I'm afraid this is another 'filler' post while I wait for the new psu for my PC to turn up, after which I have to fit the damned thing and hope everything works! So unfortunately major site changes and decent pictures of new paintings are still on hold for a while. Nevertheless there is some news to report, the poll for naming the British Art Show 7 fringe events has just closed and will be officially known as 'Plymouth Art Fringe' or PAF for short, look out for the #PAF hashtag on Twitter and a new account shortly, the Facebookgroup page remains unchanged at http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=122824517730374 so keep an eye out for the latest news and get involved if you can. And just to maintain a bit of visual interest here are a couple of phone pictures of the 'Pimpernel Smith' paintings I've been working on. The completed 'You are Doomed, Captain of Murderers' and the first pass at 'Aphrodite Callipygous'. I'm not telling you what that means, you'll have to look that up for yourselves, it's reference that remains unexplained in the movie but does not make a 'respectable godess' (have a look at the youtube video at about 8.00 minutes in).
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Something of a catch up post after a busy week of networking and, well just working really. Not a great start when the Art's Birthday events scheduled for Plymouth last Saturday failed to happen. Doubtless post mortems (post mortii?) have already been held but the problems were not of the making of the of the artists. A real shame and something of a disappointment.
By contrast the British Art Show fringe meeting on Tuesday night was ridiculously well attended and full of like minded people desperately trying to find something to disagree about. Being artists they managed it in the end but it was a close run thing. It was great to finally put faces to Facebook profiles and Twitter names and meet so many fellow artists in the flesh. I'm looking forward to the next meeting and watching developments closely. The Fringe Facebook page is here http://on.fb.me/edXTqZ if you'd like to be involved. Thursday's Arts Matrix relaunch was another chance to network and to listen to Matthew Collings (him off the telly) talk about his own work for a change. Arts Matrix details and future events here http://artsmatrix.plymouthart.ac.uk/ In between all this frankly unaccustomed extra-mural activity I did manage to cram in some solid working time. The Leslie Howard diptych is into its final (I hope) tinkering stage and I made a start at yet another painting of the sainted Leslie, this time taken from 'Pimpernel Smith' rather than 'The First of the Few'. A couple of phone pictures (with provisional titles) are below and I'll post everything to the main site once I've fixed my PC (I'm borrowing my wife's laptop for this post). I'm also thinking about a major site redesign but more news on that next time ... See what I did there? Yes it's another Leslie Howardcentric blog entry. There are times, that every artist knows only too well, when a piece of work resolutely and stubbornly fails to spring to life. In the case of what I do this is often intimately, although not completely bound up with the idea of 'likeness'. It can be doubly difficult when the source is a single frame of film which may not necessarily look 'like' the commonly held idea of the person it actually depicts.
Sometimes this is no problem, for instance both the Will Hay pictures on the gallery page manage to resemble the man whilst looking nothing like each other. Does that make any sense at all? Either way if you're thinking of buying one Will, or maybe even the pair, I have had some interest in these so don't procrastinate, easy terms are available. Sales pitch over, what I'm trying to say is, 'I can't get this bastard picture to look like Leslie Howard whatever I do! (so far).' I'm sure it will happen, I'm just getting fed up waiting for it, so far it's been David Cameron, then an old boss of mine (a full Colonel OBE no less) and earlier this afternoon looked a bit like my Dad (when he was in the navy in 1945). As these are all authority figures (with the exception of David Cameron who doesn't figure at all in my opinion) I'm sure a psychiatrist would have something to say about it. Fortunately I don't know any psychiatrists. It will, as I have said before, be fixed. Although that may have to wait until Sunday as it is Art's birthday tomorrow and I'm off to the party! http://bit.ly/fNUYmg Welcome to the first picturepalace blog post of 2011, I trust everyone is rested, replete and content after the festivities? The obvious exception being any Autralians reading this who will be understandably gutted about the Ashes, don't worry, you'll be over it in a couple of years. Any confused readers in non cricket playing regions of the globe, feel free to ignore the previous sentence.
