Dave Pearson on Pinterest

To see a great selection of some of Dave Pearson's work go to his page on Pinterest. It's at https://uk.pinterest.com/bobfrith/dave-pearson/ and there's a wide choice of great paintings, drawings and prints. You can follow the board if you wish to see new additions to the page, such as the large pastel drawing of the Minehead Hobby Hoss (above), and the graphite drawing from 'In the 7 Woods' (below).

The Pinterest page is maintained by the Dave Pearson Trust. 

Half a century

There's a palpable push now to get the film completed. Margaret Mytton is working hard to provide Derek Smith with the extra images of Dave's work that are required to fill small sections of the film and create the necessary balance between documentary footage, talking heads, and examples of Dave's work. Derek has promised us a copy of the film in its current state in a day or two, and he has even given a preview to a colleague familiar with film production for his view. Broadly the feedback was highly positive, but still a few minor tweaks need to take place.

In the process some interesting things are coming to light. Not least through the work Margaret is doing to improve the quality of the photographed images. As she has said many times, the recording of Dave's work on camera has been piecemeal and nearly always in far-from-ideal conditions; as a result it has been a mammoth task for her to create adequate photographs for use in the film. But in the process we've seen some of Dave's earliest work...

...such as this lovely drawing of his parents at home in Glyn Road, Hackney, London; probably drawn in the early 1960s. Then there's the late work, much of which deals with his illness and hospitalisation during the last decade of his life:

Above is a detail from one of a wonderful series he made using photographed prints combined with embroidery, made roughly half a century after the drawing. 50 years of drawings and paintings that describe a lifetime. 

Making space for the big paintings

The photograph (above) is of one of the upstairs rooms in the refurbished studio. You can see where we've piled boxes and groups of the smaller paintings and other work; in the background are notebooks and very small works. With the exception of a handful or two of small paintings and a pile of perhaps 3 or 400 works on paper from the late hospital period, we now have all of Dave's small works back in his old studio (always excepting those that remain in the house, and those that are still at Globe Arts Studio in Stacksteads  - another 1000?). 

That leaves 200 large paintings to be brought over from the storage space at Albion Mill. This will happen next week, so we're now busy freeing up space in the lower floors of the studio to accommodate them. Tomorrow we'll free up two large rooms, one on each of the lower floors, and remove any work from the walls that will hinder carrying the large pieces into the building. Finally we'll protect, as best we can, the glass and paintwork. 

Once that's over there will be the slow patient work of organising all of the work; cataloguing it; and displaying it so visitors can see a small selection of work by Dave Pearson.

With the snow gone..

With the snow gone things are getting back to normal. The pipes have been fixed at the studio. They've been lagged too, and the lesson learned that the stop-cock gets turned off at any hint of sub-freezing temperatures. Meanwhile at the store things have dried out a little, although the work on chipboard still looks vulnerable. However we looked through the work in the store yesterday, with Jackie and Julian (See Gallery), to choose a couple of larger pieces to put into the forthcoming exhibition. 

That done, we moved some of the shaped canvases to the studio and put them up in the new space we've created in what was the attic. It's a wedge-shaped area, quite large, and ideal for triangular pieces such as these. We also dealt with some of the work that has pigeon poo on it. Fortunately this comes off with warm soapy water and a gentle rub. Dave was plagued by pigeons getting into the studio through the roof space; they sat on the hard-to-reach piles of painting and coo-ed at him. There's a story of him catching one and dispatching it bloodily with an axe. 

Otherwise, I need to plan ahead for the See exhibition, and try and tie this in with some of the visitors who want to follow-up the Radio 4 broadcast with a visit. Several different people have mentioned how they feel a film about Dave, his work, his life, the effort to 'save' the paintings, would make a great film. Some tentative progress has been made with this idea....watch this space.

BBC broadcast

There's now a blog on the BBC iPM website about Dave and the strong possibility that the piece about the work of the Trust in restoring the studio will be broadcast on PM, Radio 4, at 5.30 this afternoon. It's entitled

The great British painter you've never heard of?

And by clicking on this link you can also listen to the interview as a BBC iPlayer podcast.

New website

One of the byproducts of being snowed in for most of the Christmas holiday is that I decided to finally make an attempt to create a new Dave Pearson website.

The reason behind this is simply that I created the original site using Dreamweaver on a PC , but I now have a Mac and didn't want to spend the (large) amount of money to buy DW for the Mac. Instead I bought Freeway 5, which is far simpler and does the job I need it to. In the meantime I haven't been able to update the current website for many months now.

So, all change and a new site has been born - fittingly on New Year's Day. Still the same address - http://www.dspearson.org - of course, but some new images and information. Most of all I can now easily update things. Click on the link to the right of this (the first heading under LINKS) to check it out.

A new home

I went to look at the studio yesterday and Mark the builder showed me around. The rooms are in the process of being painted, and the skirting boards and details fixed back in place. The building has been totally transformed - it is almost unrecognisable from the shambolic and slightly depressing place that we vacated in the summer. In a couple of weeks I should be able to start putting in some shelving, and a week after that begin the process of bringing the work back to its new home.

Today I spent some hours in the storage unit, beginning to plan for this eventuality. I've decided to buy a van, which will help move some of the work, if not the very biggest pieces. I looked at the piles of paintings and reliefs and started thinking about how to move them back; in what order; and where to store them. Margaret did a brilliant job of sorting the work out into different sizes, so it should be a more orderly process returning them than it was dragging them out of the studio.

I also need to think about an opening event for the refurbished studio, and that will be part of the planning work I need to do this next week or so. My guess is that we are on schedule to open in mid-December - a small event for friends, helpers, colleagues and patrons.

Update

Apologies for another long gap in my posts. It's been holiday time apart from anything else, and as far as the studio goes the builders have been continuing their work on the refurbishment.

The dry-rot has now been treated and where necessary timbers have been replaced. This has involved some parts of the roof, but in the main it's been the entire floor surface of the large ground-floor room, and the first floor room that would (in a normal house) have been designated as the bathroom. Currently re-plastering is being done; to be followed by re-wiring and finally by a complete tidying and treating of all walls, woodwork and ceilings and painting.

The builders, to my relief, have stuck close to their estimated costs, and as the scale of the work and cost has become more apparent I've had the confidence to ask for other small jobs to be taken on that will improve the final look and usefulness of the building.

The plan now, agreed at a Trust meeting last week, is to aim to start moving the work back in November, although in a slower and more controlled way than it left. In mid-December we hope to have a special opening and viewing of the place. We'll use this as an opportunity to raise more funds for the Trust as the bank balance is beginning to dip, but it'll also be an opportunity to celebrate the enormous task that has been undertaken in rescuing both Dave's work and his old studio.

Some work has been on-going in this direction too. Julian of the See Gallery has helped create the first limited edition print of Dave's work - The Wall (at the top of this post), which proved very popular at the See exhibition. This has taken longer than any of us expected, but Julian has insisted we achieved the highest possible quality print and, after many trials, we are only now happy with the result. We are now able to sell this edition of 40 to raise funds for the Trust.