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

Harry Charles Tim

Harry Charles Tim (b. 1956) is a fine art painter based in Stratford-on-Avon. In a past life, he was a soldier in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. After finishing his service, he immigrated to Germany, where he initially became a dealer in antiques and art before himself becoming an artist.

Tim is represented by Meander & Mooch and Montpellier Gallery. Examples of his work also appear online at auction and at Saatchi Art.

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Additional image credits:
Meander & Mooch | Montpellier Gallery

Designer Desire: Charles Spencelayh

Charles Spencelayh (1865-1958) was an English painter of portraits and humble domestic scenes. It’s the latter subject that I find I can pour over for ages, just studying all the mundane objects that are painted in great detail.

For instance, a spent match discarded on a floor, envelopes & letters stashed behind a picture hanging on a wall, a collection of mismatched china on a shelf, a glass case containing taxidermy or a painting within the painting.

Here’s an observation made by Aubrey Noakes in his 1978 book, Charles Spencelayh and his Paintings. The author could just as easily have written these comments in 2018:

Much of Spencelayh’s work now appears to me to possess a nostalgic quality about it. The agreeable clutter of inherited possessions, common enough in most households early this century, and even between the wars, is becoming more and more of a memory as people find themselves crammed into flats and pressured into the purchase of modern purpose-built furniture.

Spencelayh first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1892 (he exhibited more than 70 paintings here over his life), initially showing portrait miniatures of women. He was one of the founder members of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters.

It was only years later that he began painting his more recognisable lone elderly men in living quarters and workshops.

In the early 1920s Spencelayh was ‘discovered’ by a Mr. Joseph Nissim Levy, a Manchester cotton merchant who’d bought a painting of his entitled Cinderella while holidaying in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Levy and his wife, Rose had previously viewed other works by Spencelayh at the Royal Academy, but they’d already sold.

An Academy exhibition attendant furnished Levy with Spencelayh’s home address and that’s how the relationship between the artist and his patron began. After a while, Levy offered Spencelayh and his wife a house in Manchester rent-free and also offered to double the amount of money Mr. Spencelayh was earning at the time.

Levy enjoyed watching Spencelayh work and suggested several Jewish subjects for him to paint. These consequent works sold successfully. Levy also commissioned portraits of his family members and arranged for 23 of his paintings to be exhibited at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. However, it was the patron’s purchase of several of the artist’s important paintings for sums as high as £600 and £700 that was most valuable to the latter.

Charles Spencelayh had a few other prominent fans including Evelyn Waugh and Queen Mary; the latter for whom he painted a miniature portrait of her husband, King George V to go into her dolls’ house.

There are 176 examples of Spencelayh’s work in the permanent collection of the Guildhall Museum in Rochester – the artist’s birthplace.

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Additional image credits:
Sotheby’s

H is for Home Harbinger

Tag: paintings

Designer Desire: Brian Hagger

Designer Desire: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Harry Charles Tim

Designer Desire: Charles Spencelayh