Housekeeping...

It's now over 10 years since I started writing this blog. Initially the motivation was to give advice and support to others who might, like us, find themselves facing the daunting task of having to manage an artist's estate after their death.

Inevitably the first years' were an extremely steep learning curve - setting up a Trust; selling items of Dave's work to benefit his son Chris; cataloguing the huge amount of artwork; creating various websites; organising exhibitions; looking at the legal aspects of a complex inheritance...and so on, and on...and on.

I've documented much of this in this Artists Estate Blog and gradually, over the decade, our workload has settled down. At the same time, other changes have been made. The studio, which holds most of Dave's artwork, has given over space to local women from South Asian background - known as Apna, and their classes, workshops and various other activities have helped keep our building lively and exciting. 

But we continue to learn and develop. Over the past year or so we've wound down the Trust and from it created the Dave Pearson Studio; we've designed an on-line shop (www.dspearsonshop.co.uk) to sell original artwork by Dave Pearson, and we've curated a large-scale exhibition at The Turnpike in Leigh.

Most of the collection or work left behind by Dave Pearson has now been catalogued. But it's far from being done and dusted - just today, for instance, we've discovered a number of works on paper that somehow have been overlooked. 

The upper painting is ink on paper, and although I uncovered it a few years ago it somehow disappeared from sight and only reappeared today. The lower mixed media work, again on paper, is unusual for Dave Pearson, in its 'English romantic' colouring. I'm not at all sure of the dates of either - I think probably that they are from when Dave was in his mid-20s (early 1960s), but I'm not at all sure of this. As our archivist Ella Cole points out, the lower piece has some similarities with the Calendar Customs work of the later 1970s. 

We're on firmer ground with Dave's 'Van Gogh' period. This was from the late 1960s, and it was work he was doing when I first met him. Today we came across about 100 pieces of work from that time. They had already been catalogued, but before the present software was in place, so today we reorganised them to fit in to the new system. 

It's a period of Dave's work that we haven't done much with recently. But with the rediscovery of this tranche of drawings it could well be something we might build an exhibition around in the near future. The large-scale pieces he made at this time - the huge reconstruction of 'Van Gogh's Bedroom', or 'The Potato Eaters' have all been lost, but some of these beautiful graphic works survive and are well worth showing.

A glimpse at 1967

The photographer Paul Brown (http://www.paul-brown.com), who I knew during the 1960s, recently got in touch as he has been scanning in some old negatives, and came across a few from visiting Dave Pearson, probably in 1967. 

These were taken in Dave's house at 14 Burgess Street, Haslingden, now demolished and turned into the car park at the rear of the library. 

They take me back to a time when I was student of Dave's. Shortly after these were taken I moved to Haslingden myself. Dave generously put me up for a period of several months before I finally found myself a home of my own in Snig Hole, Helmshore. 

Dave is working on a larger-than-lifesize replica of Van Gogh's Bedroom, which I slept in some of the time. 

Rossendale Art Trail II

We had exactly 100 visitors to 54 Manchester Road over the weekend. People enjoyed both Dave Pearson's work and Ashfia Ashrif at Apna in the ground floor room. We made a few sales too...

Thanks to Dave Smith for his help on Saturday, and to Ella Cole on Sunday. Yasmine Choudry produced lovely food throughout...It was exciting to talk to so many people who were enthused by their visit. Some regular faces of course, but also many people who were here for the first time. 

On visitor wanted to track down the mysterious shopper who used to come along regularly to the art shop he worked at in central Manchester, and buy 'armfuls' of inks. This happened so often that they started having to order larger and larger quantities. He wanted to find a photograph of Dave to see if he was indeed the mystery shopper. And yes, he was! 

Andy Holt visited too; the first time for a couple years. Andy had advised us, a few years back, on our presentation of Dave's work. Some of his suggestions had been quite radical and made us rethink our attitudes to curating Dave's legacy. Anyway it was encouraging that Andy was very enthusiastic about what he found on this visit. He particularly liked the way that the Apna space and the presence of local Asian women, and Islamic inspired art, gave our building a new sense of life and identity. 

Rossendale Art Trail 2019

We're busy preparing for the local Art Trail/Open Studios for the weekend of October 5th and 6th. 

It's been a quiet couple months, as it usually is over summer, but we're launching the Autumn and Winter season at Dave Pearson's Studio with an exciting new show. It consists of previously unseen paintings that we've had framed especially for the Art Trail. Our good friend (and talented painter himself) Paddy Campbell is framing 25 oil paintings, and next week we'll be hanging them. 

If you can't make the weekend, the show will stay up over the Winter, and it's easy to phone or email us to make an appointment. We'll also put the pieces up on our shop - dspearsonshop.co.uk - and they can all be bought online. 

Calendar Customs

Today we've hung a small show at The Whitaker, Rawtenstall. It's a selection of a dozen pieces by Dave Pearson from his series of works made between 1973 and 1985, based on British (mainly English) Calendar Customs. 

It's all part of the Rossendale Heritage Festival, which includes a wide range of events from Bengali stand-up comedy to Lancashire dialect poetry. It embraces the traditional Carnival held at the Bacup and Stacksteads end of the Valley, as well as the Larks of Dean quire, Waterfoot Wakes, heritage readings and storytelling by Hina Qureshi. 

