Still Life (III), St Mary's series

24″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas 2011. Private collection. Chris Gollon was interviewed about this painting and the techniques he used: “Whilst enjoying my Residency at Durham University in 2011, I ran out of materials and had to make a trip to Newcastle. In the art supplier’s in the centre of town, I was struck by some canvases that were primed with transparent gesso. Thus one could paint on this surface without fear of shrinkage, while at the same time appearing to work on raw canvas.

I decided to pay a little more attention to the negative spaces in the painting, and to make it easier for myself I brought the objects closer together. The fruit, cheese, wine bottle and glasses are simply blocked in with black acrylic gesso. Then using a printmaker’s roller, I went back in to the still-wet gesso to make the horizon, shadows and sweeping movement. Although one gets better at this with practice, it is still a risky business. You never know quite how it is going to come out. One can work into black gesso with lighter colours without fear of the black working through to the surface over time. I was therefore able to work up the fruit with cadmium red1, blended in with fingers or a rag, and highlight applied with white4 into the still-wet paint. The cheeses were made using fingers, the wrong end of brushes, a palette knife and rags. The wine was subtly coloured with muted red and white highlights.

There is a famous saying by Diderot—he having looked at a Chardin still life—that in that picture, anyone could eat the cheese, drink the wine and go home fully nourished. In this painting I wanted to try to make a cork, without it being realistic—so that the viewer feels he could take out of the bottle and pour himself a glass of wine. I think I achieved that here.”

Still Life With Drunken Glasses (II)

30″ x 22″ (76 x 56cm) acrylic on paper 2015. Available from IAP Fine Art. To enquire about this painting, please contact us. The first version of this painting appears on p.142 of Tamsin Pickeral’s biography Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art . This version, seems as if it is the same couple, but much further on in their relationship.

Two Guitars

20″ x 24″ (51 x 61cms) acrylic on canvas 2010. Private collection.

Deliver Me (NAKED MUSIC Series)

Installation with seven canvases, 60″ x 36″ (152 x 61cm) acrylic on canvas 2004. Available from IAP Fine Art. To enquire about this painting, please contact us. This work was originally titled ‘Cross (after Goya), but was then re-thought and re-worked for the Eleanor McEvoy inspired NAKED MUSIC series and her song ‘Deliver Me’. This painting features in art historian Tamsin Pickeral’s biography, CHRIS GOLLON: Humanity in Art (Hyde & Hughes, 2010). See Publications page for details.  Goya was the first painter in history to paint meat or game without any culinary implements, making it more a mute accusation of murder. Chris Gollon takes this a stage further, making a Cross from salmon still life. To heighten the poignancy of the piece Gollon made use of one of his magnifying circles positioning it on a panel at the rough location that the centurion’s lance speared the side of Christ.

Still Life in Orange & Black

48″ x 36″ (122 x 91cms) oil on canvas 2012. Available from IAP Fine Art. To enquire about this painting, please contact us. Chris Gollon said of this work:    “Towards the end of 1888 two as yet unknown artists were working together in The Yellow House in Arles. During a turbulent 9 weeks, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin–as a result of extreme rivalry and collaboration–produced some of the greatest masterpieces of the late nineteenth century. Their main argument was that Gauguin thought one should paint from the imagination and Van Gogh from life. This was in part due to their differing religious backgrounds. They both thought that art could be the new religion. Each artist tried to persuade the other of the validity of their own approach. Gauguin, as it turned out, used both methods. Whereas, for Van Gogh, painting from the imagination was a very perilous activity indeed. In mid-November, Vincent decided to paint his own chair to demonstrate the power of working from the motif. In an hour or two, he made one of the most iconic images in all of art. Still life painting up until that day had nearly always been about wine, flowers, foodstuffs etc.. To paint an unoccupied chair was unprecedented. Unwittingly, and at the highest level, he had expanded the whole genre of still life.

It occurs to me that inanimate objects, which constitute still life, can be taken from other areas. A scarecrow of course is a very unique inanimate object, since its very purpose is to appear like a man. Therefore, it wasn’t too difficult for me in this case to animate an inanimate object. I decided to bring the scarecrow indoors to give it an ornamental look, which I also partly achieved by adding his two friends: the doll and the broken guitar. He appears to be rising from the painting like a phoenix, and his expressionless face appears full of expression, as strangely does the guitar. This is a painting that means everything and nothing.”

Fool on the Hill

20″ x 39″ (51 x 99cm) acrylic on canvas 2007. Available from IAP Fine Art. To enquire about this painting, please contact us. This painting features in Tamsin Pickeral’s biography Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art . See Publications page for details.

