Monday, 18 March 2019

Finally hitting the mark...

New paintings at 'Quiet Signs', the Asylum Gallery
l-r 'Lock-Up, 'Semi-detached Arrangement', '10.15 Saturday Night
I opened my exhibition, ‘Quiet Signs’ at Wolverhampton’s Asylum Gallery last Friday night to a packed out and enthusiastic audience. It was a great night where I met some wonderful people encountering my work for the first time, and so many seemed to connect with the images in the paintings of nocturnal streets, and seeing how they reflected the contemporary English urban landscape. It was really heartening. After exhibiting many of these paintings in two large exhibitions in 2018 to little response, I felt that they had finally hit their mark in a way I was hoping for.
I had hopefully thought that the small artist-run Asylum Gallery might be a suitable venue for these paintings when I applied there, and was also aware that the gallery has also worked extremely hard to build an arts scene around the venue with the frequent exhibitions, events and opportunities they offer to local artists in the area, that may attract a bigger audience to see my work, and I was right for once.
'Not Coming Home Tonight'
I was also pleased to show some new paintings, some new smaller ones, but also four large canvasses that I have made in the last few weeks in a really busy and enjoyable period of painting with a lot of renewed energy and purpose. I’ve been having a great time in the studio,  and I feel on a creative roll at the moment and am really pleased with these new pieces which re-assert an interest in more formal experiments. They are a lot more abstract and spare, and much more colourful too, than recent work, and were received well, as well as these new books I have collaborated with my artist friend, Chris Cowdrill on.



Anyway, to finish this post, I’ll share a lovely quote left in the comments book that summed things up nicely… it's been great to exhibit in my native Black Country again

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