Thamesgate: Broadness Salt Marshes, 2006
Some years ago I helped to organise a few exhibitions in London which featured a group of artists, including my own photographs for a long defunct organisation called ‘London Arts Café‘. The last was in 2007, and ‘City People’ included work by 15 artists, one of whom was Hilary Rosen, who had also been in earlier shows.
You can still see quite a lot of material about the activities of the group and some of the work we showed on line, where the web site has been left with a few notices to say the group is no longer active (though that doesn’t stop the spam from people offering to optimise it for search engines at a price.) The group had initially been set up as a charitable company with the hope of opening an actual café that would show art; this never happened as the surge in property prices and rents in London made this beyond our means, though a few years later the Queen’s Terrace Café allowed LAC founder Mireille Galinou to put her dream into practice for a year in St John’s Wood, with several shows, including my own (more pictures of the Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood here.) I was for some years one of the directors of the company, and although I was sad to see LAC go, I was pleased to no longer have to declare myself a company director.
The picture above was one of the images in our LAC show ‘River‘ in 2006 – and you can see one work from each of us still on line.
An image made on a dismal January day outside University College Hospital in 2011
Hilary Rosen and I have for some years worked loosely on several joint projects, but without finding a suitable sponsor or venue. One project we were encouraged to pursue concerned hospitals, and it was with this in mind that we first went to University College Hospital (as well as several other hospitals), where she spent some time working on the views from the upper storeys and I made a few panoramas mainly on the street around the building. Although that project did not materialise we do now have a show in the hospital itself.
Thamesgate: Northfleet, 2000
Another of the several themes we have worked together around is the Thames, and my contribution to the show is based on that, with two sets of half a dozen pictures, the first from 2000-2006 from by the wider river to the east of London including several new prints of work that was in the ‘Estuary’ show at the Museum of London Docklands last year (my own prints rather than those made by the Museum of London). All of these except the picture at the top of this post were taken on film.
Upstream: Tideway Walk, Nine Elms, 2014
The second set of six prints are from the Thames Path between Vauxhall and Wandsworth, and include a couple of pictures from a walk along a part of this with Hilary. These were all taken this year and illustrate my newly found freedom with digital panoramas which you can see in a several posts on My London Diary. The walk I made with Hilary is at Wandsworth Panoramas, but for the show I’ve used a different interpretation of the images in a rather more panoramic format, though still with the same horizontal angle of view.
Hilary’s work in the show will be more varied, and I will be interested to see her final selection which will include some work I’ve not yet seen. I think it will include some of her watercolours made from UCH as well as some lino prints, and possibly some river images.
The show is open to the public at ‘The Street Gallery‘ University College Hospital, 235 Euston Rd, London NW1 2BU from 13th June – 30th July 2014 and is I think open – like the hospital – 24/7. I’ll post a proper invite to the Private View we are having on Monday 16th June 6.00-7.30pm in a few days when I will have copies of the card (and e-card) to send out.