Joe Allen (painter)

Joe Allen (born 1955) is a British artist. He is known for a series of large-sized paintings on wood and for small portraits of artists. [1] [2]

Life and work

Allen was born in Airdrie, Scotland. When attending school he took private lessons from C. M. Cameron, a Scottish painter of landscapes and also attended art classes at the Glasgow School of Art. He started his vocational education at St. Martins School of Art in London and gained his degree as Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Fine Art at the Camberwell School of Art. Subsequently he gained the Master of Art Degree at the Royal Academy School in London. In 1983 he started lecturing at Art Colleges in Newcastle and London, later he taught at the Centro de Arte Verrochio near Siena. From 1984 to 2007 he was a lecturer at the European Art Academy in Trier. He lives in London und Trier (Germany). Allen is a scholarly painter. References to works from virtually all periods in the history of art are to found in his paintings. They evoke reminiscences of Piero della Francesca, Velázquez, Titian or John Constable. Also an influence by impressionist painters like Édouard Manet, Claude Monet or Pissarro and masters like van Gogh and Cézanne can be detected, even though Allen must not be mistaken as an epigone but rather has to be accepted as an artist with a unique approach. Although he spent most of his adult life outside Scotland Allen can also be seen as standing in the tradition of the Glasgow Boys.

As many authors in modern philosophy and neurophysiology have pointed out every person has a unique approach to reality. In accordance with this view Allen demonstrates in his oeuvre that the painter's job is not to depict the "real" world but to encourage the viewer to construct his or her own reality from the suggestions to be found in the work. Allen applied this idea to a number of large-sized paintings on wood each consisting of 9 panels.

In 2007 Allen started a series of more than thirty small portraits of famous painters (and persons related to painters) among them Rembrandt, Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Mark Rothko and David Hockney. Allen describes the process of painting by claiming that these portraits were not planned. "They came as a gift as it were. I put down two or three tones and there he was ‘Manet’; I just had to bring him out of the shadows a little more. Interested, exited, I took a fresh canvas and began in the same way, Mary Cassatt showed herself, and as I repeated the process Soutine arrived." (A special selection, 2007, foreword).

Exhibitions

Literature

References

  1. ↑ "Artist Canvas". Allens Canvas.com. Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  2. ↑ "Joe Allen" (PDF). galerie-clairefontaine.lu. Retrieved 11 September 2013.

External links

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