Tag: england

James Mortimer

James Mortimer: Paintings, Oil on Linen

James Mortimer, a painter and a sculptor, was born in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1989. He was educated at a Catholic School and studied sculpture at the Bath School of Art, receiving the Kenneth Armitage Prize for Sculpture. Mortimer now devotes himself to painting imagined scenes of immoral excess, mythical creatures and larger than life characters. He is represented by the Catto Gallery on Heath Street in London.

James Mortimer’s fey boys inhabit a world of uncomplicated decadence, a surreal Renaissance landscape where man and beast exist together on increasingly equal terms. Inhibitions go out the window; each is a slave to their own nature. The ensuing relationships provide fertile ground for myriad little dramas as the companions look to get along. Animals become mischievous, even vicious at times. Their masters try to rise above it, retaining an almost Imperial sense of composure, but in the process find themselves somehow detached, lost even, gazing wistfully into the opium haze of their peculiar adopted land.

Whilst seemingly simple, there is wealth of drama playing out behind the scenes. Visual puns and innuendoes pepper his paintings like Freudian slips of the brush. Every fruit and every plant is pregnant with suggestion. Exoticism and the thrill of travel also permeate every scene, like Victorian Boy’s Own adventures that have turned slightly spicy and risqué. And underneath it all, there is a simmering sexuality. These characters are vain, vice-loving and beautiful.

Note: an Extensive collection of James Mortimer’s work can be found at: http://www.jamesmortimerart.com/paintings

art@cattogallery.co.uk

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “How They Met Themselves”, 1864, Watercolor and Bodycolor on Paper, 11 x 10 Inches, Leicester Galleries

There are three versions of this watercolor “How They Met Themselves”. One exists  in a private collection and the other two at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The first version of this doppelganger theme was made with pen and ink and brush and is dated 1851 1860. It was painted for George Price Boyce, Rossetti’s friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist, during Rossetti’s honeymoon in Paris in 1860, to replace the earlier pen and ink drawing of the same subject which was either lost or destroyed.

In a letter to George Price Boyce dated February 4th of 1861, Dante Rossetti expressed, his intentions to undertaking a watercolour version: “I was much wishing to execute the Bogie pen and ink drawing which you have as a watercolour and would be greatly obliged to you for the loan of it…”

Dante Rossetti, by calling it the `Bogie drawing’, expressed his continuing fascination with the legend of the ‘Doppleganger’, the vision of which is a presentiment of death. To illustrate this strange theme, Rossetti chose the subject of two medieval lovers in a wood meeting their doubles who glow supernaturally. Doppelgänger imagery occurs in poems he admired such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “ The Romaunt of Margaret” and Poe’s “Silence” and also frequently in his own more autobiographical poems such as “Sudden Light”, “Even So”, and “Willowwood”.

Calendar: August 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of August

Searching for Socks

August 5, 1887 was the birthdate of John Reginald Owen, the English character actor.

Reginald Owen studied at Sir Herbert Tree’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his professional debut on stage in 1905. When he was still a young actor, he met the author Mrs. Clifford Mills. Upon hearing her idea of a children’s play to be called a Rainbow Story, Owen persuaded her to turn it into a play. This became the play “Where the Rainbow Ends” which opened on December 21st of 1911 starring Owen as Saint George. It received good reviews.

John Reginald traveled to the United States in 1920, originally working on Broadway in New York. He later moved to Hollywood and began a lengthy career in many Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions.  Owen is perhaps best known today for his role as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1938 film version of “A Christmas Carol” , a role he inherited from Lionel Barrymore who suffered a broken hip.

Owen was one of only five actors to play both Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson. He first played Watson in the 1932 film “Sherlock Holmes” opposite Clive Brooks. In the 1933 film “A Study in Scarlet”, Owen played Sherlock Holmes opposite Warburton Gamble in the character of Doctor Watson. Owen also has the odd distinction of playing three classical characters of Victorian fiction- Scrooge, Holmes, and Watson- only to have those characters taken over and personified by other actors, namely Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

Owen appeared, later in his career, on the television series “Maverick” in two episodes and also guest starred in episodes of the series “One Step Beyond” and “Bewitched”. He was featured in the 1964 film “Mary Poppins” and had a small role in the 1962 film production of the Jules Verne novel “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. John Reginald Owen died from a heart attack at age 85 at his home in Boise, Idaho in 1972, after a film career totaling over one hundred films, many of which are today listed as classics- “Of Human Bondage”, “Anna Karenina”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Call of the Wild”.

