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WELCOME TO MY BLOG

Amongst other more random entries you will find information about any current exhibitions where you can see my work, together with details of forthcoming life drawing and/or painting classes that I teach.

If you would like to know more about me my website has more biographical information and a large selection of images of my artwork.

Wednesday 25 June 2014

Multi-tasking - Warwickshire Open Studios 2014


My annual exhibition, together with my jeweller partner, as part of Warwickshire Open Studios has been more frenetic than usual. Crazily, I like to exhibit new work as some visitors come every year and I feel obliged not to display work that they have already seen. I am not a very prolific painter. I remember being taken on by my first London gallery in the seventies (Nicholas Treadwells). Nick asked about my output and when I said it was around eight paintings a year he laughed and said that I must get faster as a dealer needs around twenty to justify promoting an artist. Despite not increasing my productivity I was with him for seventeen successful years and nearly forty years later I am still only producing around eight paintings a year. I do paint faster, but I prefer to spend much more time choosing ideas and gathering information for my imagery. 
                                       After a lean period for sales since my last London gallery was a victim of the recession I made several sales this past year (mainly as a result of collectors coming to me). This made a welcome 'dent' in the work that I would have shown in this Open Studio show and necessitated a change in my usual working method. I normally work on only one painting at a time but I decided to start four at once in the hope that I would have them ready for Open Studios. I had previously tried working on two at a time (this makes sense if you paint in oils as you can move on to the other painting when one is too wet to work on). I however found that one of the pair became a 'favourite' and ended up better than the other, whereas if I do them 'back to back' and put all my effort into each one in turn they are equally successful. Contrary to my expectations I found working on four was both enjoyable and fruitful - as to whether they are any good, the viewers will have to make up their own mind. If they are well received it puts me in a quandary as I am obviously capable of increasing my output. Previously I had used some of the extensive preparatory work that didn't make the 'cut', and become a painting, as a subject for drawing. This time I didn't have the luxury of being too choosy and all the competing ideas became paintings.
                                I am an adherent to the 'less is more' school of thought as regards painting, both in terms of stripping down extraneous detail within each image and only painting the ideas that I find truly compelling. This facet of my personality could be interpreted as laziness but because I regard my life as an artist as a quest for some sort of enlightenment or insight, so the filtering of ideas and discarding of unnecessary or distracting detail is to me an essential part of the process. I realise that I have a lot more to say on this subject but I will save this for a future 'post'. Please take a look at my website if you would like to see the new paintings.
                                       Just to end on a lighter note below is my favourite quote on 'multi-tasking". The inimitable Billy Connolly while commenting on the prevailing view that men are unable to manage two activities simultaneously said….

"If women are so good at multi-tasking, how come they can't have a headache and sex at the same time?" 

   

Tuesday 21 January 2014

Forthcoming Exhibitions

There are two exhibitions coming up that I am participating in which I hope you will be able to visit :-

"Oneself As Another"

 The first is a major museum show at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol "Oneself As Another". It is curated by the irrepressible Jemma Hickman of Bo.Lee Gallery (formerly of Bath but now operating from London). There are works by an illustrious line up of modern and contemporary figurative artists and I feel privileged to be included among them (details of the exhibition and some of the artists appear below). The preview of the show is supporting Changing faces a U.K. based charity that supports people with disfigurements.


'Likeness" - Neil Moore, 81.5 x 56cms, Oil on canvas, RWA 2014


Oneself As Another, a major exhibition curated in partnership with London-based bo.lee projects, bringing together a select group of painters, sculptors and photographers whose work explores the definition of each individual’s sense of ‘self’.
The exhibition includes work by leading twentieth century artists such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, famed for their brutal exposure of the individual psyche. These are shown alongside work by artists who offer an alternative to contemporary portraiture – one which acknowledges, yet refuses, the freak show of difference.
The exhibition will also include the first showing of Sanctae, an Arts Council England-funded installation by leading South West based artist Ione Rucquoi. This dramatic and moving piece provides a place for reflection, consisting of an architecturally-devised space within the gallery inhabited by larger-than-life photographic images of naked, female subjects, adorned with individually painted gold-leaf halos.
The show also presents the ‘Damaged Human’ series by Sarah Ball (2012 Welsh Artist of the Year) - beautifully rendered miniature portraits derived from medical archive photographs. Works by London-based painter Wanda Bernardino and BP Portrait prize-winner Johan Andersson likewise revel in the notion of what is revealed or hidden, while renowned photographer Bob Carlos Clarke toys with the taboo, confronting us on the edges of decency.
By bringing the unseeable and unsayable to the fore, this exhibition offers the viewer the chance to reconcile aspects of one’s own, personal narrative through the brave acknowledgement of Another."

" The Human Clay Revisited"  
"Solstice" - Neil Moore, 137 x 91.5cms, oil on canvas,  Ropewalk 2014

The second is at the Ropewalk Gallery in Humberside. Entitled the "Human Clay revisited", it begins on Saturday 8th March and continues until Sunday 20th April. For those of you not old enough to remember the original Human Clay exhibition - it was a major show of twentieth century figurative art selected by Ron Kitaj held at the Hayward gallery in 1976. Many painters, who had been steadfastly continuing in the then unfashionable figurative tradition were given a platform by this touring show, establishing the contemporary relevance of figurative art for a new generation.  'Art'household names Bacon , Freud, Auerbach, Kossof were included (as well as Kitaj, who coined the phrase for them as the "School of London" before, sadly, leaving for the U.S.A. where he hoped his talents would receive better recognition).