FEATURED ARTISTS
Summer 2010
JOHN BELLANY (CBE)
‘I paint from my very soul and I want to move people, to get inside their hearts,' John Bellany
John Bellany studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art from 1960 to 1965. An Andrew Grant Scholarship took him to Paris in 1962 and he later studied at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1986, Bellany was awarded the first solo show ever at the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG) and the NPG also commissioned his famous portrait of Ian Botham. Born in Port Seton in Scotland, Bellany's paintings often feature the work-roughened faces of the fishing community. Whilst experiences such as a visit to Buchenwald concentration camp, and later a liver transplant, ensure his paintings are renowned for their great emotional and allegorical depth, his recent move to Barga in Italy has resulted in a more optimistic aspect.
A Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London, John Bellany is exhibited widely at major galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London. The awarding of a CBE in 1994 demonstrates the level of Bellany's influence as a leading British artist.
GRAEME WILCOX
‘Suited men are like stills from an unknown film,’ Art Company, Scotland, of Graeme Wilcox
Graeme Wilcox graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1993 and has exhibited in London, Edinburgh, Russia and Paris since. His paintings are strong, haunting and mysterious. The viewer often has the unsettling experience of staring into a Wilcox painting to find a still, blinded face which refuses to stare back or to communicate visually in any conventional way. Black and red, or dark blue, backgrounds frequently layer further tensions thickly onto the canvas. These paintings often encapsulate a frozen moment.
Wilcox was a finalist at the Celeste Art Prize, London 2006 and was also awarded the Glasgow Art Club Fellowship Award. He received the Arthur Andersen Prize for Best Young Artist at RGI Annual Exhibition and the Glasgow Art Club Fellowship Award, 2004, all evidence of a dramatically evolving reputation as an artist.
Graeme Wilcox’s works can be found in private collections in the UK, USA and Canada and in public collections in Petrezovodsk, Russia and the Gulf State of Qatar.
PETER HOWSON
‘God can still be found among decay and decadence,' Peter Howson
Madonna, Bob Geldof and David Bowie are all collectors of Howson's work. Howson was a central figure in the new ‘The Glasgow Boys', a group formed in the 1980’s, working in Glasgow and influenced by this revolutionary, radical and important art movement. This radical nature is clear from his career moves: he left the Glasgow School of Art at 17 to join the British Army, Lothian Branch of the Royal Fusiliers, and travel the world. Later, he worked as a labourer and landscape gardener, growing to love body building. This physicality is embodied in Howsen's art and his boldly delineated black and red figures are fearsome and overbearing.
Howson travelled to Bosnia in the 1990's to work on canvasses for the Imperial War Museum's war exhibition. He suffered hallucinations and dysentery, but with typical gusto, returned to finish the commission and to salvage his mental health. Later, he worked with John Cox, the director of Scottish Opera, on his production of ‘Don Giovanni', creating a fiercely dark and original set to act as a backdrop to Giovanni's wild and debased life experiences.
Peter Howson is exhibited widely, by John McEnroe in his New York gallery amongst others. He is listed as one of the 500 most important artists in Phaiden's ‘20th Century Art Book'.
Balman Gallery welcomes leading Australian Artist Ken Done
for his first showing in the UK since his sell out shows in London nearly 10 years ago.
Born 29 June 1940, in Sydney, Ken left school at 14 to enter the National Art School in East Sydney. After 5 years study, he commenced a highly successful career as an art director and designer in New York, London and Sydney.
Ken Done's first solo exhibition was held in Sydney in 1980. Since then, he has held over 50 one-man shows, including major exhibitions in Australia, Europe, Japan and the USA. His work has been described as the most original style to come out of Australia, and his paintings are in collections throughout the world. Over the past few years, Ken has devoted most of his time to painting. His works have been shown in the Archibald, Sulman, Wynne, Blake, and Dobell Prizes.
Major projects in a very diverse career include the painting of a BMW Artcar, and the total decorative scheme for the Garden Restaurant at the Powerhouse Museum, in Sydney. In 1994, a major retrospective 'Ken Done: the art of design' was mounted by the Powerhouse. The artist's first European exhibition was held in Paris, in 1996 to great acclaim. In 2000 and 2001 collections of Ken Done's original work were successfully premiered in Los Angeles and San Francisco and two sell-out shows were held in London.
