New website!

Finally I've found the time to rebuild the Dave Pearson website - it's at www.dspearson.org - and now it's up and running. 

It has a more extensive gallery than the old site, so dip in and have a look at the selection of paintings, drawings and prints from Dave's major periods. Plus there are a number of essays and writings about Dave. 

I still need to do a thorough check through it, as sometimes things go amiss in the process of uploading, so if anyone discovers any glitches please let me know. The only one I've found so far is that the Search Engine Optimisation programme has picked up a typo - and registers the site as Dave Person! Although I changed this as soon as I noticed it (when it showed up on  Facebook) it doesn't seem to register on search engines yet. My apologies!

Ella catalogues!

Just been to see Ella Cole at Dave's studio. Ella is now well into her stride, cataloguing Dave's output. We're now very, very close to reaching number 3000 in the catalogue - for many artists this would be a sizeable life's work. For Dave Pearson there's still plenty to go. Ella reckons it'll be at least 8 weeks before she'll finishes cataloguing all the pieces in the first room - then there's 5 more rooms plus scores of folders of work. But to be fair this first room does contain many of the smaller pieces - above is a self-portrait Ella discovered earlier this week. 

The exhibition of a selection of Dave's Bestiary paintings and a number of drawings at The Whitaker in Rawtenstall will be on until the middle of June. The Whitaker is the new name for Rossendale museum - if you want to find out more go to the equally new website - www.thewhitaker.org 

Rossendale Museum

Back from a short break that included a visit to the Reina Sofia Gallery in Madrid to see the collection including Picasso's 'Guernika' - so much better displayed than it was in the Prado - and also its wonderful collection of early and mid-twentieth century Spanish art, that I know Dave would have loved. 

During these last couple of weeks the Dave Pearson Trust has been honoured to be one of the partners in the group that are negotiating with Rossendale Borough Council to manage Rossendale Museum in Whitaker Park, Rawtenstall. This museum is at quite the other end of the scale from the Prado or the Reina Sofia but not without its charm.

Things have moved very quickly and there's still much to be negotiated, but we're currently working with the Friends of the Museum to keep it open. The closure is one of the victims of the cuts being forced on to local authorities, and this scenario is probably being repeated up and down the country. Rossendale Museum is a much-loved, but sadly not much visited, local museum containing a typical combination of stuffed animals, local history artefacts, worthy paintings of ancient local dignitaries and gloomy Victorian rooms. Amongst the collection are some real gems, and there is potential to turn it into an exhilarating and special place which, along with a coffee-shop and revitalised displays, could secure a great future for it. It is also situated in a lovely setting and we're very excited to be associated with this attempt to save, and re-galvanise, a part of Rossendale's heritage.

As part of this, Julian Williams and Jackie Taylor of the See Gallery (leading partners in the rescue bid) have put together - in record time - an exhibition of some of Dave's drawings and 'Bestiary' paintings in the upstairs galleries at the Museum. If you want to come along they will be on show, along with the rest of the Museum, over the next few weekends between 1.00 and 4.30pm 

A visit to the solicitor

Earlier this month the three Trustees went to see our solicitor. These visits are infrequent, and in between them we tend to forget the complex information (to us anyway) imparted on such things as our taxation status. So every so often we go back for a refresher visit. Fortunately Stephen Parr at Woodcocks is an excellent communicator, and we leave feeling - at least temporarily - wiser and more knowledgable. 

But now we're looking ahead to the situation in 2019, 10 years after the Trust was established, when there is a tax review of the estate. Even our solicitor acknowledges that the calculations involved in this are highly complex - and a simple top-of-the-head calculation is impossible to produce. This was our main field of inquiry on this visit, and we were promised an estimate of its impact once Woodcocks had run the necessary data through their software. 

Last weekend the results arrived. Given we've no idea of what the value of Dave's Estate will be in 2019 it was based on guesswork, but the results were scary - a possible tax burden of £75,000 or more. 

Best to be prepared of course, and this is all 6 years away, but the issue is clearly a serious one. We don't understand, if I'm totally honest, a lot of this. It appears that an estate is taxed on this basis every 10 years, so the same items get taxed over and over. Can this be right? It also means that if our work to enhance Dave Pearson's reputation is successful then we're also increasing the tax burden for ourselves - and remember that this is a tax on work unsold as well as work sold, so it isn't as if we've earned any income which can be set against the tax. 

Anyway, as you can imagine, these issues, and other related questions, are all very much on our minds. Over the next few months we'll be going through this territory in more detail. With the help of Stephen Parr and his colleagues. I'll keep you posted.

A birthday

Being trustees of the Dave Pearson Trust has taken us on a number of interesting journeys over the past few years - getting involved in the making of the 'To Byzantium' film; various shennanigans involving tv and radio broadcasts; and the curating of a large exhibition of Dave's work in London - among other things. 

The curating part was trustee Margaret Mytton working in close partnership with the writer and critic Edward Lucie-Smith (above), and a few days ago we were invited to the Albermarle Gallery in London to be part of a gathering to celebrate Edward's 80th birthday. 

Edward, who got to hear about Dave Pearson's work through Derek Smith when he was directing the film, has since been a great champion of Dave's work and was instrumental in organising the London exhibition last year. 

It was clear from the people we met at the party that Edward is also a tireless supporter of young artists from all sorts of backgrounds - his interest and championing of art in developing countries, in his native Jamaica, in Iran, and young artists at the beginning of their careers in this country. This was reflected in the people we met at the Albermarle, and in a short speech Edward made, not only about the changing shape of the 'art world', but in the radical changes and opportunities opening up by the revolution in IT and the internet.

So a happy 80th birthday Edward, from all of us at the Dave Pearson Trust.

Found it!

Today I  tracked down the folder that contains most of the remaining small drawings and gouaches that Dave made in the mid- and late- 1960s inspired by his obsession with the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. I selected a few to photograph and send to a woman who had been a student of Dave's in 78/9 and only recently returned from working in the Middle East to find out about Dave's death. She asked to buy a piece in memory of Dave, who she remembered as being 'extremely kind to me...and extremely encouraging'. 

Searching for that folder reminded me just how few pieces remain from that relatively early period of Dave's work, and how the Trust needs to be careful and selective about those pieces that do remain, keeping examples aside for the Trust collection. This aspect of curating Dave's work is increasingly important as we get a clearer picture from the cataloguing and ordering process, (currently being done by Ella), telling us how many pieces there are from the various and different stages of Dave's output. 

By coincidence I was contacted via this blog by Katherine Tyrrell, an artist and writer who has set up an extremely valuable website Art after Death - Resources for Artists and Art Collectors which provides, in a systematic and comprehensively factual way, links and advice for anyone who finds themselves in the position that we did on Dave's death. It's also a very useful resource for living artists who wish to consider the future of their own work, and it is clearly aimed at both US and Uk based artists. Katherine also keeps an interesting blog - Making a Mark . 

A York exhibition?

Detail of a figure from a larger 'Bestiary' canvas.

We've been in discussion with a gallery in York about a possible exhibition of Dave's work sometime later this year, or next. Today the gallery owner, Greg McGee, visited us in Rossendale - I met his train at Accrington station. We then looked at the exhibition of Bestiary pieces at the See Gallery, and from there we drove up to Dave's studio in Haslingden. 

Greg made a selection of the kind of pieces he felt would work in his gallery, and chose a range of works from large canvases to smaller works on board and paper.

Ella was working away in the studio, and the meeting with Greg was an opportunity for Margaret and Julian to look at the progress she has made with cataloguing the work and ordering the catalogued pieces.