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

Salon Event # 1

David Henckel– Selected Works [15.12.2009 - 31.01.2010]

An exhibition of paintings and prints from Preston based artist David Henckel launched They Eat Culture’s new strand of curated exhibitions at The Continental, Preston. David's work is informed by the personality of everyday objects and how they might interact when placed together on the canvas. Through a playful process of sampling and automatic drawing he combines elements of vegetation, science fiction, furniture, architecture, vehicles and other stuff to create characters and forms with absurd and comic tendencies. There are strong elements of street-art in these works including the cartoon-ish influence of the New York School painter Philip Guston.

He sets himself the challenge of creating new characters based on a loose set of rules; whether they are to be all three legged or monopods; or trying to bring out the inherent character without the use of expression or eyes and utilising shape or posture rather than a face.

A narrative then evolves as these 'sculptural-objects' face each other as if there is some sort of hidden dialogue. The canvas also develops like a piece of writing working from left to right and down the canvas, flattening perspective and giving each character its own space suggesting code or pictograms. David thinks of them as “quantum soup, packets of information, genes or tiny building blocks of unlimited potential.”

To see more of his work, visit: www.davidhenckel.com