NEWS - SUMMER 2024
Chris Orr painting in Hoi An, Vietnam 2024.
Back from my travels in Vietnam and Japan in March where I was doing a lot of painting and drawing, I have been busy working on a new book to be published by Unicorn in 2025 as successor to my 2013 “Chris Orr the making of things”. This will review all the different strands of my work from the prints through to the paintings and drawings.
After exhibitions last Autumn and Winter with the Jill George Gallery, North House Gallery Manningtree, Chelsea Arts Club, Rugby Museum and Art Gallery and most recently at the Kevis House Gallery Petworth of my Japanese inspired paintings and prints, I am looking forward to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition which opens to the public on the 18th of June where I will be showing 6 pictures.
The big watercolour painting “Talent Night” is the ultimate theatrical experience. My hopefuls are some of the usual suspects, singers, a saxophonist, a man on a bed of nails but they are joined by other less likely participants. At the entrance is Icarus, all togged up and ready to fly (or maybe not). The Human Pyramid who are balancing the impossible with the probable and the monkey trying to write a Shakespeare sonnet randomly on a typewriter. Everybody has got talent. Some more than others.
My painting “Cargo” is a sequel to my “Ship” shown in last years Summer Exhibition. Now in port a cornucopia of goods are spread out on the quay. There is the World’s largest fruit salad, a collection of Grandfather clocks, cricket bats, animals for a menagerie and assorted junk. As it says on the side of a van about to drive onto the ferry “ENUFF STUFF”.
I don’t really like shopping so my mixed media piece “The view from the back of the shops” is probably what you see if you are a shop assistant or a burglar. The pet shop has gone a bit mad and stocks a rhinoceros. The music shop has some curious instruments and the corner shop doesn’t have very much at all except a change on wires system.
Almost the first record I ever bought was Lonnie Donegan singing “Midnight Special” back in the 1950s. It has stayed with me ever since as one of my unperformed party tricks. This year it became a big engraving “The Midnight Special”. The train snaking down is packed full of people and incidents. This is an epic print echoing the composition of my 1997 lithograph “The 20th Century Limited”.
“The Red roofs of Shimoda” is a lithograph that come from waking one morning in Shimoda just south of Tokyo and seeing this brilliant red roofs under a beautiful blue sky. Making a print just about the colour was a first for me. However there was a little old lady who got lost. She is in the print.
Finally there is an engraving of my version of the famous Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting “An experiment with an air pump”. I have introduced some more modern elements: a bike, a garage air pump for tyres, a cuckoo clock and a radio.
Chris Orr May 2024
