Palace Hotel -Mood Study 2

 Although born in Cheltenham, Fred grew up in Lancashire and the West Midlands, left school early and worked at various manual jobs. Determined to draw and paint, he eventually attended Art School in Bournville, and then Central School of Art in London. He was awarded a Hill bursary to Mantova and Venice before graduating in 1969.

 

After college he continued to paint but worked at a series of manual then teaching jobs for a year, then taught at Art Schools in Hereford, Bournville, and Aston University. In 1979 he worked briefly at B.B.C. Pebble Mill and went on to pursue a freelance career as a pastiche, matte and scenic artist working in television, commercials, and films. Film work has ranged from hundreds of large scale landscape and cityscape backdrops to Art House film projects which include ‘Landgirls’; ‘Hilary and Jackie’, being the hands of Gertler in the film ‘Carrington;’ large sets of watercolours for ‘Ladies in Lavender’, and a huge collection of over one hundred and twenty backdrops of townscapes, landscapes and skies for Aardman Animations films;  ‘Wallace and Gromit, the curse of the Wererabbit’, and then ‘A matter of Loaf and Death’. He has taught visualisations to postgraduate, design students at the National Film and Television school.

 

Despite busy schedules in his commercial work, Fred always continued to paint and exhibited in one and two man shows in the West Country and a one man show in Upper Street Gallery, London. He also showed at Bradford Print Biennale, in the Singer Friedlander Sunday Times Watercolour competition, RWEA, RBSA, and Ikon galleries plus galleries in Wells and Bristol. He also had two shows of work based on travels in India at Artique in Tetbury and Bodelair House in Hurst.

 

Since moving to South Devon his local landscapes have been shown in galleries around the area including Brownston, Davidson, and Artizan galleries. His work is now held in collections in America, England, Germany, and Israel.

 This project was a very interesting one for me. I am a studio – based artist, who works from drawings and photo references which are gathered on site and during the painting process. For this project I did some preliminary studies both on location and in studio with grid drawings before the Painting day then turned up on site to paint a canvas in situ. I had not done plein air painting for some forty odd years due to bad experiences with viewers, bad weather and a herd of cows. This time my experience was more positive.

 

The Palace Hotel is an attractive but very white regular building. After initial trials to try to capture Its essence, I settled for a limited palate and repetitive pattern which is never easy. Questions on the day included technical questions re colours, tones, perspective, and layout. More personal ones; Is my child on the right course? Where are local courses held? What props could help them start? Where were the historical buildings in Paington? We encouraged people to come and paint the next day.

 

Overall, we saw 160 people with ages ranging for 10 years to over 60s which included dog walkers, locals, and holiday makers from Wales.

 

Pencil and Charcoal on Paper

26x21cm

Framed under glass