Cornelius McCarthy

Cornelius McCarthy, “Harry and Stephen One Night”, Date Unknown

Cornelius McCarthy was among the top painters of the male form working in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. His earliest artistic influence was probably through the artefacts and images used to promote Catholic devotion that he grew up with. Through these McCarthy became familiar with the compositions of the masters of the Italian Renaissance.

His formal study was completed at Goldsmith’s School of Art, London, followed by a tour of Italy visiting all the principal art collections and monuments. McCarthy was greatly influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso following his first great post-war show in 1n 1960 at London. Later McCarthy was influenced by the British artist Keith Vaughan and many of his early works show him working through these influences.

Cornelius McCarthy’s work is characterised by a solid sense of composition and the use of still-life elements that often give a ‘cubist’ feel to his paintings. Since his untimely death in 2009, many early paintings and drawings have come to light that were never intended for exhibition.

Eadweard Muybridge

Gif made from Eadweard Muybridge’s “Animal Locomotion” Series, 1887, Plate 166

This series of still photographs was of a nude man jumping over a man’s back. The original vintage collotype measured 20 x 24 inches.

One of Muybridge’s main working methods was to rig a series of large cameras in a line to shoot images automatically as the subjects passed. Viewed in a Zoopraxiscope machine, his images laid the foundation for motion pictures and contemporary cinematography.

Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd. “Portrait of a Young Man”, 1853, Oil on Canvas, Tate Museum, London

Nineteenth century English painter Richard Dadd was a promising young artist who trained at the Royal Academy Schools,, Dadd undertook a grand tour of the Eastern Mediterranean between 1842 and 1843, encompassing Italy and Greece as well as the Ottoman Empire.

Upon his return, Richard Dadd’s life unravelled. Insanity ran in the family, and Dadd started showing signs – not least believing that he was under the power of the Egyptian god Osiris.

Then, in the summer of 1843, Dadd stabbed his father to death in Cobham Park, near Chatham, and escaped to France. Eventually, he was caught and extradited to England, where he spent the rest of his life in criminal lunatic asylums, first at Bethlem Hospital in South London, and then at Broadmoor. During more than four decades of confinement, Dadd produced many paintings.

Owen Davey

Owen Davey, “The Hundred-Eyed Giant Argus Panoplies”, 2016, Cover Illustration for the Directory of Illustration #33

Owen Davey is an award-winning illustrator living and working in Leicester, England. He graduated with a BA degree in illustration from Falmouth University. Davey was the illustrator of the iPad App of the Year 2015 game, “The Robot Factory”.

Davey created the artworks for the cover, endpapers, title page and contents page of the Directory of Illustration #33. The book is an annual of work by professional illustrators which is sent out to Art Directors and the year’s theme was centred around the idea of ‘Made You Look’. He decided to approach the images with a loose narrative idea around the Ancient Greek story of Argus, a hundred-eyed monster…

Zeus began an affair with a beautiful nymph named Io but when his wife Hera returned home, Zeus turned Io into a white heifer to hide her. Not deceived, Hera demanded the cow as a gift and sent Io to a hundred-eyed giant called Argus Panoplies to guard her. Furious, Zeus sent Hermes to slay Argus. Hermes attempted to lull the giant to sleep but then stabbed him with his sword. Hera honoured Argus by placing all but two of his hundred eyes into the tail of her favourite bird, the Peacock. Io eventually returned to her original form.