We've taken over one of the two upstairs galleries at the Whitaker, our local museum. The other room is being converted into a pop-up cinema and there will be showings of Derek Smith's film about Dave Pearson, along with Arcadia, a much acclaimed film shown on BB2 earlier this year which uses old film footage to paint a wild, dark and slyly humorous look at English traditional customs. 

We've been able to show a selection of Dave's large cardboard relief paintings, as well as etchings and small oil paintings. Thanks to Paddy Campbell and Ella Cole for their help in hanging the work - the show opens tomorrow and stays up until Sunday the 14th July.

Art Quarterly

Throughout 2018 I was talking with the Art Fund about donating a small collection of work by Dave Pearson to a museum or art gallery. The series of drawings were being gifted by a collector who wished to remain anonymous. They were from a series of beautiful graphite drawings that Dave called 'In The Seven Woods', and they were inspired by the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. Here's a selection of the work:

Eventually the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), based at Reading University, accepted the gift, and they are now on display there. 

Today I found a package sent to me from the Art Fund that included a copy of the Art Quarterly which contained this short piece on the gift: 

It's good to see Dave's work getting publicity in this way, and interesting that these pieces have ended up in a collection dedicated to the 'life and traditions of the English countryside' which Dave immersed himself in the mid-1970s and 80s when he produced his "Calendar Customs' and 'In The Seven Woods' series.

Dave Pearson's self-portraits

The critic Edward Lucie-Smith wrote in one of his essays about Dave Pearson's work -

"(his)...own series of self-images exceeds both Van Gogh and Rembrandt in terms of number. They show a huge range of stylistic flexibility, with each change of style reflecting a change of mood."

When the Dave Pearson Trust existed it took the decision to limit the number of self-portraits sold, in part because the family were uncertain as to which they were prepared to sell. More recently we've held a small exhibition of self-portraits at the Studio, and not surprisingly there is growing interest among collectors in these pieces.

There are over 120 self-portraits in the catalogue of Dave's work, and it would be interesting to look more closely at these and see what are the main stylistic variations. Then to see how they reflect and portray the mood of the artist, as suggested by Lucie-Smith.  

Easter 2019 Open Days

We had a very enjoyable opening of the studio on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. Just about all our visitors stayed for longer than an hour, and it was good to talk about Dave Pearson's work with other local artists, a handful of ladies from Apna (who share our building), and various friends - some of whom had travelled to Haslingden from Shropshire. 

We made a few sales on Saturday and also met with Sara Riccardi, an Italian art historian who has recently moved to Rawtenstall and has already made an impact by starting a series of talks on women artists. Sara runs Artcross (www.artcross.co.uk):

We also took ownership of a stunning triptych which had been in private hands. It's unusual in being of a size which makes it possible to hang in a domestic setting. Most of Dave's triptychs are too large for other than gallery walls. Please contact us if you want to view:

Two showlets in the pipeline

The According to McGee gallery in York have asked us to show alongside Harry Malkin in an exhibition due to open on Saturday 6th April. We've chosen a selection of small canvases that Dave painted in the late 1990s and which demonstrate many of the traits of his Byzantium work (example above).

At the same time we're revamping the display at the studio 54 Manchester Road in Haslingden, to show a range of Dave's work that has been framed, and is ready for sale. We'll be choosing a day or two during the Easter period to open the building for anyone interested in dropping by. Details soon...

Van Gogh's 'Bedroom'

In the process of tidying up my office I just came across some old photos of Dave's. They were mostly from the late 1960s, about the time I first met him. It's when he was in the middle of a period of work which was totally dominated by Vincent Van Gogh. He worked in all mediums, but the biggest and most impressive pieces were large paper-mache reconstructions of some of Van Gogh's painting. Nearly all of Dave's work from this period has gone - either fallen apart or broken up to make space for later pieces. 

Van Gogh's 'Bedroom'. Dave built this slightly larger than life size. It was exhibited, I think at Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery, along with other pieces from this period. Interestingly its mentioned (and illustrated) in Thames and Hudson's 'Environments and Happenings' by Adrian Henri, published in 1974. It says..."David Pearson. an obsessional artist from Lancashire, has emerged as one of the most exciting new artists in a series of recent shows. His work is almost entirely motivated by the life and work of Van Gogh...".

New Year - and a Sale!

The On-line Shop (see previous posts), offering a selection of smaller works by Dave Pearson has been a success - selling considerably more work in the pre-Christmas period than we had expected. 

But one surprise was that the prints - the etchings and drypoints that make up two of the seven categories on sale - didn't sell better than they did. I hoped that they would do well on-line, in part because they can be viewed quite well on a screen. This is in contrast to the paintings where, inevitably, the details of the brushwork get lost. Below are details of four example prints:

Admittedly they have to be sold at a price that covers the printing costs, because unlike the other work which is simply in storage at the studio, we have to ask the master printer Alan Birch to create new editions for us, and cover his costs. 

So we're trying out a new idea - which is to join the January sales, and reduce the price of each print by £100! It will be interesting to see if this results in selling some of these wonderful artworks. They are all in verified limited editions, and once sold this won't be repeated.

The Calendar Customs series of etchings are particularly amazing, full of detail from Dave's exhaustive researches into English customs. They are very attractive and absolutely crammed with minute detail: 

The Dave Pearson On-line Shop website is at www.dspearsonshop.co.uk