My current exhibition at Waterstones, Bloomsbury, features thirty-two literary portraits from the series begun in 2016 for Terry Victor’s 2017 Edinburgh Festival show Well Thumbed, though since expanded to include further novelists, essayists and poets.
The exhibition includes portraits of Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, Audre Lorde, Millicent Fawcett, Laurence Sterne, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aphra Behn, Giacomo Cassanova, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gwerful Mechain, Herman Melville, Izikiel, Nancy Mitford, Joe Orton, Charlotte Bronte, E.M. Forster, Giles Lytton Strachey, Hedd Wyn, Christina Rossetti, Patricia Highsmith, Vita Sackville-West and Wilfred Owen.
Also included is a room of paintings and drawings from my Ballet Cymru series (pictured), including one the earliest canvases, Nation of Two (Andrea Battaggia and Allegra Vianello), depicting a moment from a rehearsal of Serenestial, the company’s 2016 National Eisteddfod production. The painting is titled after a line from Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, whose portrait hangs nearby.
Big thanks to arts journalist and old friend Hettie Judah (pictured in classic 'Woman looking at art' pose for the media) for much assisatance, including figuring out how to hang the exhibition.
The show runs until November 23rd.
Details here.