William Blake

William Blake, “The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, in Whose Wreathings Are Infolded the Nations of the Earth”, 1805-1809, Tempera on Canvas, 30 x 24 Inches, Tate Museum, London

William Blake occupies a unique position in art history in that he was both a major artist and a major poet. Often the two went hand-in-hand, his art illustrating his poetry, or if not his, the poetry of others. The subject is not drawn from any literary source, but from contemporary history.

The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan was first shown in Blake’s solo exhibition of 1809, held at his brother’s house in London’s Soho. Though the reviews were mostly negative, some of the paintings did sell, including this portrait of Admiral Nelson. Instead of a lifelike portrait, Blake painted Nelson’s “Spiritual” likeness.

Admiral Nelson is in the centre of a graphic explosion of colour, creating a corona of light around him. He is standing on top of the Biblical sea creature, Leviathan, whose body encircles him; he controls the beast with a bridle, attached to its neck, which he holds loosely in his left hand.

Trapped in, crushed under, or in one case, half-consumed within Leviathan’s coiled body, ten figures are arranged around the figure of Nelson. These represent the European nations defeated by the British during the Napoleonic Wars.

Nicolas Pain

Nicolas Pain, “Octopus III”, 2016, Bronze, 1 x 1 x 1 Foot

After graduating in 1990 with a  B.A. in Graphic Design, English sculptor Nicolas Pain pursued a career as a graphic designer though his interest and ability in three dimensional work drew him into the to the video game industry in the late nineties. This allowed him to support his life long interest in both SCUBA diving and marine wildlife that proved to be the trigger for his sculptural work which he began in 2005.

Calendar: June 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of June

The Hidden Balcony

June 25, 1903 is the birthdate of the British author, George Orwell.

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25th of 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. Educated in England at Eton, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. In 1928, Orwell moved to Paris where lack of success there as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described these experiences in his first book, “Down and Out in Paris and London”, published in 1933. It was shortly before the book’s publication that he changed his name to George Orwell.

An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s Orwell had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in his 1937 published non-fiction work “The Road to Wigan Pier’” documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England.

Late in 1936, Orwell had travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. The account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia” was published in 1938.

In March of 1943 George Orwell started work on his new book, which turned out to be “Animal Farm”. By April of 1944 the book was ready for publication; however, publishing houses refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime which at that time was a crucial ally in the war. Orwell’s allegorical novella “Animal Farm” was finally published in Britain on August 17, 1945, and a year later in the United States on August 26, 1946. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell’s name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life.

His book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases – such as “Big Brother is watching you”, “newspeak”, “thoughtcrime”, and “doublethink” – entering popular use. Orwell’s health had continued to decline since a diagnosis of tuberculosis in December of 1947. In the early morning of January 21, 1950, an artery burst in Orwell’s lungs, killing him at the age of 46. His body is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Oxfordshire, under his birth name Eric Arthur Blair.

Jamie xx, “Gosh”

Jamie xx, “Gosh” from the Album “In Colour”

James Thomas Smith, known professionally as Jamie xx, is and English musician, DJ, record producer and remixer. He is known for both his solo work and as a member of the English indie pop band “The xx”.

He has been described as a “driving force” behind the xx, contributing to the group’s significant commercial and critical success. As a solo artist, he has been recognised with a 2015 Mercury Prize nomination, and a 2016 Grammy Award for Best Dance/ Electronic Album nomination for his debut album “In Colour”.

William Roberts

William Roberts, “The Barber’s Shop”, 1946, Oil on Canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Tate Museum, London

William Roberts joined the Vorticists in 1914. Founded that year by artist and writer Wyndham Lewis, the Vorticist objective was to break with the decayed state of British art and begin anew. Its style relied on a combination of the styles of  Cubism and Futurism. Roberts’ work exemplifies some of the motifs, while equally retaining a connotation of Fernand Léger’s tubular representation of human figures.

After the war, Roberts returned to London with a different aesthetic in mind. The experiences of the war had changed him. He now focussed on the everyday city life of people; but he imbued his work with his pre-war architectural aesthetic and a renewed concentration on the human figure.

Note: For those interested in William Robet’s work, an alphabetical list of his complete oeuvre can be found at: http://www.englishcubist.co.uk/catalph.html