Alison Pullen and Frances Bloomfield by byardart

New Works by Alison Pullen and Frances Bloomfield featuring Donald Macdonald 29th April-30th May 2021

Byard Art 14 King's Parade, Cambridge, CB2 1SJ info@byardart.co.uk

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CONTENTS 1-14 Alison Pullen

15-34 Frances Bloomfield

51-42 Donald Macdonald

Alison Pullen Alison Pullen's interiors are created using a mix of paint and collage. She always works in situ, both beginning and ending in the room itself in the creation of these atmospheric, mix-media works. Alison graduated from the Norwich School of Art in 1990, completing her Masters in Illustration at the Royal College of Art in 1993. She has received commissions from a number of prestigious institutions including the Royal Mail, the Langham Hotel, and the Ionian Bank. In 1998 Alison completed two paintings of the Throne Room for the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace, leading her to claim the Chelsea Arts Society Painting Prize that year. Her career has taken her to exhibit across the UK and at major art fairs in New York, Stockholm and Brussels.

Cambridge Interior 'In Bejing’ Mixed-Media 114 x 86 cm (framed) £2600

Bayswater Interior 'Plant’ Mixed-Media 113 x 100 cm (framed) £3000

Merchant Taylor, Reception Room 'Blazer’ Mixed-Media 104 x 80 cm (framed) £2600

MT Hall, City of London Library Mixed-Media 96 x 110 cm (framed) £2600

Maida Vale Interior- Lie Down and Change Your Life Mixed-Media 92 x 87 cm (framed) £2600

Osterley Park House- Garden Room 'Hessian’ Mixed-Media 114 x 90 cm (framed) £2600

Quex House Kent Mixed-Media 86 x 94 cm (framed) £2600

Cambridge Interior 'Villa del Sol’ Mixed-Media 99 x 110 cm (framed) £3000

Parsons Green Interior 'Simon's House’ Mixed-Media 89 x 102 cm (framed) £2600

Merchant Taylors Hall Cloisters, City of London Mixed-Media 115 x 92 cm (framed) £2600

Cambridge Interior 'Pioneer’ Mixed-Media 115 x 92 cm (framed) £2600

Parsons Green Interior Vandra Mixed-Media 65 x 79 cm (framed) £2600

Parsons Green Interior Wallpaper Mixed-Media 70 x 72 cm (framed) £2600

Alison Pullen Q&A - Topically, as we emerge from stay-at-home restrictions, your works depict interior spaces. What draws you to your subject - and to a particular room? As people have been spending more/all their time at home this last year, people have been making office/workspaces and making them conducive to working well. It's in most of us to make our environment nice for ourselves... putting a desk near a window or buying a new chair or a plant to keep us company while we work. We appreciate our own spaces more. I'm interested in what our living spaces say about ourselves. They are like a portrait of who we want to project to the world, who we are. It's about what we choose to surround ourselves with. Are we super tidy? Do we want to make our spaces like interior magazine spaces? Do we use a designer to create our interior to 'tell' visitors about ourselves? Or is it we don't trust our own taste? Why do we need style makers and companies to tell us what we should surround ourselves with? I've been told my paintings of interiors can make people want to cocoon themselves in a similar interior. There is always the idea of home and where we feel safe, can be ourselves... My father trained in Architecture and he sometimes asked me to colour in his plans and so manmade spaces was a natural interest. Going to art college I was always interested in atmosphere and then further along in a sense of place. Interiors, when I left the Royal College when I was 25, seemed a natural fit. I was always and am increasingly interested in painting different sorts of light and how it can transform a room and how we feel about being in it. I think light is much more interesting in an interior than an exterior because as well as summer or winter light creating different atmospheres, it can also play with the objects or surfaces in the room, for example, a wooden floor becoming enlivened and fiery by light crossing it, or light passing through textured or patterned fabrics- let alone how interesting shadows can make dynamic patterns.

