Coming Up....

 

'Winter Field', oil on canvas, 70 x 80cms, 2020-Prizewinner!

I’m a prizewinner! A few weeks ago I was informed that I, alongside two others, including my close artist friend Andrew Smith, had had our respected artwork selected as prizewinners in Stourbridge’s General Office Gallery’s Winter Open exhibition. I haven’t won a prize since I won the History Prize in my first year at Secondary School 40 years ago (I’m afraid it was a slow descent for my school career after that...) so I’m really pleased, not least because the exhibition was judged ‘blind’ by three notable judges, artist Jo Naden, Glenn Howells architect, and the photographer/artist John Myers, who is an artist I really admire and whose ideas of the ‘banal and boring’ have influenced some of my own work. And the prize? To take part in a group exhibition at General Office with the other two prizewinners later in the year, which is exciting.

In May I’m also exhibiting at the esteemed Ikon Gallery in Birmingham for the first (and probably last!) time in an exhibition, ‘Ikon For Artists’ aimed at celebrating and supporting artists during the continuing Covid pandemic who are based in Birmingham. All artworks are for sale, and I’ve seen on social media that many of the local artists I know and whose work I like will also be exhibiting, so that’s great to be showing alongside some of these for the first time. I hope I get to meet some of them too but I’m not sure about the Covid restrictions and whether the exhibition will have a private view or not (I suspect not). I’ll be exhibiting a painting I made last year at the start of lockdown, ‘The Green Door’.

'The Green Door', oil on canvas, 120 x 90cms, 2020

I’m also trying to plan a possible two exhibitions with several of the artists that participated in this year’s Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year 2021 competition in the heats at West Wycombe Park. It has been agreed that we can exhibit in the National Trust House located in the grounds of the estate, but we are just looking more closely at the logistics of it all, and we are also looking at other venues in the Buckinghamshire area that may be interested in holding an exhibition of our work on the back of the our connection with the TV competition (not show). If this comes off we hope to present the exhibitions in late June/early July. It will be so great to meet the artists I worked alongside in my own heat, but also the other artists from episode 4, without the stress of the competition hanging over us and hopefully get to know them all a bit better. I’m really looking forward to it.

I feel really upbeat about all of these upcoming events. After a terrible year of cancelled exhibitions, isolation, lockdowns etc it’s great to be part of some exciting exhibitions that sees me, and all the other artists, back out in the world again and showing work to expectant audiences (including myself). 

Dana Schutz in Wakie...

I do love painting, and at the end of January I saw an exhibition of paintings by American Dana Schutz that completely blew my socks, and was at another level than almost any other contemporary painting I’ve seen. It was at the rather brilliant Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, and I travelled up keen to see the show, surprised and curious that this much feted Brooklyn based painter was showing in Wakie of all places. I say that, but the Hepworth gallery is a major international exhibition space, with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park also a short drive away. It’s just that I used to have a studio right behind where the gallery has been built near the river, on the top floor of an old mill. It was a huge and cheap space, the biggest space I’ve ever worked in, which I shared with two other artists, but really had to myself as they never turned up, which, in my experience, is often the way with these studio set-ups. I’ve often worked in shared studios, hoping to meet and engage with other artists, but I’ve been the only one ever there. It’s sadly defined much of my experience as an ‘artist’. 

 

Anyway, Schutz’s large, colourful, funny, paintings were a truly joyous revelation that had me grinning from ear to ear as I walked around.  

 

'Piano In The Rain'

 'Bra Removal'

Populated by rather melancholy individuals, couples, or large crowds, in scenes of weird psycho-dramas all of their own making, and in their own painted world, they were so inventive and witty. But the painter’s technical dexterity and seemingly effortless skill left me truly taken aback. The use of colour was terrific for one, but the handling was in another league.  Each mark, dash, and stroke and wonderful line and shape seemed to have this strange life of it’s own within this amazing cohesive whole. They were so fresh and alive. They also seemed to take on the legacy of Picasso, in a way that no other figurative painter seems to want to touch, and turn it inside out and make it so contemporary. I can’t remember when I’ve seen a better painter, I really can’t. I’m  so glad I went.  

 'The Flasher' 

 I’d previously only ever seen one of Schutz’s paintings before, in New York a few years ago, and had not been that impressed by their Expressionist tendencies, as I was desperate to move away from these in my own work. But these works in Wakefield were also very recent, and seemed much more sophisticated and fresher in their technique than the one I had seen then. Weirdly, when I was painting in that studio in Wakefield I was also painting very large figurative canvasses that contained their dense narratives and psycho-dramas of their own. 

                                                                         David Tremlett, '3 Wall Drawings', Ikon 

I also went to see David Tremlett’s wall drawings (not paintings, he is very distinct about this) at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham yesterday, which were really impressive. Their blocks and bands of colour and geometry really chimed with some of my current thinking for my own paintings, so that was really inspiring. I really think I should look further at Tremlett’s work, and I shall go and see this again when I’m not with my wonderful, but very loud, daughter who just loves testing the acoustics at Ikon, as well as the Martin Creed singing lift (which both my children love). 

 3 Wall Drawings

 

Still Game...

Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

-->

You’re really spoilt for choice for great painting exhibitions in the region at the moment, with terrific shows by Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall. 

 Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall

I visited the Ged Quinn show yesterday, being only vaguely familiar with his surreal and theatrical landscape paintings, but this exhibition also presented some peculiar still lives and portraits. All of the work is some sort of riff on different traditions, or genres, and historical periods in paintings and heavy on complex narrative that can often be alienating in certain artist’s hands, but not so here. I’m not really interested in narrative painting, but with these works there was a sense of inclusivity and openness that drew you in to the strange symbolic buildings, objects and figures that occupied the appropriated romantic landscapes of hills and woodland, rivers and forests. You didn’t feel you had to know exactly what all these things meant or stood for to enjoy the work and bring yourself to it. A lot of the work reminded me of the late, great Scottish painter, Steven Campbell, whose dense narrative paintings were also often humourous and rewarding, but with a more off the cuff technique than Quinn’s more slickly painted works. A sign of the times.

 

Ged Quinn

--> These qualities were far removed from Hurvin Anderson’s paintings at Ikon, whose paintings were lush and rich with great and varied painterly expression, experimentation and command. The landscape in most of Anderson’s paintings was that of his adopted home of Trinidad, although the view always seemed to be seen at a distance, through wire fences or windows, always just out of reach, which created a dark undertow to the light filled large canvasses. 

 Hurvin Anderson

-->

The execution of the paintings was just very exciting, with a sense that the artist would leave no stone unturned in exploring the myriad possibilities of oil painting to realize his vision. My favourite paintings in the show were a suite of works called ‘Peter’s Room’, set in a barbers shop. These were a series of repetitive paintings with only subtle differences between many of them, before the introduction of a figure in the later ones, representing the marking of time in this communal space. The revealing layers of paint and the zones where edges and shapes met and overlapped or collided are the things that really excite me (which is like some sort of sad confession).  The painting that I most enjoyed though, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a large black and grey urban scene of a street in what rightly or wrongly I’m presuming was Birmingham (top of the post)

 

 Hurvin Anderson

-->

I’ve been making some spontaneous small paintings of my own in the studio in the last two weeks, with a view to present them alongside the larger paintings in January’s ‘Black Highway’ exhibition.  If you are in the region I'd recommend these shows.