New Works By Matthew Draper at Thompson's Gallery Marylebone

Please scroll through the images below to view the works.

1973 Born Stone Staffordshire.

1991-1992 Walsall College of Art.

1992-1995 Flameout College of Arts BA(hons) Fine Art.

In the notorious libel trial of 1878 arising from Ruskin’s contention that in his painting of fireworks known as “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket” Whistler had flung “a pot of paint in the public’s face”, the painter Albert Moore testified that Whistler “has painted the air, which very few artists have attempted”.

The pastels of Matthew Draper reinforces the impression that as well as capturing nocturnal lights and shapes in company with the American master, Draper can see and capture the very air around us. He sees and depicts nuances and changes in the atmosphere which the viewer recognises and marvels over, but can barely understand how they have been achieved.

They share with Monet’s Rouen Cathedral or Westminster series a passion for light, colour and space, but they are less overtly topographical and never formally repetitive. The grandeur, drama, richness and subtlety of these works are a tribute to the versatility of pastel, but also to the artist’s very personal working methods. Draper’s physical engagement with his painting perhaps eclipses even Turner’s scraping-out with a deliberately long thumb-nail and, well, Whistler’s metaphorical throwing of a pot of paint in the public’s face! Rather like the action painter’s Ruskin’s bluster evokes, Draper dispenses with the intermediary of the brush, which he finds over-methodical in its mark-making, and manipulates pastel and charcoal with his hands, working instinctively rather than methodically. To withstand the physicality of his technique Draper chooses robust printmaking paper, which he tapes to the studio wall.



Awards
2004 Contemporary Fine Art gallery Award, Paisley Art Institute.

2004 Most popular work in the exhibition, Hunting Art prizes.

2002 City of Glasgow Prize, Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.

2001 Commendation Aberdeen Artists.

2000 Alexander Graham Munro Travel Award, Royal scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.