Lost Nottingham was a illustration/poetry project for Nottingham Poetry Festival 2018. It was also shown in Open Studios in May 2018.
The three banners were shown at Jermy & Westerman bookshop on Mansfield Road in April 2018 which has now sadly closed.
The theme was famous people and their connection to Nottingham that may be little known.
Here photos of the works. The actual poems can be found at
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing
I did not show any new work but displayed the Indie Abstracts shown at Doctors Orders in October 2016.
After the paintings below were lost to oil degradation I received a request from singer-songwriter Ralegh Long to use the images on his new LP called ‘Upwards of Summer’. I repainted the images and Ralegh used one on the Lp released in Summer 2017 pics below of launch at Rough Trade Nottingham.
I painted these three canvases after Spectrum paints very kindly sent me some new tubes of oil paint. Sadly my ground wasn’t suitable and the linseed leaked into the support discolouring the painting. I painted over. However I am re-painting the main and to my mind most successful image below.
1984 London
1985-8 London abstract work used as covers for The Weather Prophets band.
2015 something remarkably similar on the wall of my studio……plus ca change…
These the only three pieces of work this year and they were all submitted.
The selectors took the two drawings..have to work harder on paintings 🙂
The full list of exhibitors here: http://nottinghamcastleopen.com/
Here the first coloured drawing from a couple of weeks back and a new three part 12′ x 4′ canvas.
This connects directly with my mid to late 1980’s work…..especially the Record Sleeve paintings.
https://shaunbelcher.com/painting/
Plus ca change…
'Punky' 2014 Acrylic on Canvas 24" x 24" £300These two canvases were painted in may last year before the Lady Bay ‘Moogee’ show. They were shown but in a hallway but many people may have missed them.
I did not put online at time as they been at my friend Stephe’s from last May until recently. I forgot about them when I submitted to the Open. They may indicate where I headed in the new sequence I will be working on for this year’s Lady Bay show. Again it will be at 117 Holme Road 🙂
'Paradise' 24" x 24" Acrylic on Canvas 2014 £300
Red Barn 2005 watercolour and pencil on paper 24" x 36" £200
I have just completed a complete archive of work from 1975-2000. 25 years of strange stuff indeed. In the process I found some images that had slipped the net when creating this current catalogue so here they are.
Here a watercolour form 2005 and two drawings from Egerton Studio in 2004.
All work on this blog is for sale.
Please use the contact email if interested or contact me through social media.
'Youlgreave' Watercolour and pencil on paper 24" x 36" £200
These two drawings were accepted and shown in the Nottingham Open 2014. These two pieces were easily selected for my submission because they along with the large three part canvas below were the ONLY three pieces of work I completed in 2014.
In response to some early debate on Sharkforum Chicago I played around with multiple identities and created my own ‘Fake’ gallery which showed various ‘personas’ artworks in different styles – all mine ( a bit like an artistic Pessoa 🙂
Here a further response to the Mark Staff Brandl article on sharkforum.org
This article really hits home from the perspective of an ‘ex’ artist, future artist struggling to deal with the multiplicity of styles and cliques now infecting the British ‘Body Artistic’. I was a party to the initial infection of ‘oblique strategy’ art through a couple of interviews for Goldsmith’s College of Art here in the late 1980?s ( ironically just before the Brit-Art boom).
I was discarded as being too ‘traditional’ at these interviews and responded by disappearing literally to the countryside where I grew up to complete the supposed ‘reactionary’ art I was accused of. I ceased exhibiting soon after and have led a merry dance around the genres ever since and in fact came across r.d.roth of sharkforum in that dance.
It seemed then and it seems now that a a badly misunderstood ‘mission statement’ based on an outpouring of cobbled together cod philosophy (especially French) actually mattered more than an ability to develop or complete a substantial body of work. This trend has thrived like a virus especially in regard to art-training which has shed all pretence to accomodate ‘skills’ in favour of ‘networking’ and ‘business acumen’.
As an example of how far this trend predominates I recently had a show where I instinctively felt that my actual ‘work’ ( traditional landscape drawings influenced by Paul Nash ) were irrelevant to my audience and in a fit of pique I started drawing on the day of the show a series of sarcastic and irreverant cartoons about the art-world in Nottingham on basis if you can’t beat them join them! I immediately gained attention, some small renumeration and a possible future show……
I feel that I have stumbled into that world the article describes of small pecks at the rhino’s hide in search of my own artistic salvation. I increasingly over last decade and a half admired ‘polymath’ souls such as Butch Hancock (musician/photographer) and anybody operating well away from the main stream especially so-called ‘outsider art’ as they seemed immune to this ‘tainted generation’s’ stylistic morass.
It seems to me that artists have two choices…travel to Rome and adopt the clothes of the conquerer’s and become ‘curators’ or walk to the furthest edges and break down fences that border the still wild and unexplored possibly with multiple personas….Pessoa comes to mind and in his spirit I have invented any number of ‘Fake’ musicians and artists recently….indeed to the point where I declared myself a ‘Fake Gallery‘and declared my various ‘styles’ separate personas…
Only in fakery did I become real…