Andrew Graham-Dixon in conversation with John Virtue
Saturday 17 January 2015 | Towner, Eastbourne
Towner is delighted to welcome art historian and broadcaster Andrew Graham-Dixon, who will be joining British painter John Virtue for a very special talk on the opening of his major exhibition, The Sea.
Andrew Graham-Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television in the English-speaking world. He has presented numerous landmark series on art for the BBC, including the acclaimed A History of British Art, Renaissance and Art of Eternity, as well as numerous individual documentaries on art and artists.
John Virtue’s The Sea is a spectacular new body of work that explores the vast, dark expanse of the North Sea. The exhibition at Towner presents 12 canvases, 24 paintings on paper and over 100 sketchbooks, some seen for the first time. All the works were executed in the last three years from Virtue’s home in Blakeney Point, Norfolk.
An admirer of the great English landscape painters, Turner and Constable, Virtue’s paintings have been compared to oriental brush painting and American abstract expressionism. Virtue is most well-known for his iconic images of London’s skyline, created when he was National Gallery Associate Artist in 2003-2005.
This promises to be an exciting discussion between two of the UK’s leading art figures on Virtue’s long career as an artist and his newest works.
Andrew Graham-Dixon in conversation with John Virtue, Saturday 17 January 2015, 2pm. Towner, Devonshire Park, College Road, Eastbourne BN21 4JJ. Tickets £10/£9 conc./£7.50 members and are available by phoning 01323 434670 or from townereastbourne.org.uk
Notes
Towner (Registered Charity 115676) is an award-winning gallery and contemporary art museum in Eastbourne.
http://www.townereastbourne.org.uk/
John Virtue trained at the Slade School of Art, London, from 1965 to 1969. He then worked as a postman in the late 1970s before devoting himself to his art in the 1980s. He has always worked from the landscape where he lives, initially from the moorland in North East Lancashire where his first works in black and white were created. For many years, he resided in Exeter, South Devon, taking the edge of Dartmoor and the Exe Estuary as his subjects.
From 2003 to 2005, Virtue was Artist Associate at the National Gallery, London – a period of intensive work based in a studio in the Gallery, scrutinising the London skyline. The sketches he made each day culminated in a series of grand paintings of the capital which were shown at the National Gallery in 2005, while a selection of the works on paper were on view concurrently at The Courtauld Gallery.
Two years living in Italy separated his time in London and his move to Norfolk, the latter prompted by a stay in Burnham Market, near Burnham Thorpe, the birthplace of his lifelong hero, Horatio Nelson. However, it was the view of the sea from Blakeney Point that inspired Virtue to live and work in North Norfolk in 2009 and, since then, he has produced these dramatic land- and seascapes.
Works by John Virtue are represented in numerous public and private collections including Tate,British Museum, Arts Council England, Yale Center for British Art, USA, and the Queensland Museum and Gallery for Modern Art, Australia.
Andrew Graham-Dixon is one of the leading art critics and presenters of arts television in the English-speaking world. He has presented numerous landmark series on art for the BBC, including the acclaimed A History of British Art, Renaissance and Art of Eternity, as well as numerous individual documentaries on art and artists. For more than 20 years he has published a weekly column on art, first in the Independent and, more recently, in the Sunday Telegraph. He has written a number of acclaimed books, on subjects ranging from medieval painting and sculpture to the art of the present.
He has a long history of public service in the field of the visual arts, having judged the Turner Prize, the BP National Portrait Prize and the Annual British Animation Awards, among many other prizes. He has served on the Government Art Collection Committee, the Hayward Advisory Committee, and is currently a member of the board of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/
