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this is the lyceum theatre in Crewe
and these are some of my paintings and drawings and prints
these first few paintings are based on the 1942 movie
Casablanca
and you can see that this one has got some
arcade video game-style icons intergrated into it
and although it's a black and white movie
as you can see, the painting's in a kind of retro palette
of colour
there's Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund
and Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine
the idea with the life in 2-D theme is that we
spend a great deal of our time in front of screens of one type or another
tv screens
movie screens
or as in this case computer screens
it's like we get our world view - our view of life - through a screen
and often it's quite skewed one
here's another movie, this time Godfather Part I
But it's got
some real characters edited into it
people that I know quite well
so it's kind of
fact meets fiction
and there's a little cat just for the hell of it
moving on up we've got some little biro drawings
actually prints these
made this time from two films
two favorites of mine
To Kill a Mockingbird and Trainspotting
very powerful films - very disturbing - but great films
so they're sort of edited together to form a kind of narrative in a way...
..I called it Fall...
...and originally there were fourteen drawings but there are only seven here...
...there's Scout in the tyre
an unfinished oil on canvas
I've called this one Labyrinth - Where Next?
and it's again based on the idea of the internet and searching
but also searching in painting too for the next move
and you see there's that nod back there to
A Dance to the Music of Time
This theatre really does have a lovely space
I quite like using this horizontal strip format
it's good for giving a sense of movement
in this case to some dancing figures almost like little animations
and again the same format
this time to show
a real life setting - Crewe Station
with fictitious characters
gunslingers
battling it out across two platforms
and over there are some enamel paintings which we'll have a look at in a mo'
the lower of these two is an acrylic portrait
the one above it is again an unfinished painting an oil on canvas which I've called for the time being
Three Suspensions
there are two escapologists and
a high-wire act
and some very very thick paint and some very thin paint
the twin towers is in there it kind of
resonates with ideas certainly in my mind at the moment
here'a little pencil drawing
and here - this is a strange one
it's a little gouache
it's called
Conflagration by Numbers
Baghdad March Two Thousand and Three
about the air strikes again based on an image from the internet
and the trompe l'oeil effect with the paint brush and
pots of paint
here's the image we saw from the other side
it's the last three lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem
Ozymandias
which are
Nothing Beside remains.
...Round the decay Of that collossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
But you can't read it
because it's set in a weird font and the symbols are kind of breaking up
here's that little enamel painting
perhaps the smallest one in the exhibition called
The Big Country
you might recgnize the scene
it's appeared in many westerns. That's Monument Valley in the US
so that's really the end of the first part of this exhibition
Life in 2-D based on the screens
and the start of the second
sometimes you see an opportunity for a painting in the everyday
in this case in a garden centre in Chelsea of all places
there was a little terracotta head on the wall
an almost Christ-like figure - I think it was Old Father Thames
but it gave me the idea for this painting which I called Gethsemane
the second part of the exhibition is really given over to
landscape
prints and watercolours
that bridge there is in my home town
wintry scene
and then the same bridge again
looking a bit more optimistic in spring
finally some coastal prints of Anglesey