Last night I was at the Cure Leukaemia Art Auction in Birmingham. First of all the hard facts the local artists raised £13,000 towards the charity.
My contribution to the event was “Cavernous Deep” a photograph printed on glass. Here the successful bidder Gavin Buckley (right) is joined by Fine Art auctioneer Martin Lambert from Humberts (Cotswold) Ltd. Gavin has known my work for some time in his role at Arts and Business. I was selected for the AandB project Visual a few years ago and Gavin is the Director. So he knows all about my art practice and about this particular piece. He was a very determined bidder.
I was trying to take photographs and listen to the bidding and I could hear and see Martin acknowledging bidders around the room. My stress levels were really high as the starting bid was offered to the floor, because you don’t want it to have come down, but it didn’t and continued on a steady curve upwards.
The Cure Leukaemia Appeal is a multi-million pound project launched in 2004 to create a world class centre of excellence for clinical leukaemia research at University Hospital Birmingham. You can download a copy of the brochure from
www.artauctionbirmingham.co.uk
and more information from
www.cureleukaemia.co.uk
Of course this was a great networking event with all the local arts business and creative industry folk. So a quick mention for some of my artist friends who I spoke to last night.
Chris Keenan
www.primeobjective.co.uk
To source my photography I go few miles down the road but Chris travels the World and goes up mountains and balances on glaciers to produce his brilliant images. He told me on the trip that produced the image of the “The Franz Joseph Glacier”, New Zealand he had been guided up the glacier took some photographs then when he had finished his film he turned a corner to find a scene to die for. Now that’s another aspect if Chris was using digital media then he could delete one of the lesser shots. Not surprisingly his image of the glacier is featured on the front of the brochure www.artauctionbirmingham.co.uk
Another artist who uses traditional film methods is Dan Burwood
www.danburwood.co.uk
I love the set that he produced in Cuba. I have bumped into Dan a few times this year because he was involved with schools project based around my exhibition at Solihull in Jan/Feb/March this year. For once Dans bicycle wasn’t to be seen chained to a lamppost outside the venue.
And finally Ross Jones,
www.ross-jones.co.uk
I remember deciding that I wanted to draw because I was fascinated by artists whom could produce accurate pictures that somehow evolved and took shape on paper. My first adult art learning lessons were in a drawing class, I loved it and found hard move on into other media –it had to be a drawing. So I’m naturally drawn to Ross work. I must get the pencils out and get back simple draftsmanship.
So there it is do have a look at the sites and enjoy some high quality art work
