John Blandy

JOHN BLANDY

2 Montrose Avenue
London NW6 6LB

phone: 020 8960 3040

www.johnblandy.co.uk

The artist John Blandy is a graduate of St Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He has travelled widely and has shown regularly in group and solo exhibitions, particularly at Cassian de Vere Cole Fine Art (2001-3) and at the Francis Kyle Gallery (1985-95).

The Conceptual Process

The essential element of the work is to combine a conceptual approach with traditional depiction, encouraging a dialogue on many levels.

John Blandy works in pastel. The work is painted on site, so the immediate quality of mark relates directly to the visual source.

Blandy works with the idea of a moment in time. The work is made in extended series, with an emphasis on each pieces’ reliance on time and sequence. Each work is completed to stand as an artwork within its own terms.

The studio work involves active cataloguing and gathering together of the images for display, where each painting within a series can be used as a part within a larger installation of inter-related pieces. The installations can be put together as a collection of large panels of pastels, or in projected images as a film within a DVD format. Structures are found that help to reinforce the idea of change through time.

Multiple images of the tree are presented together to form a visual record over varying periods of time. Different times of day, and the varying seasons over the years, can be compared.

The drive behind the work derives from conceptual concerns of recording time, building databases and presenting the whole from within a structured display or installation.
Installations from the series ‘Following the Lime Tree’ are part of the collection of Hammersmith Hospital and St George’s Hospital, Tooting. Further portraits of trees have been exhibited at Guildhall, Kingsgate Gallery, Tricycle Gallery, Cassian de Vere Cole Fine Art, The Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and Leeds Royal Infirmary.

Following a lime tree

This work brings together pastels of a lime tree. An on-going project in which John Blandy has followed one tree over the last eleven years, resulting in over 2000 images to date. A multiple record of the myriad changes of light, season and incident from day to day and year to year.
To see larger static images click on thumbnails below.