The Waiting Rooms Gallery

Presents:

Painting by Dale Grimshaw
January 24th – February 22nd

Dale Grimshaw’s painting continues a strong tradition of social realism in urban contexts. His themes are simple and honest, concentrating on the environment of the city streets and their day to day inhabitants. He presents the unglamorous, the hard, gritty and commonplace things that make up the core of city life. Influences such as McFadyen and Ocean are clear in Grimshaw’s work, although he exhibits a style of painting that gives his work an interesting contradiction.

Colour and composition are very important in Grimshaw’s work. Where his subject matter may traditionally call for muted tones, Grimshaw chooses to describe his chosen scenes in rich, powerful colours. The darkness of his themes is clear, but he explains it by using glowing hues, describing a cold atmosphere with a warm visual language. Similarly he often uses a quite graphical style with regards to composition, positioning the features of an image very carefully in order to make the work pleasing as a painting as well as a comment or description of society.

Grimshaw’s images invariably suggest a narrative through both their content and their titles. Sometimes these seem quite straightforward and at other times they can be particularly ambiguous. There are references to the mundane aspects of life in, for example “The Trudge into Town” and “Another Day”, however in works such as “The Scouting Party” he adds an element of mystery and suspense, reflecting our changing perceptions of our surroundings from day to day and the infinite number of things one can encounter on urban travels.

These evocative paintings work excellently on two levels. On one hand they describe in detail the atmosphere of the urban environment and it’s lowly denizens such that we can all relate to them, whilst at the same time they have a value that is purely to do with the quality of the colours and the shapes that Grimshaw chooses. He clearly has great control over his medium in being able to blend together these two seemingly contradictory aspects of his practice.

Dale Grimshaw has studied at both Middlesex University and Blackburn College of Art and has won the Apthorp Fund for Young Artist competition as well as the Liquitex International Student Award in the USA. In addition to these successes he has exhibited at the Academy of Arts, also in the USA and in the Cable and Wireless Exhibition and painted commissioned murals in Cairo and work for the Millennium Church in Dublin.

Tom Wilmott
Arts Manager
0777 929 7724
waitingroomsgallery@hotmail.com