape to. I’ll say more about that later.

The second exhibition is in November at the small gallery space at Malvern Library. A friend had a show there a couple of years ago which I thought looked great, so I applied with the view that it would be a really nice venue to show a broad span of work too, but smaller pieces I rarely get chance to show such as prints and drawings. I’m really looking forward to both exhibitions.

'Itchin and Scratchin'- Postscript

Pinter Denzil Forrester

As a brief postscript to my last post I organised a trip to Nottingham Contemporary for my students to see ‘Itchin and Scratchin’ and they loved the exhibition too. One can never tell how these visits will go (the Jasper Johns exhibition at the RA a couple of years ago was a complete disaster for instance), but they were so engaged with Denzil’s work, the themes, the techniques, the dazzling colour and kaleidoscopic compositions, it was really heartening. I haven’t had such an excited response to an exhibition by students ever now I think about it. 

In the study room lots of the students were drawing each other across the table inspired by Denzil’s drawings and a video of him talking about his experience of drawing in nightclubs. Such a rich learning experience for them.