Another hoard...

I've mentioned many times in this blog that Ella Cole spends two days each week cataloguing the collection of work left by Dave Pearson. In his three storey studio she started work on the top floor, and after almost two years has catalogued over 9000 pieces - all on the upper level. We thought that work on this top floor was almost completed, but late in the day discovered a hoard of a dozen or so large boxes of work - a lot of it early work, from Dave's student years. 

This week Ella open a new box, and discovered 300 pieces of work in it. It's particularly interesting - small experimental coloured sketches and trial pieces, with a dozen or thereabouts on each page. Above is a small selection of these from the corner of one such sheet. 

One of the fascinating things about these pieces is how assured they are for such a young artist (Dave must have been in his 20s) but also how so much about them prefigures the forms and approach of the later work around the Byzantium period of the 1990s. 

Early work

I visited Dave's studio to day to catch up with Ella, who continues to patiently catalogue the work. We had expected to meet Greg McGee and Margaret Mytton to discuss plans for an exhibition at Greg's gallery in York. Unfortunately Greg has been taken sick overnight, so the planned meeting has been postponed. 

Instead Ella showed me some of Dave's school and early student work she is currently entering into the catalogue. Some of this early work is fascinating, such as this interior of his parent's home in London, where he would have been living at the time:

But inevitably, with someone like Dave who kept all of his output, not apparently censoring anything, there are many sketches, abandoned pieces and rejects. What to do with these? To put them all in the catalogue, or to start a censoring ourselves? Ella has chosen (with help from the Artlook software people) to create a fresh category within the programme - 'School and Student Work'.

This sketch of a baby is typical of the kind of work I'm referring to. Unfinished or not followed through pieces, probably of interest to anyone approaching Dave's work from a scholarly or research-based point of view, but unlikely to be saleable or of general interest. Putting these into their own section of the Catalogue seems to provide the answer.