I'm happy to report that it was a quiet Christmas in the picturepalace household and while very little paint was actually applied to canvas source material arrived in abundance. It is a strange quirk of DVD release schedules that many of the movies I've been trying to track down recently are only available as part of a boxed set or are prohibitively priced on their own. This can be a blessing in disguise. For instance, looking for a copy of Powell and Pressburger's 'I Know Where I'm Going' I found it as part of an eleven film set for £16(ish) at HMV. Bargain! Margaret Lockwood and Stewart Granger in 'Love Story' is another box set purchase that also includes 'Bank Holiday', Hitchcock's 'The Lady Vanishes' (more cricket references from Charters and Caldecott,) 'The Wicked Lady' and others. And finally something else to thank the Aussies for, 'Tawny Pipit' arrived packaged with another rural wartime movie that I've never seen, 'Great Day' http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0037748/ somebody down under really knows how to programme a double bill. There was also some actual work done over Yuletide where 'The First of the Few' has morphed into a diptych depicting the apotheosis of Leslie Howard. I've basically completed the 'first pass' of both elements ie. getting the canvas covered and everything in the right place, unfortunately somewhere along the line the blessed Leslie appears to have mutated into the very much not sainted David Cameron! This state of affairs will not last long believe me. As it provided me with a bit of a giggle however I'm sharing it with you here. Getting a slight touch of cabin fever here on the snowy Bere Peninsula, no buses for a couple of days and the first post for three just hit the doormat, chocolate supplies low but not yet critical. All of which means of course that I should be taking the opportunity to work solidly and get on with things, which I am, sort of. 'The First of the Few' painting I was planning in the previous post has morphed into a diptych which is still in progress leaving 'The Man in the White Suit' on hold for the moment as I've decided to concentrate on a series which I'm hoping will form the core of an exhibition (hopefully as part of the British Art Show 7 Fringe next year). I have a title for the show 'The Demi-Paradise' (after the 1943 Laurence Olivier film here http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0035793/) and the central premise (conceit if you will) is that all the paintings are derived from British wartime movies. It might not feel like it to anyone who grew up on a Sunday afternoon television diet of 'The Dambusters' and 'The Colditz Story' but during the war years themselves the British film industry (at least compared to the Americans) made few films where combat was central to the story, preferring to produce a vision of an England and its people (and it was almost exclusively England) rooted in a bucolic agrarian past yet able to adapt to change and to summon a steely resistance to outside threats. Many were more than just propaganda however and revealed a real ambiguity about the status quo and attitudes to class.The obvious examples are probably 'Went the Day Well', when the local squire turns out to be a fifth columnist or Eric Portman's genuinely creepy turn in 'A Canterbury Tale', both movies which that bastion of unquestioning Britishness 'The Daily Mail' has given away as freebies in the last couple of years (not big on irony or self awareness the 'Mail'). 'Tawny Pipit' is one movie that I've had to track down on DVD from Australia (rather than as a bootleg) and is unlikely to be given away by the 'Mail' anytime soon, it's the only time you are ever likely to see the inhabitants of an English village lustily belting out 'The Internationale' whilst waving Soviet flags, and all in a film about green issues before there ever was such a term. Can't wait for it to turn up! In the meantime here's a youtube video made by an American fan of the film who also manages to rather miss the point with the music, enjoy ... No idea why I chose a Velvet Underground song to title this post, just popped into my head but it seems appropriate as I'm posting mainly about stuff that's going to be happening next year.
