Hanging the Leicester show

Wednesday and Thursday was spent at Leicester Grammar School hanging paintings and drawings for the 'Trees of Byzantium' exhibition that opens on Friday 26th January (although the students will see the work when their term starts on the 8th). 

Alastair Price, Sean Frith and myself drove down with a van loaded with the four large pieces (although these are made up of 11 separate canvases) and 16 smaller framed pieces. This was in the teeth of Storm Eleanor and was an adventure in itself. When we arrived we were joined by Ella Cole. 

The school is in a large modern building, and the exhibition is on a first floor passage that runs the whole length of the building, known as The Street. It's an unusual exhibition space, not ideal in some ways, but it does have the virtue of being seen by everyone passing through, as its the main artery of the school building.

By Thursday afternoon we had completed the hanging. It looked good - despite the fact that it's in a corridor, it's a very wide one and has deep bays in which its possible to stand back and look at the work from 4 or 5 yards away, which is necessary to get a good look at the large pieces. It's also possible to see the work from below, in the dining area:

Getting ready for Leicester

We're busy preparing paintings, information boards, labels, tools and suchlike for the exhibition of Dave's work at Leicester Grammar School in January.

We've had 9 pieces newly framed for the show - as well as 8 already-framed works that will complete the collection of gouaches and drawings in the exhibition. The centrepieces will be three large-scale paintings - a diptych, a triptych, and a 5 panel piece, 7 metres in length, all over 2 metres in height. The overall theme for the exhibition will be the use of tree images, mythology and folklore within his vast 'Byzantium' period. 

The show opens on the 12th January and runs until April 1st 2018. 

Coincidence

Two key aspects of our work are now coming to their conclusion. By coincidence the process of cataloguing all of the artwork held at Dave Pearson's studio is coming to its end just as the Dave Pearson Trust itself is being wound up and made into a new organisation. 

Ella Cole has moved down to the ground floor of the studio and is now cataloguing the large paintings, currently working on item number 13260. After this, final, room has been completed, Ella will move onto the work that is stored in Chris Pearson's house, just down the road from here. It's hard to be certain but that possibly houses another 2,000 or so drawings and paintings. 

The Trust itself is going to be wound up at the end of the current financial year. If you've read the earlier blog posts you'll remember that this has been forced on us because of estate duty issues, and if we didn't take this course of action the Trust would be facing a huge tax bill on its tenth anniversary. Instead the whole of the work that makes up the estate will be handed back to Chris Pearson, and he will manage it himself, although we (Bob, Ella) are planning to continue to offer him the same type of support that we currently provide to the Trust.

Meanwhile we're also collecting together work for the exhibition planned to open on 12th January 2018 at Leicester Grammar school, which will take a look at the way that Dave Pearson used the image of trees in his Byzantium paintings. This will then be followed by another large exhibition at the Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Manchester between June and August 2018, when parts of the Byzantium series that have a particular relevance to Manchester will be shown.

Plans

There's new momentum about at Dave Pearson's studio. For a start with Apna (see previous blog) joining us in the building there's simply more people around - holding workshops, meetings, classes and so on. 

Last week an officer from the Arts Council visited Apna for one of their meetings and took the opportunity to look around the studio. Apparently he was very impressed; for us at the Trust to have this kind of opportunity to widen knowledge of Dave's legacy is invaluable, and it chimes well with the efforts we're making to initiate a fresh round of exhibitions of the work. 

As part of these new initiatives Ella and I visited Leicester Grammar School at the weekend (above) to look at their large exhibition space and plan a show for the end of the year, or in early 2018. We're also expecting a visit from Zillah Bell Gallery, who are one of the country's very best dealers in prints, to look at the new 'Calendar Customs' series. On top of this we are expecting to settle dates for the Turnpike exhibition very soon, and the Colourfield Gallery of Poynton have sold the 4 pieces of work that they took at the end of 2016 and are wanting more.