Dale Atkinson: Artist in Residence

Invited by a company manufacturing harps to compose a piece for their product, Maurice Ravel wrote the magical “Introduction and Allegro” in one week. Commissions can be as liberating as restricting, as Dale Atkinson well appreciates. Watching him paint is rather like watching Clouzot’s great documentary, ‘The Picasso Mystery’. Before our eyes a tree will morph into an owl or a car into an ape. In his risky adventures in erasure and reconstruction he creates more than a narrative of the painting’s history, he also reveals hidden experiences, apprehensions and perceptions; a multiplicity of worlds.

Commissioned to document the narrative of the building of Kings Place he has proved to be an inspired choice. His response, of course, has been metaphorical rather than literal with compelling images such as a loose scaffolding grid containing hints of ghostly workers who materialise and vanish as if glimpsed in a dream. The broader metaphor is one which echoes the flux and change of the building itself. This poetic strategy is as far removed from methodical documentation as it is possible to get, each image being as resonant with life as that of his own fugitive world.

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Exhibition Curator: Mara-Helen Wood, Director, Northumbria University Gallery

Touring to: University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne
18 April - 29 May 2009
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/universitygallery/