Upcoming Workshop in Kent: 'Still - Life' 21-22 October

This 2-day workshop at Creek Creative will tackle the enduring subject of the Still-Life but as always there will be twists and challenges along the way. 

I have found in my still-life work that I seem to be able to tell what objects are important to me by what tends to stay in the painting as it develops'  Richard Diebenkorn

In my own practice, 'Still-Life' is rare -  I was probably traumatised by having to paint my first ever still-life on my art college interview!  In the early nineties though I painted collections/arrangements of pebbles,stones and shells, fused with landscape. Appropriately, with the workshop in Faversham, these paintings from the early nineties, are about nearby Whitstable, a favourite place where I lived during my time at Canterbury College of Art. 

'Tankerton'  40x50cms

'Tankerton' depicts standing on 'The Street', the strange shingle strip that is revealed at low-tide, looking back towards a pink-beach and green slopes of Tankerton.  

'Whitstable'    120x60cms    oil on wood

Looking towards the Isle of Sheppey, carved out of the paint, my favourite objects grouped in the foreground. 

detail - 'Whitstable'

'Black-Beach'   80x80cms   oil on wood

I feel 'Black-Beach' is the most successful of the series, taking the ideas further and more spatially interesting, escaping the 'tabletop'. This painting won second prize in the Observer Hunting Art Prizes in 1993. I think there is a compliment about the painting here:

Brian Sewell writes in the Observer Magazine 10 Feb 1991:

Of Ashley Hanson’s ‘Black Beach’, winner of the second prize, one of the grander judges complained that the idiom eluded him and that in it he could see nothing better than the tarred surface of a London street – to which the response of the real grandee of the occasion, ‘It is a compliment to the painting that it leaves you critically disarmed’

'Pebble/Shell/Stone'  20x60cms  oil on wood

I remember sculptor John Gibbons liking these....

'Beach'  180x60cms  oil on paper

The 1st year painting that kept me in art-college, when i finally let go of photographic imagery. I think I have this rolled up somewhere- maybe... it's oil on paper!

'Black Beach' 1991

 

'Black Beach'    60x60cms   oil on wood   1991

It's about time I put a painting up - 'Black Beach' won Second Prize at the Hunting Art Prizes, back in 1991, presented by Sister Wendy.  The painting went to Australia shortly afterwards, one of the girls who worked in the Mall Galleries where the exhibition was shown.  If you are out there please get in touch.  Still looks strong, one of my best pieces, I worked on it for nearly a year. Every mark belongs, a still centre, almost a still-life in a landscape. Beautiful blacks, all made. Innovative - I remember cutting and rolling/removing paint around the edges to make the frame- obviously influenced by Howard Hodgkin.   In the Observer, critic Brian Sewell commented that the painting  'looked like the tarred surface of a London street'. Still not sure if that's a compliment!