FIGURATIVE ART / URBAN REALISM

oil paintings, lithographs, drawings, photographs

Summer storm V oil on canvas 170 x 220 cm

"THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE"

The Realist Movement in France in the 19th century proposed that ordinary people and places should be painted with the same love and respect that former generations had lavished upon royalty, great events and mythological scenes. Seurat celebrated the lower middle class at leisure in his heroic 'Baignade' in the National Gallery in London. Degas painted women ironing clothes, combing their hair and washing themselves. Van Gogh celebrated local people, the postman, the doctor. Sickert frequented and painted London's music halls. This was a movement which brought art closer to common experience and seemed set to persist as a dominant form into the 20th century.

The impact of photography:

By the last decade of the 19th century, the camera could manage exposures fast enough to photograph moving subjects. Urban realism was abandoned by "mainstream" artists and became a principal theme in photography, cinema and more recently electronic media. Many artists and movements throughout the century and today, in various countries have sought to reclaim the city and

Oliver Bevan 2005

Since writing these lines the scope of my painting has enormously expanded. There are landscapes, with or without figures, a love for water in all its forms, and running through everything, a passion for the myriad ways in which light reveals or disguises the world.

A glance at my biographical details will reveal that my early career was dominated by Op and Geometric Art. Abstraction has never completely left me and I sense that the balance is shifting in that direction again.

O.B June 2017

Photo of Oliver Bevan by Annick Le Mée