A Drink To Soutine

20” x 16” (51 x 41cms) acrylic on canvas 2010. Private collection.  Chris Gollon was interviewed about his techniques used in this painting: “This is my homage to Chaim Soutine, who painted the most magnificent red fruits that I have ever seen. He used distortion a lot, but not in the same way as I do, and so I felt this painting could be a homage rather than a copy. The whole canvas was painted with a neutral brown, created by mixing red, yellow and mars black. Then water was thrown at the canvas while the paint was still wet to create a variety of drips and marks. In some areas the paint can be removed with rags, and more water can be added, until an interesting surface is achieved. The background was then completed with a terracotta colour (mixed from red, yellow, black and white), leaving areas to show through. The tablecloth was sketched in with thin white paint, leaving areas exposed again to show the form. The wine in both the glasses and the bottle were blocked in pure mars black, as were the fruits in the foreground. The shape of the stems of the glass and the neck of the bottle were made with very thin mars black applied with a sable brush. The glass was very slightly modified with a thin white so as to achieve the effect transparency. White highlights were then added with pure titanium white, as were the stars as in what now appears to be a sky. The fruit at the bottom was made by applying cadmium red paint, blending in towards the shadow with the thumb, and simple white highlights applied to some of the fruit.”

War

18″ x 22″ (46 x 56cm) acrylic on canvas 2006. Private collection. This painting features in Tamsin Pickeral’s biography Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art , in which she notes: “War was painted in response to reading a number of philosophical works by the French playwright and novelist Jean Paul Sartre (1905-80), which dealt primarily with human hostilities. Deeply moved by Sartre, Gollon went on to paint War as a pictorial reminder of insidious violence within society, using the colours of battle, a red ground overlaid with the blue-grey smoke of gunfire, and then exercised his scratching-in technique to produce the angry, raw red outlines of his elements. The blatant message of the painting is that it is a hopeless battle of stacked odds and inequality with only one obvious winner. It is a painting in which any number of situations may be identified from the brutality of war, injustice of politics, the stranglehold of corporations or indeed the playground bully, and as such is universally appealing. The artist himself on completing the painting refused to allow his agent David Tregunna to remove it from his studio and insisted on it remaining in situ throughout 2007 while he completed his many still life paintings. It was with great reluctance that Gollon finally relinquished the work to the gallery for sale.”

Still Life Homage to Pittura Metafisica

16″ x 47″ (41 x 119.5cm) acrylic on canvas 2007. Private collection. This painting features in Tamsin Pickeral’s biography Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art , in which she notes: ”..of similar importance is the painting Still Life Homage to Pittura Metafisica, 2007, which is another landmark work for Gollon and was inspired by the artist Giorgio de Chirico. This work takes the general underlying concept from War, but places it within a familiar social context, addressing the issue of cultural alienation in broad terms. A group of carafes and pots huddle together with introspective solidarity totally excluding the wine glass. At first the scene appears one of relative innocence, but the elements’ shadows imply a different story. Acting somewhat independently from the vessels, the shadows take the scene from simple exclusion to aggressive exclusion, with the combined shadow of the group looming towards the glass, whose own shadow recoils back with fear. It is an image of almost childlike simplicity, and yet it addresses fundamental and topical issues such as racial, social, political and religious prejudice, a rather remarkable feat achieved through a still life painting”

Gollon at Henley: Still Life Study with Champagne & PIMMS

20″ x 16″ (51 x 41cm) acrylic on canvas 2008. Private collection. See Museum Acquisitions for more details on Gollon At Henley.

Still Life With Flowers

14” x 12” (35 x 30 cms) acrylic on canvas 2012. Available from IAP Fine Art.  To enquire about this painting, please contact us. Chris Gollon was interviewed about the techniques he used to make this painting: “This is probably the simplest still life I have done to date, and to my knowledge there is very little precedent. If anything this painting is more connected to Vincent Van Gogh than any other artist, although mine is very different in mood. The background was applied in a shot blue, very subtly darker towards a ledge or table edge at the bottom. This same colour mixed with a little cadmium red and mars black was next used for where I assumed the shadow of the as-yet-unpainted flowers and vase would be. In reality, I got it wrong, but this helps give the painting’s objects their peculiar life. The three flowers and vase were blocked in with black and allowed to dry. After this I scratched in the rim of the vase, the stalks of the flowers and the centre (or stigma). The pot and stems were finished in a harmonious blue-green and the flowers completed in a simple, complimentary blue-yellow, leaving the stigma with its matt black effect.”

Still Life With Wine, Cheese & Fruit (I)

30″ x 24″ (76 x 61 cms) acrylic on canvas 2012. ‘Last Radio Playing’ (Version 2)

Cocktail Party In The Mountains

24” x 18”  (61 x 46 cms) acrylic on canvas 2012. Private collection. 

Prosecco & White Wine Versus Red Wine

12″ x 12″ (30 x 30cm) acrylic on Khadi paper 2016. Private collection. 

Last Radio Playing (Version 2)

30″ x 22″ (76 x 56cm) acrylic on paper 2015. Available from IAP Fine Art.  To enquire about this painting, please contact us.