“It
was over thirty years ago, I was at art college and we were given a project to
design a relief sculpture for a bank and I thought I’d
base it on the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra as I’d get lots of drawing
practice and I could make something interesting based on them. I was
attending many of their rehearsals
and sometimes they’d have a concert pianist there. The soloists were always the
most interesting and exciting people to draw and inevitably I ended up drawing
a few pianists during these rehearsals. When someone is a soloist they
have such a passion for the music that they move in an intense and interesting
way, it’s very hard to capture. I like the challenge of it. Drawing
a pianist is very difficult. The piano is such a complex, architectural
form that it’s very difficult to draw so if I knew I was going to be around a
lot, then I could invest a lot of time in drawing
the actual instrument. I went on tour with the orchestra to Hong Kong and
Peter Frankl was in that series of concerts and I was with them for the whole three weeks. I think that my Peter Frankl work was
the best of series of drawings that I did for this project because I had time
to invest in drawing the piano and then I could set him against the piano, and
try to capture his stance and movement. It’s such a big instrument
that it makes drawing it very difficult, so if I was only going to be there for
an hour or so, I would concentrate on the artist and put just a few lines in
for the keyboard because it’s fascinating to see just how much people move when
they play the piano. When I was drawing the orchestra I didn’t talk to
the soloists, I was young and lucky to be given the chance
to draw - they were famous and there to rehearse their music. I
was given a lot of freedom to sit where I liked. I was drawing Peter in the
concert hall, I was sitting in the front row, it was during a rehearsal.
This work was sold to a collector in Canada in an auction to raise money for
Motor Neuron Disease, my friend Amy Doolittle who was a flautist and musician,
was dying and her family and friends had an
auction to help her. Peter Frankl was great, he signed the work that I sent him before
it was auctioned, and he posted it on
to Canada, he e-mailed kind
words that I also forwarded to Amy - it meant a lot to her that so many
cared, and helped.” (Diane Gorvin)
http://www.bewsgorvin.co.uk/ Phil Bews and Diane Gorvin are a partnership
that makes sculpture for the public realm, collaborating on a wide range of
public art projects, internationally and throughout the UK. Experienced in
liaising with architects, landscape architects, structural engineers and
fabricators, they have designed, made and installed over a hundred site
specific, sculptural works in a wide variety of environments in both urban and
rural contexts, many were commissioned from 'percent for art' policies.
No comments:
Post a Comment