After the rain the sun… a private view report

After yesterday’s post on the damp woes of preparation, the sun came out on exhibition opening day! As 6pm drew nearer, the Cambridge skies became brighter, people arrived at the gallery and Prosecco was dispensed.

The finishing touches: cleaning the windows.

Had to keep re-hanging as people kept buying paintings (strangely enough…). One on the top right wouldn’t stay straight. Both Study for Brief Encounter II and Study For Tea Party IV had several buyers vying to be first with their cheque books. Tea Party went to a new home in Ipswich and Brief Encounter to new collectors in St Ives. Pretty successful evening all round! The exhibition continues at Cambridge Book & Print Gallery until June 30th.

 

It’s the day! (Exhibition day that is)

So all the preparation has happened, every visit to the framer, suppliers, the gallery, have coincided with a torrential downpour. What a summer! This is one batch of work going to be framed…

It’s June by the way

A car full of paintings wrapped against the weather.

And we’re off…

Of course, by late afternoon, the sun was shining, but you’ll have to just believe me.

Then it was our turn to check and update the catalogue, plough on with publicity and do some smartening up of a couple of frames.

Liberon wax

When I’m cleaning windows…

And the finished pile keeps growing

Circus People having a bit of TLC

The oak frame of Circus People having been waxed

And so… it’s all ready for the opening night in Cambridge. Here’s a little peek at some of the paintings in the exhibition. Do come along if you can between 17-30 June at Cambridge Book & Print Gallery. And please tell your friends!

View From Kentish Town

Study For The Third Man II

The Tiff

Half Moon Street

Spire

Cousins

For further information see right here:

It’s exhibition time!

Do please come along to the first show of Michael’s paintings since 2000. On show will be lots of works not seen publicly until now, plus a few favourites, and a new range of 5 beautiful and affordable giclee prints, including Tea Party (as seen on the poster below.) Looking forward to seeing you there!

Picture post 13: flowering Apple Tree

MR 48 Apple tree, oil on canvas, 340 x 315, 1981.

One of Michael’s early influences was Vincent Van Gogh, which is clear in this small painting of a flowering apple tree in the family garden in Cambridgeshire. He had recently visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and was working through some ideas gleaned from the trip. The paint is thickly applied on the canvas and the colours sing through the layers, reflecting the layers of  blossom on a tree. Michael preferred to paint from life at this point, he didn’t use photographs as a reference until much later, so this painting really captures a moment in time.

Picturepost 11: Soho Hairdresser

MR 78 Soho hairdresser, acrylic on card, 235×165, 1990.

One damp and cold winter’s evening on a family visit to London, Michael’s attention was captured by the lights, colours and activity in a hairdresser’s shop in Soho. He stood outside the door, sketching with oil pastels until he had enough information on the page, but not before his three small children had loudly stated their utter boredom with waiting for him to finish. The black panel on the right side indicates his constant testing the boundaries of composition and also prefigures his experiments with dense blocks of colour that we’ve seen in Picturepost 1 (Closed Visits) and Picturepost 3 (Grantchester Meadows).

Picturepost 10: Study for ‘Poll Tax Riots’

MR 58 Study for Poll Tax Riots, acrylic on card, 345×515, 1991

The Poll Tax Riots exploded onto British streets in March 1990 in response to the introduction that year of the Community Charge. The widespread newspaper coverage provided plenty of images for Michael to begin a series of works, which culminated in a large oil painting of a rioting crowd, which will be the subject of a future post. This b/w gouache sketch captures the intense anger many people felt about the imposition of what came to be called the poll tax. He was naturally attracted to the challenge of conveying emotion and energy in his work; sometimes the atmosphere would be calm and quiet but with events like this he was inspired by the energy that drove the action. He always tried to remain apolitical, but actually he was strongly against the policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government, believing that the existence of the working class was threatened by their policies.

Picturepost 9: NSW Rockpool

Michael travelled to Australia in the mid-70s staying with friends in New South Wales and Western Australia  and, as you can imagine, he recorded as much as he could on paper and board, rather than with a camera. The light and colours in the landscape inspired a series of paintings of which this is perhaps the most complete. In Australia he felt that he was looking at the world with new eyes and his already strong sense of colour was developed significantly during and after that trip. This rockpool was close to a friend’s farm that lay 20 miles up a dirt track and with the neighbours five miles away. He was enchanted by the light reflecting on the surface of the water, and by the lizards that stalked through the grass, looking for a tasty lunch of snake.

Picturepost 8: Highcliffe landscape

MR 397 Highcliffe, oil on card, 295×335, 1995

This dramatic landscape depicts the top of the cliff at Highcliffe in Dorset; many family holidays were spent on the beach below. Michael’s favourite place to paint was looking east from the cliff, towards Lymington, with the Isle of Wight to the south. With this series he was interpreting landscape more simply than he’d done before – the question was how to strip the image down to its most basic shapes, without losing the essence of what he was seeing. The paint is thickly applied, which gives the painting a tactile surface and lends depth to the sharp white arrow shape.

Picturepost 7: Study For Tea Party

MR 64 Study for tea party, acrylic on card, 375×470, 1991

Capturing on canvas the energy that comes from a large group of people was a constant inspiration for Michael. A child’s birthday party was the setting for this lively work, which is part of a long running series that culminated in several oil paintings. The source material was a selection of family photographs, some portrait commission work, and drawing from the life. He wasn’t especially interested in the fact that his own children feature, only in the challenges of the work itself. Family photos are often messy; they’re often unplanned, they are snapshots of a moment in time, which is why we all like them. In the right artist’s hands they make productive source material. For example the old man in the hat was the elderly father of a friend; he had died recently and he seemed the perfect ‘watcher’ at the feast, but more importantly he balances the composition. Several sketches and paintings of this man exist, but he certainly wasn’t at this party.

Picturepost 5: More from the Garden In France series

MR 65 Garden in France, acrylic on card, 730×425, 1991

In Picturepost 4 we showed you one aspect (the mother and child) of the scene in this painting, Garden In France, which in turn is part of a large series inspired by a teaching trip to France. The image has been abstracted to blur the shapes of the figures and it’s necessary to step back when viewing the work in order to process the activity captured on the paper.  The brush strokes are very lively and this is a technique Michael used to portray action. Even though the people are sitting around a table there is still much activity – serving food, talking, eating and drinking, dealing with the baby. The summer heat is implied by the prominent spotty parasol and even though the colours are cool, the picture still suggests a hot, sunny day.