Welcome to Art Space Online - ARCHIVE PAGE

I am a visual artist creating images of landscape and space using a mixture of media (pastel, watercolour and oil paint).

I use local landscapes as a starting point often working on-sight. The final pieces are worked up in the studio, many becoming more abstracted, and breaking down into simpler forms, emphasising colour and structure.

Colour is very important in my work; the changing colours of the natural world often become heightened in my work. Colour is used to define and differentiate the shapes within my work. I have been using colour to represent and explore emotions, extending this to work  with groups, designing a series of workshops that encouraged young people to express memories and emotions using abstract shapes and colours.  This led to the creation of a large scale collaborative work.

I have a long term interesting the industrial landscape; I worked on a series of images of boat yards in Bristol, on building sites and completed a series of drawings in an aluminium foundry.  In rural Yorkshire this has moved into an interest in capturing a landscape enclosed by walls and changed by mining.

Artspace Residency…

I will be continuing my own exploration of printing as a starting point for painting. The work will start with mono printing, painting directly onto acetate and then printing on paper or canvas, using acrylic,  the random nature of printing also encourages experimentation and provides a great basis for continued work with paint, charcoal and pastel.

I will be using a mixture of images of the local rural landscape and images of the Leeds city skyline as visual inspiration for work that should become increasingly abstract, as the layers of printing build.

Using Printing as a starting point we can further work with the images using a range of  paint, charcoal and pencil, picking out line and shape.

I will be bringing a selection of sketchbooks, drawings and paintings to the Gallery for visitors to look through.

Working with Others…

All visitors to the Gallery will be encouraged to engage both with the process of making work, the printing and painting, and with thoughts and questions that stimulate create work.

Filed under: Artists at the Gallery
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A collection of British Surrealism brought together by prominent  Leeds collector Dr. Jeffery Sherwin, will be on display at Leeds Art Gallery from 10th July. The exhibition will contain outstanding pieces including work by Eileen Agar, Roland Penrose, Henry Moore, Emmy Bridgewater and Conroy Maddox.

Dr. Sherwin started collecting  in 1986 after seeing the exhibition ‘British Surrealism in the 30s’ at Leeds Art Gallery and is acknowledged as having the largest private collection of British Surrealism in the country. 

Taken from over 220 works the exhibition will contain many important pieces including the Eileen Agar plaster head ‘Angel of Mercy’ accompanied by new research showing that it was originally titled ‘The Politician’ and collaged in fur; a haunting and disturbed head by Leonora Carrington after Max Ernst had left her for the USA and produced when she was in a mental home in Santander Spain suffering from severe depression. This work, displayed alongside a grainy photograph of Carrington sitting with her psychiatrist Luis Morales in 1941. A group of 30’s photo collages by Humphrey Jennings contrasted with his post world war II paintings. Conroy Maddox box Denouement enclosing objects including a photo of Maddox making a sadomasochistic attack on a nun who is wearing silk stockings and clearly enjoying the experience. A Julian Trevelyan work on a roof tile and his painting, ‘Hypnosis’ from the days of taking mesalin, the hallucinatory drug. The painting includes an image of a Calder mobile’. Trevelyan bought the first Calder mobile which is now in the Tate.

All the British women surrealists are represented in the exhibition including Grace Pailthorpe who along with her younger partner by 23 years Reuben Mednikoff produced Freudian dream paintings , mainly of a sexual nature.

The close connection between the British Surrealist and the Republican movement in Spain at the time of the Civil War is well represented in Dr Sherwin’s collection. An extraordinary pen and ink drawing ‘Mass in Pamplona’ by Andre Masson depicts the Bishop of Pamplona as a Donkey handing out a holy communion wafer emblazed with a Swastika surrounded by acolytes and a Goyaesque execution squad etc .

The Leeds College of Art surrealist connection of the 60-70’s is represented by Patrick Hughes and Anthony Earnshaw and their pupils Paul Hammond and Glen Baxter. Jeffrey Sherwin commissioned the anarchist and surrealist box maker Anthony Earnshaw to make two boxes after his heart attack and by-pass. The two works ‘The Glamorous Heart Attack; and ‘Make Mine a Quadruple’ made with bits from his surgery are part of the show.

Filed under: Exhibitions
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