Seven of my paintings are currently on display at the Jeannie Avent Gallery, SE22, till Feb 3rd.
I’ve lived in East Dulwich since 1986, and I’ve exhibited with Jeannie Avent many times over the years – I live just round the corner. That’s how we could arrange this current show safely during lockdown, almost without contact. Though the gallery is closed, there’s a great view of the artwork through the wrap-around windows, on busy North Cross Road. I love seeing the gallery lit up at night with the paintings glowing like jewels inside, and I hope they’ll give people a moment of pleasure as they pass by!
There are 3 local landscapes on display – two stormy Peckham Rye Parks, and a yearning view over local rooftops towards the City and the Shard, painted from my attic during the first lockdown. There’s a fresh Welsh landscape of a rural lane on an unusual tall canvas format, partnered by another tall canvas showing my own summer balcony out through the doorway between the ruby-red sitting-room curtains. The world has been a bit limited for us in the last year.
Then there are two big canvases that normally hang together in my flat. “Evening Swimming Pool” shows a group of evening swimmers hanging out as the open-air pool closes under a twilight sky, maybe in Australia. “Pancake Get-Together at Marcus’s” is the same size, also painted loosely in radiant colours. This time it shows a group of us (plus dog) over in Hackney, with Marcus’s French mum making crepes for us all, and his little girl dissolving into the sunlight through the (French!) windows. Two happy paintings that always lift my heart. Real everyday people from the here and now, but paintings that remember wonderful artworks from the past like Bonnard, Tiepolo or Watteau. I’m a great fan of ambitious figurative art as well as abstract and expressionist painting, and I try to boil all that down into my own painting, though personally I’m a realist painter. I’ve seen my paintings hung in the houses of people who’ve bought from me. I think they bring a bit of magic entry there to a world of beauty and energy that somehow a framed poster doesn’t give you….
I guess one thing people often comment on in my paintings is the use of colour, somehow that’s central for me. I do draw but I’m not a compulsive sketcher or drawer like some of my artist friends. Nor do I want to express concepts in installations, or video, or make 3D structures – though I can admire all those things. I really just want to make real the wonderful colourful paintings in my head and in my dreams that have been with me since I was a kid. But the stimulus is not fantasy, but reality – real people, portraits, real places, still lifes of vegetables, fruits, mobile phones, all the stuff that surrounds us. They’re all full with life and importance, significant for us who live with them. Composing and creating these paintings is something I find so thrilling, difficult but interesting. So generally you’ll find me painting in oils or acrylics from life. I’m happy to work on commissions for clients, which might mean combining real sittings with reference photos and drawings to produce the final painting.
I don’t know if I seem typically English on first meeting but I have a few concealed details – I was born in Germany and grew up partly in Gibraltar, lived in Italy in my 20s, spent a lot of time in Spain and still work with Spanish-speaking colleagues. So maybe I’ve always been hankering for something extra beyond my own (as it seems to me) ‘everyday’ Britishness…
I took another degree and career path first, then returned to fine art (my first love) and graduated from Central St Martin’s in 1996. I’ve also done loads of supplementary courses in the last 10 years, from expressive painting to anatomical drawing to portraiture to the classical ‘atelier’ approach. I have a studio in New Cross, and I’ve exhibited regularly in south London. Each year (except for 2020) my painting-crammed flat has been in Dulwich Festival’s Artists’ Open House. I submit to the usual national competitions, and I’ve been long-listed for most of them including the NPG BP Award. A big painting of mine was selected in 2019 for the prestigious Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait exhibition here in London.
I guess I’m a shy guy but ambitious for my paintings, and after decades I’m sure of my direction as an artist. I’m making the paintings that I always wanted to.
