Art / front room totterdown art trail
Meet… Oliver Sidaway
One of the trio of exhibitions this month at Bedminster’s Grant Bradley Gallery is a selection of recent paintings by Oliver Sidaway, a skilled depictor of (largely nocturnal) street scenes and cityscapes around Easton and Redfield.
Like another gifted local painter, Tom White, Oliver manages to imbue some of Bristol’s less celebrated and certainly less painted neighbourhoods with their own captivating urban atmospheres.
His latest selection includes night and evening scenes using the atmospheric qualities of street and shop lights – the launderette at night, the warm glow of the local takeaway.
Here’s Oliver on his inspirations and methods.
I’m a self-taught painter, and I have always painted alongside other things – for example, I worked for 20 years as a youth worker and support worker with people who are homeless. Over the past 15 years I have developed my current style and exhibited and sold my paintings, both at Totterdown’s Front Room art trail and then at the Grant Bradley Gallery and elsewhere.
Feedback at those art trails has been important in developing my own way of portraying ordinary, perhaps mundane scenes in a way which – I hope – reflects people’s everyday experience of cityscapes as backdrops to our lives. I am interested in how we all construct myths, dramas and stories from what’s in front of us, and how we strive to change the world around us to our own imaginings.
Ideas for paintings come to me as I’m walking along, coming home from work, going to the shops, on the bus… I see a scene and think, “that could make a painting”. The process from seeing something that inspires me to the finished painting is where the work comes in. I use photographs, some sketches and my imagination rather than painting en plein air as the latter is difficult to do to achieve the effect I aspire to during the day – and pretty impossible at night.
I’m also inspired by music, literature, films and photography, in so far as they attempt to deal and depict similar themes.
The biggest compliments I receive are from people who recognise the places I have painted and relate some personal story to those places: “Me and my partner met there,” “I used live around there,” “that’s my allotment in the background,” and so on.
Oliver Sidaway exhibits at the Grant Bradley Gallery, Bedminster from Feb 6-27. For more information, visit www.grantbradleygallery.co.uk/current.html
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