More of that extraordinary find...

Four more examples of the set of large pastel drawings of British Calendar Customs made by Dave and uncovered by Ella last week. I went to see them - they really are huge, most measuring close to two metres on the longest side. How would we frame them - being unfixed pastel they really are quite delicate?

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.

A discovery!

I visited Ella at Dave Pearson's studio yesterday to see how things were going with the cataloguing of Dave's work, and also to meet Chris Pearson, Dave's son - and one of the Trustees. 

Ella showed me the progress she was making  and we took a look round the upstairs rooms where she is focussing her work. She has now reached 5400 items in the catalogue and is close to completing the first room - with perhaps another 1000 paintings and drawings still to be catalogued on the first floor alone. Chris, by the way, mentioned that he had several thousand works on paper in his house, in addition to the those in the studio. 

I pointed out to Ella a pile of works on paper that had been unopened since Dave died. These were rolled up in about 10 large rolls. This afternoon Ella opened one of these rolls - and found a series of really beautiful images of Calendar Customs pastel drawings. Excited, she immediately sent me 11 small photographs of her discovery. Four of them are illustrated here, to show their quality. 

New Year stirrings

A New Year and things are beginning to stir. First we've agreed with the Bridgeman Art Library (see the previous blog entry) to register Dave's work with them so that there's easy access to anyone wishing to use his images, and also that we've joined the Artists Collecting Society which means a small percentage of any resale of Dave's work would go to the Trust.

So Margaret Mytton and I spent half a day photographing 50 or more of Dave's smaller paintings, pastels and etchings for the Art Library. They require very high quality images as these will be for reproduction purposes. Margaret now has to go through the 1000 shots she took and select the best and then make any final colour balance adjustments they might need before they join a selection of the Byzantium images at the Bridgeman. Once these are transferred over anyone searching for Dave Pearson on the Bridgeman site will be able to pay a small fee for use of the image. 

Margaret is also poised to complete her new Revelations website on-line. You can visit it and see its nearly complete form here.