- You collage your pieces, largely from magazine pages. What’s the appeal of this medium for you? I have Natasha, a lady who I went once a week to art classes after school from the ages of 7 to 13 to thank for introducing me to collage. When I finished at Norwich School of Art, I had a year as a freelance illustrator. Going to the Royal College of Art I wanted to make the most of my time there so knew I had to specialise in something- illustrators get more work if they have one style. I knew I had an affinity with collage and its many possibilities. Both my dissertations at college, I realise now, were researching the reality (or not) in photographs. My paintings on magazine pages now are furthering this idea- the real photo underneath and my interference and overlay of paint subverting the magazine page. I love the spaces in the magazines being changed into my new painting. You can suddenly see a photo of, say, a chateaux larder cupboard with french rustic ceramics in a part of my painting of a London terraced house sitting room that depicts a plain wall. I enjoy the surreal happen chance and also the original magazine texts declaring themselves in the finished painting. - Of all the spaces you’ve captured in collage, which is the most memorable and why? I love beautiful rooms like the Robert Adam interiors at Osterley or the grandeur of Merchant Taylor's Company in the City, or Royal Hospital Chelsea, but the domestic interior where someone has taken care to make it their own is always appealing. Interesting people make interesting interiors. Of course, painting at Buckingham Palace for the Queen was amazing, the rooms are vast. Being there and meeting the Keeper of the Royal Collection was all part of the experience. Living with a family in Hong Kong who paid for my son and I to go there to do paintings of their and their friends apartment that had a whole wall of windows looking over the bay. Or the wooden beach house in Grand Cayman that amazingly survived a hurricane where I was looked after by their armed guard. But it has been the commissions where I haven't found the interior beautiful that have been the most memorable- where I have had to find a beauty or interest that isn't there initially. Good things come from being out of your comfort zone. Being commissioned by Royal Mail to do stamps was such an opportunity, and the brief to highlight the differences between the areas that the London bridges span was inspiring as the images had to portray themes beyond the subject matter. I'm increasingly interested in plants in an interior setting , hence the Conservatory/Garden paintings, or indeed, the external nature showing through windows.

Frances Bloomfield Frances Bloomfield is an artist living and working in Brighton. Notable shows include Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and at the German contemporary show Documenta VI, where she was a guest of Joseph Beuys. Alongside this she has worked as a freelance graphic designer with a wide and varied range of clients. Recently she designed the typography for a new public art piece in Ebbw Vale. She lectured in Graphic Design in London for several years at Sir John Cass School of Art & Design and the University of the Arts. Frances creates fascinating dreamscapes, exquisitely created in three-dimensional collage. Each stage set-like piece plays with space and perspective to draw the viewer into the artist's curious imagined worlds. Although her subject matter is drawn from the world we exist in, her work always contains a suggestion of parallel realities. It might be a juxtaposition of what is considered real and what is imagined or desired, or the conflict between the facade and what could really be occurring behind it. However, the meanings are far from prescriptive and it is for the viewer to contemplate and reflect upon these mysterious scenarios. Inspiration for the work comes from an eclectic range of sources- industrial ruins, the back streets of several European cities, geometry and wiring diagrams, maps and plans, detritus from the seashore, unusual found objects and various texts, most notably writing from R.D.Laing, Gaston Bachelard and Italo Calvino.

Petit Fissure 6 Mixed-Media 15 x 29 x 7 cm (framed) £420

Ritual Domestique 21 Mixed-Media 44 x 44 x 5 cm (framed) £425

Naples 1 Mixed-Media 44 x 44 x 5 cm (framed) £425

Theatre of Lost Dreams Act 2 Mixed-Media 52 x 72 x 9 cm (framed) £950

Theatre of Lost Dreams Act 1 Mixed-Media 52 x 72 x 9 cm (framed) £950

The Great Indoors 1 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

The Great Indoors 2 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

The Great Indoors 3 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

The Great Indoors 4 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Floating 1 Series II Mixed-Media 23 x 29 x 7 cm (framed) £420

Floating 2 Series II Mixed-Media 23 x 29 x 7 cm (framed) £420

Conflit Cosmique 5 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Conflit Cosmique 15 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Bess Mixed-Media 43 x 57 x 9 cm (framed) £950

The Great Indoors 5 Mixed-Media 58 x 48 x 3 cm (framed) £720

Floating 98 Mixed-Media 23 x 29 x 7 cm (framed) £420

Ritual Domestique 20 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Nuances de Blanc 1 Mixed-Media 34 x 53 x 9 cm (framed) £850

Nuances de Blanc 5 Mixed-Media 34 x 53 x 9 cm (framed) £850

Dialogue Domestique 91 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Dialogue Domestique 93 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Dialogue Domestique 94 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Dialogue Domestique 95 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Suite Arithmetique Petite 2 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Temps Perdu 4 Mixed-Media 24 x 36 x 7 cm (framed) £520

