Designer Desire: Ed Gray

Ed Gray is a London artist whose paintings observe and explore human social interaction in vivid technicolour. He’s like the photographer, Martin Parr with his captures – but whose chosen medium is often acrylic paint, chalk and charcoal on canvas.

His works are snapshots of everyday city life; city from around the globe – New York, Tokyo, Mexico City and Cape Town. However, it’s the London scenes that I love the most; a packed carriage on the Tube, Smithfield Market stallholders, pubs, bookies and ‘the match’.

He attended Wimbledon Art College and then on to Cardiff University where he graduated with a BA Hons degree in Fine Art. He went on complete his PGCE teacher training after which he taught art and design at secondary level in Peckham, South East London.

He now spends his professional time painting, running workshops and undertaking private commissions.

I go out drawing in the streets to find characters to paint. These are real people, real moments in time, depicting the ebb and flow of city life. I aim to celebrate and commemorate these people; to leave a trace of these lives lived with my pen, my charcoal and my paintbrush

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ed Gray (@edgrayart)

All image credits: ©Ed Gray

Designer Desire: Kenneth Rowntree

I’ve just come across a copy of A Prospect of Wales – number 43 in the King Penguin series and published in 1948. It contains 20 watercolours and a cover by Kenneth Rowntree. In looking him up, I discovered even more beautiful artworks that he created for the likes of School Prints Ltd, Edinburgh Weavers and Shell Guides.

Kenneth Rowntree A.R.W.S. (1915-1997) was a British painter, illustrator, collagist, muralist, draughtsman and teacher. Born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, he embarked on study at the Ruskin School of Drawing, Oxford between 1930 & 1934 and immediately on to the Slade School of Fine Art for another year.

Between 1940 and 1943, Rowntree was one of over 60 of the country’s finest watercolour artists to be commissioned by the Committee for the Employment of Artists in Wartime (part of the Ministry of Labour and National Service) and funded by the Pilgrim Trust to capture England and Wales before rural and agricultural development, urban growth or wartime destruction changed them beyond recognition. This ambitious project, dubbed Recording the Changing Face of Britain, encompassed 36 counties and was established by Sir Kenneth Clark, the then director of the National Gallery. The scheme ran alongside the official War Artists’ Scheme, which Clark also initiated. Most of Rowntree’s watercolours for the program depicted parish churches and chapels in Bedfordshire, Essex, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Wales. His routine was to drive to the locations during the week, stay for a couple of days or more in an “absolutely solitary” circumstance.

Following the war, Rowntree joined the Royal College of Art as head of the mural painting studios. In addition, his topographical interests led him to collaborate with Clough and Amabel Williams Ellis on their Vision of England series, (published by Paul Elek between 1946 & 1950) illustrating the volumes covering Norfolk and the Isle of Wight and creating the cover for Sussex (which contained illustrations done by his friend and Essex neighbour, Michael Rothenstein).

In 1951, Rowntree painted murals – entitled The Freedoms – for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at the Festival of Britain (see image below).

In the 1960s, he collaborated with the architect Erno Goldfinger on coloured-glass screens for the entrance halls of the Ministry of Health building at Elephant & Castle, London.

There has been a book written about Rowntree by John Milner, available on Abe Books and Amazon.

Embed from Getty Images_{Kenneth Rowntree working on his Freedom Mural on the section depicting Charles the First being rebuffed by the Speaker of the House of Commons, 1642. This mural is an exhibit in the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion, South Bank Exhibition, Festival of Britain, 1951}

Additional image credits:
ArtUK | Invaluable | V&A

Designer Desire: Brian Hagger

Brian Hagger (1935-2006) was a fine art painter of urban scenes. His sensitive paintings often depict the unfashionable, faded areas of places that he and his family lived over the years; Chelsea and Fulham, Brighton and Norwich. He painted pubs, fish & chip shops, bingo halls, cafés and newsagents. His works remind me of photographs of ‘ghost signs‘ – a glimpse into a bygone era.

