Now that it’s over, here are some pictures from the Chester Arts Fair. This was my first ever art fair, and I must say I found the whole thing hugely enjoyable.
The live portrait demo in front of a roomful of people was somewhat daunting, but great fun and I’m very grateful to Neil for volunteering to sit. Hopefully, he enjoyed the experience and the result!
I met loads of fascinating people, both artists and collectors. If you stopped to look at my work and have a chat, I just want to say a big ‘Thank you!’ I really appreciated hearing your comments and feedback, and you definitely helped validate the direction I feel my work is taking.
I’m excited to be participating in the Deepbridge Chester Arts Fair, Cheshire’s premier arts event, which is taking place from 16-18 November at Chester Racecourse.
Visitors to the Fair have the opportunity to view and buy artwork of all mediums and styles, ranging in price from as little as £40.00 up to £10,000 plus.
Since the Fair first opened in 2011, it has grown considerably, now attracting over 100 UK & International, emerging & established artists exhibiting a varied selection of visual arts including paintings, sculpture, photography, illustration, glass, digital art, ceramics and much more. The Fair welcomes visitors with a genuine passion for art, from serious collectors to those investing in their first piece of original art.
CAF have been kind enough to provide me with a number of free tickets, so please like and repost/share this to be in with a chance to win!
I’m currently re-reading ‘The Cubist Epoch’ by Douglas Cooper (Phaidon) and I can’t stop thinking of the following passage relating to Picasso’s painting, ‘Dance with Veils‘:
[which] reflects yet another of Picasso’s sculptural preoccupations, for it seems to bear out his expressed hope that, if he had succeeded in truly representing his subject, one should be able ‘to cut up’ his canvas and having reassembled it ‘according to the color indications … find oneself confronted with a sculpture.
Whilst it’s not a particular favourite, this painting (referred to as ‘Nude with Draperies’ by Cooper) is one of several produced during 1907-8 which helped Picasso ‘advance progressively towards the creation of Cubism’.
I love the concept of a 2D sculpture, as it resonates so well with my interest in contrasting ‘flatness’ and ‘form’, so this new painting is another attempt at exploring methods of reproducing it.
During it’s production, I was also trying to keep in mind lessons learned during the recent collage workshop I attended and, especially, the bold use of colour made by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in his ‘Self Portrait with Model‘ that I used as reference.
For interest’s sake, below is the original life drawing on which the painting is based. It was painted back in February of this year so, given that I painted over it the day after and have been re-working it on and off since then, it’s come as quite a shock to me to see how much the finished piece has changed from the original.
Without being able to refer to the original (and having forgotten until now that I had the photo below), I felt I had a very strong recollection of the pose. I was even considering calling the painting ‘The Yellow Dress’, as that was the most vivid part of my memory, but I now see how faulty that memory was.
I guess the finished piece must be an amalgam of fragments of remembered poses from different sessions, or of half remembered snapshots of the evolutionary/developmental stages of the piece itself, rather than the actual pose. Fragmentalism?
Life Drawing 2018-02-14 (acrylic on board 91.5cm x 61cm)
