Trixi and Dirk Mecky invited me to have a show at Salon Schmitz in Cologne in October 2009.  When we discussed the exhibition, Trixi said she would like about 100 paintings in the show and that I should mix all the different sorts of work I do.  With the help of my friend, the painter, Bolan Chen, who came over from Japan specially, we drove over to Cologne with over 250 drawings/paintings. Trixi and Dirk made an initial selection and the artist, Walter Dahn, advised on how the show should be hung.  The main hanging space in Salon Schmitz is a long 20m x 5m high wall.  Walter’s idea was to have a lot of space, with a few large oil paintings on the first half of the wall and a crowded hang on the second half.  I was pleased with the result and hope to post some photographs taken of the show soon.  The exhibition, which I called “Pics for Schmitz”, ran from 30 October 2009 to 15 January 2010.

The hang in Cologne meant I had quite a few paintings spare, which I brought back in October and hung in the Magdalen Arms in Oxford, which more about later.

On the way back from Cologne, after the Pics from Schmitz show ended, I left some of the paintings and dubbed photographs from the exhibition in Belgium with Galerie Hoge Bomen, Veurne, for my exhibition there in August.

My plan was to rehang the pictures in the Anchor & Hope with the work I had brought back from Cologne.  The last hang I put up there looked very chic, a double row of elegant black and white box frames, closely spaced, holding a set of dubbed photographs of Istanbul that I painted for Gilles Blaize’s film “Dreaming Istanbul”. [Read more…]