Espace Elictrisant 1 Mixed-Media 34 x 53 x 9 cm (framed) £850

Suite Arithmatique 10 Mixed-Media 34 x 53 x 9 cm (framed) £850

Frances Bloomfield Q&A - Juxtaposing the worlds of dream and reality, there's a magical-realist tension in your work, isn't there? How did that develop? I started making 3D pieces around a line from a poem that someone wrote for me, ‘Other Lives..the ones we did not live.’It always suggested to me a contrast between the place we are in and what we desire. This developed into an interest in what we present as our reality and what might really be happening beneath the surface. This can be most clearly understood in the Dialogue Domestique series. We are bombarded with ideas of the 'perfect home' but in reality the home is also the setting for emotional and often disturbing scenarios. These pieces look at the split between the order that is presented and the chaos that may lurk inside. I explore these tensions in different ways throughout my work. This quote by Paul Auster from Man in the Dark (2008) clearly expresses the main concerns of my work:‘There's no single reality...there are many realities. There's no single world. There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of a mind.’ - Working in 3D collage, your works have been described as “stage-set like”. Tell us a little about the process. When I was a child I often used to stay with my grandmother who was very involved in the theatre and used to make costumes and models of stage sets for performances. I used to help her and I was always particularly fascinated by the stage sets. When I started to develop my ideas in 3D I initially made them very crudely and photographed them with a variety of lights to make them really theatrical to emphasise their temporary nature. We are always conscious in the theatre that the stage set is a construction so its form immediately questions reality. I was particularly interested in how a stage set can deceive the eye by playing with perspective so that spaces appear bigger or longer than they actually are through various tricks. In some new pieces for this show, Theatre of Lost Dreams Acts 1 & 2, I was interested in how in these particular buildings the inside and outside become confused and I used images hanging like stage flats to emphasise my constructed vision.

- You draw on everything from city back streets to seashore finds for inspiration. What’s the spark? Inspiration for the work comes from an eclectic range of sources: city backstreets, industrial ruins, geometry and wiring diagrams, detritus from the sea shore, unusual found objects and various texts including writing from R.D.Laing and Italo Calvino. It is hard to explain what draws you to something. I have a fascination for both ruins and conversely clean brutalist forms. I love wandering around with my camera in new places with no particular agenda and just being surprised by things and see what I am drawn to. Shadows and reflections play a large part in my work as this will often transform something very mundane into something quite magical. During this strange year we have all lived through I have not been able to go wandering so I have been forced to develop ideas from photographs I have taken in my own house. In some ways this has been hugely challenging as I am so over familiar with my own environment so it took me a while to surprise myself! I have called the series The Great Indoors.

Donald Macdonald Donald Macdonald has always been fascinated by Photorealism, even as a child he would sit for hours meticulously drawing images from encyclopaedias and copying his siblings' school photographs, desperately trying to copy every detail to capture their likeness. It was not until studying painting at Gray's School of Art that he really discovered expressive art and working loosely from memory, the contrast between these two very different methods of working immediately appealed and he has been studying and trying to push its boundaries ever since. He creates three-dimensional scenes using sketches and folded paper which he has previously drawn from memory, placing them in compositions and scenarios which are then painted. He likes to use this method to convey feelings and emotions, all the while recreating his own interpretation of life's events.

Pour Oil on Canvas 83 x 113 cm £3500

Yellow Blue Orange Oil on Canvas 150 x 105 cm £6000

Perfect Oil on C 100 x 1 £60

t Storm Canvas 150 cm 000

Butterfly Oil on C 80 x 1 £35

Dance II Canvas 110 cm 500

Donald Macdonald Q&A - How did your Photorealist style evolve? I started drawing at a very young age and all I really knew was that a good drawing should be very realistic, so that was my focus right up until art school. I would stay in the art department at break times and during lunch, constantly drawing and painting, striving for realism. It was not until I really started studying in Art School that I started to express myself and my work became very abstract and 3 dimensional. I returned to studying photorealism on leaving art school and the expressive side of my work is now the process; sketches from memory, paper cut-outs which I then set in scenes, photographed, then painted realistically (I even paint all the pencil lines.) It's bringing these two contrasting aspects together which fascinates me and it is always evolving. - You take the ordinary - a jar, a feather, a piece of fabric - and make it extraordinary. What is it about everyday objects that inspires you? Everday objects are so inspiring to me, one example would be the feather- I saw one on the beach one day, picked it up and started to wonder about its journey, where has it been? Where would the wind take it? Where would the sea take it? If it were a sail on a ship, could it take me with it?... It just kind of evolves and then back in the studio I strive to recreate these feelings and thoughts I have into paintings. Sometimes though it can be the other way around and I have an idea which I then need to find the objects for. - This is the first time you’ve shown at Byard Art. To single out one work, which piece should gallery-goers seek out and why? Yes, this is my first time showing with Byard Art and I am very excited to be working with the great gallery and staff. Considering recent events I couldn't pick