HERE and NOW
Portraiture and Other Works
Gallery at St Martins, Lincoln LN1 1ET
10am to 4pm Tuesday 11th to Sunday 16th Nov.
Private Viewing: Tuesday 11th Nov 6pm to 8pm
In this exhibition portraiture is my key subject. My favourite is to paint faces, in real time, direct from life. It is the all-absorbing concentration of the challenge to capture that moment in time, the shapes, the colour, the changing light, the expression, the atmosphere.
This exhibition is an opportunity to show some of my most recent portrait studies which are really sketches in paint, mostly done in 1 ½ – 2 hour sessions at the Draw and Drink sessions in Lincoln run by Ellie Benton.
I will also be showing some older narrative paintings focusing on themes of people at work preparing food. Initially I was inspired by a woman I saw in Thailand cooking noodles in the night market on the busy urban street of Sukhumvit Road, and set about creating paintings from my observations.
I extended this theme by visiting Lincolnshire’s Pocklington’s Bakery and found visual inspiration of the bakers at work. The narrative of the person evolves during the process of drawing and painting. Learning when to stop, in order to maintain the feeling of freshness, is my challenge!
I tend to gravitate towards painting portraits and printmaking, but also enjoy exploring other media.
“The main exhibition is called ‘Georgia, Georgia’ and is inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe. Or at least by an American feminist’s review of an exhibition of her flower paintings I read when I was a photography student. I had come across her name as the partner/wife of Alfred Stieglitz -who at the time was probably the most famous Art-photographer in the world. Recently I’ve seen her ‘Modernist’ New York cityscapes which take similar subject matter to Stieglitz’s “Flat Iron Building” etc. Of course, O’Keeffe left Stieglitz and became arguably more famous as an ‘independent woman artist’ in New Mexico. At the time of the 1970’s review, her famed love of women was being read into her flower images. I wasn’t convinced at the time, but I was left with a mild itch to try looking at my surroundings with O’Keeffe’s supposed attitude. As a result. I’ve put up 20 images in vertical letterbox format.”
