Salon Event # 2

Simon Plum – Selected Works [23.02.2010 - ]

The second installation of They Eat Culture’s new Salon Events series featured the paintings and drawings of local Preston artist, Simon Plum.

Born in Preston Simon paints and draws in a variety of mediums including; oil, acrylic, watercolour, pencil, charcoal and ink. The subject matters he depicts are just as varied, creating Breugel-esque paintings incorporating bizarre half-man half-beast characters involved in vivid imaginative acts. These allegorical scenes draw on the history of medieval works where each character symbolises a particular meaning.

To the other extreme Simon produces loosely painted landscapes of Preston or Manchester where shadowy edges of the canal or bus station are rendered in colourful chiaroscuro, making these grim, usually ignored, corners beautiful.

In more ambitious pieces he combines these two styles with unusual narratives and strange animals are seen to parade the streets of Preston, holding picnics on Tythebarn Street or running through Avenham Park. He sees these paintings as naive and surreal evocations of past memories and finds that the tales become increasingly complex as certain recurrent characters evolve.

His interests lie in the anxieties, desires, nostalgic yearnings and absurdities that govern our behaviour, or more specifically his own. There is a blurred distinction between comedy and tragedy, reality and fantasy, the past and the present, with the stories in his paintings drifting between these areas.

To see more of Simon’s work visit: www.simonplum.com