An original Ken Done work has featured on the cover of the weekly Japanese magazine Hanako for over ten years, and in recent times Ken has also become involved in the movement toward a new Australian flag. In 1999, Done was asked to create a series of works for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies programs of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
In 1992, Ken received the Order of Australia (A.M.), for services to Art, Design and Tourism. In many parts of the world, Ken Done has come to symbolise Australia and Australians: creative, optimistic and bold.
JOHN BOYD
‘I have a strong emotional attachment to the North East and this is a sort of symbolic homecoming,’ says John Boyd. ‘I am planning a move back to the area. The more recent work is based around the idea of landscape and figure in landscape and many of the landscapes are more reminiscent of Northumbria than Ireland.’ The show will mainly consist of Boyd’s work from the past year or so, with the addition of a few slightly older pieces.
John Boyd was born in Carlisle in 1957 and between 1975 and 6 attended Newcastle College of Arts and Technology. From here he went to the Slade School of Art, 1976 – 78, and then on to University of Newcastle, 1978-1980. Boyd has had solo exhibitions all over the world, initially in and around Newcastle, and later internationally, in Cross Gallery, Dublin; Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh; Braggiotti Galleries, Rotterdam; Christopher Hull Gallery, London and Lydon Gallery, Chicago, amongst many others.
Paintings within paintings, words within words, rearrangement of patterns of words and of images and partial images: this is the landscape which Boyd inhabits. His titles are highly original, complex ways into his paintings. He is drawn to foreign titles, particularly in Latin and French. He likes titles that tease, for example, those with ‘Maybe’ tacked on, deliberately withholding while inviting interpretation. Both titles and paintings are highly original. He likes to invite analysis and also to outwit.
A playful artist, Boyd enjoys using Victorian pictorial puzzles, words and word games within his titles and paintings, for example ‘thaumatrope’ - a now you see me now you don’t, early animation of 2 moving pictures, eg vase and flowers, which the eye combines to make one. In Boyd’s painting, the two images are of a face, looking and not looking, playing ‘peekaboo’ with the viewer. He enjoys playing with hidden faces and meanings, and the viewer’s understanding and misunderstandings of the messages which he sends out. He likes to play with masks, bringing to mind the drama, theatricality intrigue and mystery of the Venetian Carnival season.
These are paintings about art and about the puzzles experienced by the viewer in trying to understand the messages the artist may or may not be transmitting, and the frustrations and appeal to the artist of being interpreted and ‘understood’. John Boyd’s artist’s statement: ‘Artists should keep their eyes open and their mouths shut,’ shows that he is an enigmatic character who prefers that his paintings speak for him.
I am self taught
I do not like fashion culture
I do not hate anyone – Billy Childish
Billy Childish is, famously, the name of the man inside Tracey Emin’s tent, but Billy Childish is so much more than that. He is more, even, than the man whose influence Emin acknowledged in the formative years of her career. Billy Childish is a cult figure in America, Japan and Europe. He is the most prolific painter, poet and song writer of his generation. He is a man who refuses to have either his spellings or his world view ‘put right’ in any way, working free of limits, restraint, compromise and fashion. (He was welcomed into St Martin’s School of Art under a ‘genius clause’ and later expelled due to his maverick working methods.)
Lavishing thick, lush strokes of paint onto the canvas, Childish creates passionate and almost sculptural work. His canvasses display both the swirling to life of the Impressionists and the dark, savage brushstrokes of the Expressionists. A Van Gogh-like obsession with colour rages from Childish’s flowers, whilst the figures in his paintings are lonely, thoughtful people, created by an obstinately individual artist.
An iconic figure in 21st Century art, Childish co-wrote the Stuckist Manifesto with Charles Thomson: ‘Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego’. Like Expressionist Edvard Munch, Childish explores his ‘neurosis and innocence’ (Stuckist Manifesto) through his art.
Billy Childish’s global profile is expected to soar further in 2010, due to a major exhibition of his work in White Columns, New York, and a rare exhibition in ICA, London. ‘The Stuckist engages with the moment’ (Stuckist Manifesto) and the art world, as it – arguably – creaks slowly away from the dead sharks of Conceptualism, is engaging with Childish right now.
As Childish says of his paintings: ‘My stuff isn’t made up. It isn’t bullshit; it’s the real thing’. Balman Gallery agrees.