EXHIBITION OPENING TIMES

Walkway & Foyer-bar: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday 8:30am - 4:00pm | Wednesday - CLOSED | Saturday 9:00am - 3:00pm | Sunday 10:00am - 3:00pm
Please note that we occasionally have to close the foyer bar part of the exhibition space: please check this page before visiting. Thank you

 

FOYER CLOSED: MONDAY 6 OCTOBER, TUESDAY 7 OCTOBER, THURSDAY 16 OCTOBER

 

‘A prodigious neo-baroque talent’ -  Jonathan Glancey, The Independent

 

Widely heralded as one of the UK’s finest draughtsmen, Jonny Boatfield's extraordinary body of work straddles illustration, cartoon and theatre. He draws daily, with a dip pen and ink on old envelopes, greaseproof paper, food bags, scrap cardboard and record covers, with no prior plan or decision making. The resulting images are instinctive, fluid and unconstrained. Graduating from The Royal College Of Art in 1984, he won the Creative Futures Illustrator of the Year competition (1986) held in London and Amsterdam. Jonny has created installations for the Barbican, the International Book Festival, the Museum of London, Welsh National Opera, Royal Museum of Scotland, the Do Lectures in Wales and the End of the Road Festival. His strikingly detailed artwork has been published in picture books and he has been an active workshop leader in the national Big Draw movement since its conception. 

 

This exhibition includes around 30 framed original drawings, plus paper theatres, three-dimensional work and sketches. Though the subject matter varies considerably, his pictures all share edge-to-edge paper coverage and a distinctive colour and textural palette, ranging from monochrome through faded watercolour-wash pastels to heavily varnished patinas. Anachronistic motifs run through the pictures; mythical creatures, hot air balloons, historical figures, space rockets, robots, animals (living and extinct), music, flags, aliens and astronauts. Central to Jonny Boatfield's work is his arcane concept of Englishness. He grew up in Cyprus, Malaysia and Singapore and created a myth of England gleaned from 'ultra-English' storybooks and children television, resulting in 'a subverted idea of English culture, but not the reality'. There’s a strong nostalgia for the Industrial Revolution too. His pictures are full of machines, inventions, and architecture from the Great Exhibitions; iconographies of modernism created to express the spirit of an emerging era. The combination of meticulous tiny detail and the sheer quantity of visual information in his work is intoxicating. Some of the smallest drawings (such as A Musical Compendium) need a magnifying glass, or extremely good eyesight, to decipher the intricate features. Other pictures, such as Midsummer Manifestation conjure up a dream-like fairy-tale Victoriana.

 

He is influenced and inspired by the sharp minds and sharp pens of cartoonists who expose vanity, inanity and mediocrity; Saul Steinberg, his friend Steven Appleby, and Peter Brookes. Jonny Boatfield is equally adept at detecting social canker, and many of his pictures have a Dickensian tone which emanates from his mixture of realistic accuracy and unrestrained fantasy. His complex, unwieldy melodramatic ‘plots’ are not designed to be unravelled, and not especially coordinated into any philosophy. Like Dickens, they are more concerned with the diversities of the world, instead of unities. The villains and heroes in his pictures are all of us, and he depicts a light-humoured side to evil, alongside an infectious delight in the endless creation of small miracles.

 

 

Images: Mandrake In The City, picture novel (top) Midsummer Manifestation (bottom) The History Machine, The Great Small Miracles Exhibition (thumbnail)