After recently going to two exhibitions, the CCA Gallery and Public and Private, I was inspired through the works of the photographers regarding their pop art, graphics, album art, documentary photography and paintings. Looking back at the galleries I really liked how each artist’s work varied from the next, with each possessing their own unique perspective and style. The first gallery I visited was the CCA Gallery, exhibiting the works of Mike McCartney, Rupert Truman, and Carinthia West. Some examples from the gallery can be seen below:
Rupert Truman:
Storm Thorgerson founded StormStudios in the early 1990s where he worked as part of a creative team that included photographer Rupert Truman, who worked with him shooting 99% of the studio’s output. Storm Thorgeson sadly passed away in 2013 but the Studio remains busy today creating ‘normal but’ designs and Rupert Truman has given us access to many works from the studio, including iconic props such as the heads used in the 10cc album, Tenology, that will be included in our exhibition ‘The Eye Of The Storm‘ (Thursday 6th – Sunday 30th July 2017). Rupert Truman is one of the leading photographers in the country and has shot images of bands from Pink Floyd to Muse. We’re delighted to announce that Rupert will be at For Arts Sake gallery Sunday 23rd July from 12-3pm talking about his art and signing copies of his book. In our interview with Rupert Truman he talks to us about his work, his time with Storm Thorgerson and the future for StormStudios.
Carinthia West:
Throughout her career as a model, actress and journalist, Carinthia West, 59, has always had her camera by her side, capturing carefree moments for her bulging scrapbooks. She remembers her great-grandmother being a keen photographer, and received her first camera – ‘a plastic thing; when you wound on the film it got caught in the sprockets’ – at the age of nine. But it was when she was given her Canon EF, a 35mm single-lens reflex camera, in the early 1970s, that she began experimenting with film and exposures while taking shots of her friends. West’s first exhibition, Hanging Out, has come about almost by chance. As a tribute to her parents, General Sir Michael and Lady West, last year she started organising a show of their extensive art collection – ranging from a Lowry, which her mother bought direct from the artist, to a Lichtenstein – at the Quay Arts Centre, a gallery that her parents had helped found and build in the Isle of Wight in 1975.
Mike McCartney:
Mike McGear is actually Paul McCartney’s brother; he changed his name in the mid-’60s shortly after the Beatles become famous, not wishing to be perceived as riding Paul’s coattails. He was a member of the Scaffold, who recorded some fairly successful comedy rock releases in the late ’60s (their “Thank U Very Much” and “Lily Pink” singles were big British hits). In 1974, he recorded a solo album with plenty of help from Paul, who wrote or co-wrote almost all the songs and sang backup; fellow Wings Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, and Jimmy McCullough also play and sing. The album, which unsurprisingly recalled Wings, attracted some critical notice, but sold poorly.
After visiting the CCA Gallery we headed over to the Public and Private gallery, they were currently holding an exhibition based around ‘Pop Icons of the 20th Century – British & American Pop Art’. Emerging in the mid 1950’s in Britain and late 1950’s in America, Pop Art reached its peak in the 1960’s and went on to become the most recognisable art form of the 20th century. It began as a revolt against the dominant approaches to art and culture and traditional views on what art should be.
Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books for their imagery. Some of the artists who have the work exhibited are Andy Warhol, Sir Peter Blake and Patrick Caulfield. Some of their work can be seen below:
Andy Warhol:
Andy Warhol, original name Andrew Warhola, (born August 6, 1928, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 22, 1987, New York), American artist and filmmaker, an initiator and leading exponent of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s whose mass-produced art apotheosized the supposed banality of the commercial culture of the United States. An adroit self-publicist, he projected a concept of the artist as an impersonal, even vacuous, figure who is nevertheless a successful celebrity, businessman, and social climber. The son of Ruthenian (Rusyn) immigrants from what is now eastern Slovakia, Warhol graduated in 1949 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, (now Carnegie Mellon University), Pittsburgh, with a degree in pictorial design. He then went to New York City, where he worked as a commercial illustrator for about a decade. Warhol began painting in the late 1950s and received sudden notoriety in 1962, when he exhibited paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap pad boxes. By 1963 he was mass-producing these purposely banal images of consumer goods by means of photographic silkscreen prints, and he then began printing endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colours. The silkscreen technique was ideally suited to Warhol, for the repeated image was reduced to an insipid and dehumanized cultural icon that reflected both the supposed emptiness of American material culture and the artist’s emotional noninvolvement with the practice of his art. Warhol’s work placed him in the forefront of the emerging Pop art movement in America.
Sir Peter Blake:
Peter Blake was born in Kent and studied first at the Gravesend Technical College School of Art before continuing his studies between 1953 and 1956 at the Royal College of Art in London. At the RCA Peter Blake was at the forefront of British Pop, studying alongside Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips amongst others. He was awarded the Leverhulme Research Award in 1956, to study popular art. Between 1956 and 1957 he made an extended journey to Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Holland and Belgium), and in 1961 was awarded the first Junior Prize from the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition. In 1964 he was appointed a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London and at the Walthamstow School of Art. In 1975 he was a founder member of the group of artists called The Brotherhood of Ruralists, and from 1994 to 1996 he was Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London. Blake became a Royal Academician in 1981, was awarded a CBE in 1983 and was knighted in 2002 for services to art. There have been multiple retrospectives of his work in Britain, with the most significant including those in 1983 at the Tate and in 2008 at Tate Liverpool. In February 2005, the Sir Peter Blake Music Art Gallery, located at the University of Leeds was opened by the artist with a permanent display of 20 examples of Blake’s album sleeve cover art, including the only public display of a signed print of the iconic Sgt. Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.
Patrick Caulfield:
Patrick Joseph Caulfield, British artist (born Jan. 29, 1936, London, Eng.—died Sept. 29, 2005, London), was a member of the “New Generation” of 1960s British Pop and abstract artists. Caulfield’s bold paintings incorporated everyday objects in still lifes and ordinary domestic interiors and were defined by strong graphic design, black outlines, and bright, saturated colours. He later introduced elements of trompe l’oeil and photorealism into his painting. He also worked in other mediums, including graphic prints, tapestry, theatrical set design, and screen-print book illustrations. Caulfield was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987 and shared the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1995. He was made CBE in 1996.