Firstly though congratulations to Susan Philipsz on this year's Turner Prize win and maximum kudos to the students (and others) who occupied Tate Britain at the same time, here's The Guardian video report http://bit.ly/gHhcFN nice to see the support the protest got from the great and the good. And just for the record (listen very carefully, I shall say this only once). I may be what might loosely be termed a 'proper' painter (in other words I currently deal in images and 'likenesses' to one degree or another) but I am not now, nor ever have been, nor ever will be a 'Stuckist' and contemporary art of all stripes is where my heart lies. The conceptual basis of what I do is absolutely central to the premise of the art that results. Which I hope will be the last piece of 'artspeak' to appear on this blog for a while (although I can't promise). The big news for Plymouth concerns the advent of 'British Art Show 7' http://www.britishartshow.co.uk/ will be arriving in venues across the city next September http://bit.ly/eLsRTZ Actually this is probably not news to a great many people but as I've only recently realised the significance of the event (and I'm an artist, it's my business to know this stuff) I make no apology for attempting to spread the word as much as possible. Where you, me and the butcher's dog come in is in trying to utilise (exploit is such an ugly word, don't you think?) the publicity and interest that such an event is designed to generate for our own not so nefarious purposes. In other words a 'fringe' that accompanies the main event, complements it, critques it, capitalises on and generally highlights local creativity and changes things for the better as regards the visual arts in the city and beyond. To this end there is now a Plymouth Fringe-BAS2011 Facebook Group over here http://on.fb.me/edXTqZ Join up, spread the link, retweet and disseminate as you wish. Denham (that is my second studio, otherwise known as the spare room) is open for business. Having spent most of the day in Tavistock I came home to find that my loving wife has basically transferred my studio from Elstree (the currently sub zero garage) and reinstalled everything in the spare bedroom. Thus my commute to work is even shorter (and considerably warmer). This is an act of extreme kindness and consideration on her part, or she knows me too well and thinks I've been using the weather as an excuse to procrastinate! Either way it's time to get back to some real work starting with 'The Man in the White Suit'.
I've also been looking at a couple of Leslie Howard movies (incidentally if anyone has a DVD copy of 'Pimpernel Smith' they can lend me please drop me an email) and thought 'First of the Few' might prove to be a good source. I was right, but I'm not sure I've got the bottle to use the image I'd really like to. David Niven flying into the sunset having given Jerry a good thrashing. I know it's cheese, but it's sincere cheese and I like that, what does anybody else think? Oh God, sorry about the truly dreadful pun in the title, the cold is getting to my brain! With temperatures in my studio (that's the garage by the way) hovering around the 2ºC mark it's time for a little indoor work with no heavy lifting. Hence I'm rifling through my DVD collection for my next series of subjects. I've invested in some slightly larger (24" x 18") canvases which are spot on in terms of aspect ratio (1.33:1) for the pictures I have in mind. I've also managed to acquire a goodly collection of Ealing movies that weren't already in thepicturepalace library (ebay is your friend). So first up for consideration are the collected works of the very wonderful Alexander Mackendrick http://bit.ly/eFB9HC and in particular the absolutely beautifully photographed (along with brilliantly written and hilarious to boot) 'The Man in the White Suit' http://bit.ly/gwGB4v Next up will be 'Whisky Galore' http://bit.ly/fiVXzO but the screengrabs below will give you some idea of why 'The Man in the White Suit' particularly appeals as a subject. All those lovely inky blacks for starters! Is the headline for the story on page 20 of today's Plymouth Herald underneath a picture of me looking every inch 'the 49-year-old painter' presenting the portrait of the mayor to Councillor Ted Fry who was opening the event. Full story and picture here http://bit.ly/9y4Vr6
Well today was thepicturepalace live! event and I was there and so were quite a few others. I'll post a fuller blog entry when the Plymouth Herald have run the story and I can link to their coverage which will hopefully feature me presenting my portrait of the Lord Mayor to Plymouth City Council. Yes folks, that's how you get your work accepted into a public collection, you give it to them. I just wonder if it will end up somewhere in the City Museum and Art Gallery next to a Joshua Reynolds? Anyway a sleepless night was worth it as it seemed to go down very well and there is talk of re-presenting it to the Lord Mayor herself in the council chamber (in which case I hope she likes it). The work in question is pictured below in between a view of my display and one of me behind said display resplendent in thepicturepalace exclusive Will Hay T shirt. I know, a T shirt over another shirt, it's a tough look to carry off but I think I got away with it.
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Dave EvansWork in progress and other stuff that happens. Archives
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