Born in Bury St Edmunds, he was educated at West Suffolk County Grammar School. Brian went on to study at the Ipswich School of Art between 1952 & 1956 and, after serving his National Service in the Army, the Royal College of Art from 1958 to 1961.

At the latter, his tutors included Colin Moss, Philip ‘Pif’ Fortin, Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight. Many of his paintings demonstrate the influence of Spear and Weight.

I have always been interested in Urban landscape and seascape. This has been the subject matter of my work for most of my life. The buildings in question are painted as I see them, although this may sometimes produce architectural changes for the sake of the painting – although almost photographic in concept I try to base them on sound principle of abstract design. An important part of the paintings are the figures which are stylised and simplified to suit the painting in question.

For a time, Hagger was a studio assistant to William Scott and exhibited in the open air art shows in Piccadilly and Kings Road, Chelsea. It was during this time that his work was noticed by Oscar Lerman, the American owner of the new Bramante Gallery in Victoria.

Hagger had 4 solo shows at Bramante Galleries, London and many group shows between 1968 and 1971. It was at Bramante that his work was introduced to many important art collectors.

He exhibited at the Royal Academy during the 1960s, 70s & 80s. He also showed at the Thackeray Gallery between 1971 and 1976 where he had 5 solo exhibitions.

From 1978, he exhibited at a number of other UK galleries including the Furneaux Gallery in Wimbledon, Mill Hill Gallery in North London, Selective Eye Gallery in Jersey & Guernsey and the Phoenix Galleries in Lavenham Suffolk and Highgate. He sold in excess of 400 paintings during this era.

His wife, Anne once revealed:

We did our shopping in Fulham market. When I was working Brian would go out with his rucksack and while shopping take photographs or do drawings of the small local shops. Occasionally an old shop-front was being replaced with plastic signs, which he found irritating. If he was too long drawing a shop, the shopkeeper would come out and say: “You’re not from the council, are you?”

Hagger’s daughter, Rowena Hagger-Utting is currently working with TrentArt to hold a retrospective of his work later on in 2023.

Additional image credits:
Bonhams | Invaluable

Designer Desire: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

I have to thank SuAndi at National Black Arts Alliance (NBAA) for this week introducing me to the wonderful work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977) is a British fine artist born to Ghanaian parents in London. Her artistic practice is mainly in large-scale, oil on canvas, figurative portraits of fictional people. Her artworks can command auction prices in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

She attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Arts and the Royal Academy Schools.

Yiadom-Boakye has been represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery since 2010 when she had her first solo show entitled, Essays and Documents.

In 2013, she was a finalist for the Turner Prize. She was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 2018. The following year, Yiadom-Boakye was included in Ghana’s inaugural pavilion at the 57^th Venice Biennale.

As well as her own practice, she currently lectures part-time at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford.

Her works can be found in the collections of institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) amongst others.

I work from scrapbooks, I work from images I collect, I work from life a little bit, I seek out the imagery I need. I take photos. All of that is then composed on the canvas.

Blackness has never been other to me. Therefore, I’ve never felt the need to explain its presence in the work anymore than I’ve felt the need to explain my presence in the world, however often I’m asked. I’ve never liked being told who I am, how I should speak, what to think and how to think it. I’ve never needed telling.

It isn’t so much about placing black people in the canon as it is about saying that we’ve always been here, we’ve always existed, self-sufficient, outside of nightmares and imaginations, pre and post “discovery”, and in no way defined or limited by who sees us.

I don’t use black pigment… It completely deadens things. I use a mixture of brown and blue instead.

The exhibition – Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night – is on at Tate Britain until 26^th February 2023. It assembles approximately 70 works created between 2003 and the present in the most extensive representation of the artist’s career to date.

Credits:
Jack Shainman Gallery | Tate

H is for Home Harbinger

Tag: British art

Designer Desire: Ed Gray

Designer Desire: Kenneth Rowntree

Designer Desire: Brian Hagger

Designer Desire: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye