Transitions

This week we'll be hanging a new exhibition of Dave's paintings at the According to McGee Gallery in York. The gallery is opposite Clifford's Tower, so very close to the centre of town, at 8 Tower Street YO1 9SA. It opens this Saturday and will remain open for three weeks, closing on Sunday 12th April. 

The exhibition will show 30 or so oil paintings and drawings that look at the period in the mid-1980s when Dave was moving away from an extensive series of work inspired by English Calendar Customs, and particularly the Abbots Bromley Horned Dance. During this period of 5 or more years he began to explore different painterly approaches, and also reconnected with conventional forms of painting - still lives, interiors and self-portraiture.

The exhibition mainly focuses on his work in oils and his experiments with brushwork and texture, and which eventually led to his most ambitious and wildly epic series of work - 'Byzantium' and 'Journey to Byzantium', both based on W.B.Yeats' poem.

Selecting work

Today was spent selecting paintings for the forthcoming 'Transitions' exhibition in York. It looks like being largely a fascinating mix of rarely-seen oil paintings from the period in the late 1980s when Dave was working towards the two epic 'Byzantium' series. 

Jackie Taylor and Julian Williams from the Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery also called by and selected a number of pieces from 'Byzantium' to include in the refurbished Whitaker, which re-opens this coming Saturday.

'Transitions' opens at the 'According to McGee' Gallery, 8 Tower St, York, North Yorkshire YO1 9SA on Saturday 21st March and closes Sunday 12th April 2015.

The newly refurbished Whitaker in Whitaker Park, Haslingden Road, Rawtenstall, Lancashire BB4 6RE reopens Saturday, 14th February 2015. 

An exhibition in York soon...

We're waiting for confirmation from Greg and Ails McGee who have the 'According to McGee' Gallery in York of a date for an early Spring exhibition of Dave's work.

The exhibition we held at the gallery last year was a big success, and Greg and Ails have asked the Trust to put together a second show for the space. The date they suggested was late February but we need a little longer to put something good together. I'm hoping for mid-March through Easter, but still are waiting for the gallery to confirm this. 

I'm thinking about what aspect of Dave's work to explore in the show. ATM is a small gallery and so lends itself to showing smaller pieces of work, such as work on paper. But there isn't much time to get much work framed, and so I'm considering looking at the output on canvas of a transitional period in Dave's output. One possibility is the period in the mid and late 1980's which spans the period after the Calendar Customs series and before the start of work on Sailing to Byzantium which, with Byzantium, occupied Dave for almost the whole of the next decade. 

The example above is a canvas about 1 metre square, and typical of this transitional period. It's also a time in which Dave painted the stunning 'Jarrow March' triptych that hangs in the Horse + Bamboo office, and you can see similarities in the composition and drawing.

Back to York

Yesterday I went across to York for a final look at the exhibition at the According to McGee gallery on Tower Street (opposite Cliffords Tower).  Today (Sunday) is the last day of the show. I also met up with Graham Breakwell, who helped me hang the exhibition, as he had come up from Shropshire with his wife Angie and their two children. 

It looked great; and I was very pleased to see that 10 pieces have been sold, including the smallish oil on canvas (above) 'The Orange Tree', that I've always rather liked, and was a late addition to the exhibition to fill in a gap when a couple of works were sold on the opening weekend and taken away by the buyer. 

Tomorrow then, it'll be off with the hired transit to collect the remaining paintings and bring them back home to the old studio. But today, if you're interested, there's one last opportunity to visit the exhibition, and perhaps buy yourself a fantastic painting.

A day in Dave's studio

Today is the first time I've been able to work properly alongside Ella at Dave's studio in Haslingden. This because I'm slightly reducing my days at Horse + Bamboo and allowing myself a day each week catching up on the enormous number of jobs that have built up in the studio over the past couple of years. Ella focuses very effectively on the cataloguing process but there's a heap of jobs that have been allowed to pile up - everything from deciding on whether certain sketches/scribbles should be catalogued to fixing the cistern!

This is also the last week of the Dave Pearson: Colourist exhibition at the According to McGee gallery in York. There have been a decent number of sales and excellent feedback from the show but on Monday next week I'll be collecting the unsold work and bringing it back to the studio.

Ella tells me that she is cataloguing number 5976 as I write; so very close to the six thousand mark. Yesterday she uncovered some beautiful gouaches and water colours (pic above), but she's now cataloging a large series of works about the Haslingden war memorial, in the park just across the road from here. These series - and Dave worked on scores of them, on diverse subjects - are usually variations on a theme, sometimes drawing and painting over a photocopied image. Because there are literally hundreds of these works, perhaps thousands, we're discussing placing them in groups by series in their own special boxes and giving each box a catalogue number, rather than cataloguing each individual sheet.

Visitors and...fame

This week I've spent a fair few hours at Dave's old studio in Haslingden - some of them to do with preparing work to take to York for the exhibition, but also giving the studio a much needed airing and clean-up, plus meeting visitors and showing people around. It's seems appropriate, given that Spring is now unequivocally in the air, that things are clearly stirring at 54 Manchester Road and that there's still great interest in Dave and his work. 

Florian and Robin visited yesterday. They both live in Berlin, but Florian was a student on the Foundation Course at Manchester Poly (now MMU) and knew Dave as a teacher. He has bought a number of Dave's pieces in the past and visits the studio whenever he is back in the UK. Yesterday he and Robin bought several more small examples of Dave's work - the photo was taken in the room Ella uses for cataloguing. 

Today in our local newspaper - the Rossendale Free Press - there's a full-page feature on 'Who is Rossendale's most famous person?'. with a list of people including the actress Jane Horrocks, model Agyness Deyn and comedian/actor Ted Robbins. It also includes Dave Pearson which, even if representing nothing else, is surely a marker of the success we have had in keeping Dave's name and work in the public eye.

Preparations for York

In between work at Horse + Bamboo Theatre I'm undertaking various jobs that need to be done in order to prepare for the upcoming exhibition of Dave's work in York. Today, for example, I went over to the theatre workshop and created simple frames for two of the relief paintings Dave made in 1981 for the 'In the Seven Woods' series which grew from the earlier 'Calendar Customs' work of the 1970s. Both of these sets of work were derived from imagery relating to  English folk events. 

This past week I've also written and designed a simple leaflet for the exhibition, which went to the printers on Friday, and I now have a selection of between 24 and 28 paintings to take along to York in early March for hanging the exhibition and about a dozen of these are currently at the framer.

So preparations are well advanced. The show is 'Dave Pearson: Colourist' at the 'According to McGee' gallery on Tower Street, York. It opens 1pm Saturday 15th March and runs until 5th April. 

According to McGee

The next exhibition of Dave Pearson's work, which I've mentioned in several posts as happening in April is, in fact, due to open at 'According to McGee' on Saturday 15th March. 

I happened across this fact as I was searching my diary for something unrelated. In shock, I immediately rang Greg McGee and arranged to travel over to York and visit the gallery. This I duly did on Saturday, meeting Greg and his wife, Ails. 

The gallery is in a fine position facing Clifford's Tower, and is an intimate i.e. small, space; just two galleries but friendly and welcoming. The theme of the exhibition will be 'Dave Pearson, the Colourist', and I've spent the rest of the weekend considering how to do this in the two galleries available. 

One thing I feel sure about is to include a selection of pieces from the 1960s, when Dave was working, in his usual totally focused and all-consuming way, on work inspired by Vincent Van Gogh. I was very close to him at this time and I feel it was Vincent's example that drew him into a new relationship with colour. The early pieces, that Dave said were influenced by Pop Art, and often used colour in a schematic way, slowly gave way to a richer and more complex palette inspired by Van Gogh's own paintings from nature.