This year’s 7th Annual Lynn Painter-Stainers
Prize for Representational Painting was won by the worthy portraitier AntonyWilliams, but I have to say my top pick was certainly Christopher Green. His watery-realism style of sketching pockets of London activity is mesmerizing
enough on computer screen, let alone when he spreads it six meters wide across
a gallery wall. (A feat he completed for an exhibition of megalith Thames
panoramas, catch them at the Prince’s Drawing School.)
His drawings are a love affair with the city, glorifying
everything from the Walthamstow Marshes to a high-rise in Archway, Liverpool
Street station at rush hour to Bermondsey at dusk. Taking the busy and making of it beautiful, languid
images which hang together in their darkness and seem to span great stretches
of time.
What I love most are the imperfections of his pen, the
warped perspectives and evident creases where the paper has been folded. It’s reality
as it often feels it should be captured - not with the hyper-pixilated
perfection of a camera lens, but with interpretive sweeps of graphite that
follow a pattern of truth, but leave room to dally.
And a quick nod to runner-up Rachel Ross as well, whose
still-life acrylics of "worn", "found", and "significant" objects are more than a
little bit lovable. Enjoy them too.
Christopher Green's website here.
No comments:
Post a Comment