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Lot Essay
When I arrived in Los Angeles for the first time on a Harkness Fellowship at the end of October 1966 I had no real idea as to what the Art scene in LA was about, Artforum was published from LA but I had never seen it in London. David Hockney, Colin Self and Derek Boshier had been before but I hadn’t talked to them about it. What I found there surprised me, a group of painters whose sensibility was very attractive, very cool without the traditions that I had found in London. They were all very open and welcoming. I speak of Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, Robert Graham, John Altoon, Ron Davis, Billy Al Benston, Kenny Price and Ed Moses. But the art scene was lively and everyone had advice, the best paint shop, someone to make and deliver stretchers, places for compressors and spray guns. I purchased a beautiful Paasche Airbrush that I still use today.
Driving around I noticed the movie theatres, which I found extraordinary. They stood out since they were set in a background of bungalows and flat landscape hemmed in by mountains and the Pacific. I borrowed a camera and started taking photographs of them and making drawings. I was looking for a studio and found an old carpet store on Sunset close to where the Keystone Studios had been thirty-five years before and now a rundown area. I settled in and started painting very big pictures.
By January, I was painting bits of the cinemas using this whole new set of imagery. Though now the images came out of the idea that they were projected onto the canvas by light, first a few girl paintings then a whole series of cinema paintings. Like Los Angeles at this time, these paintings always had a lot of sky. The one step back objective finish was further enhanced by the use of spray gun and airbrush. When I was a child one of the great mornings of the week in the holidays was Saturday’s Children’s Cinema. There was a rush to sit right at the front so that these enormous images floated straight above and engulfed you.
The photographs of the cinema facades I took in December of 1966, which had made a deep impression on me, were used as source material for these paintings. Today these particular cinemas no longer remain in this state, most having been spoilt by ill-conceived modernisation.
By the end of the two years in LA I had completed fourteen cinema paintings which were shown at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles in May 1968. It’s great to see Hollywood Pix again, I think it was one of my best paintings from this series.
Private correspondence with Antony Donaldson, October 2018.
Driving around I noticed the movie theatres, which I found extraordinary. They stood out since they were set in a background of bungalows and flat landscape hemmed in by mountains and the Pacific. I borrowed a camera and started taking photographs of them and making drawings. I was looking for a studio and found an old carpet store on Sunset close to where the Keystone Studios had been thirty-five years before and now a rundown area. I settled in and started painting very big pictures.
By January, I was painting bits of the cinemas using this whole new set of imagery. Though now the images came out of the idea that they were projected onto the canvas by light, first a few girl paintings then a whole series of cinema paintings. Like Los Angeles at this time, these paintings always had a lot of sky. The one step back objective finish was further enhanced by the use of spray gun and airbrush. When I was a child one of the great mornings of the week in the holidays was Saturday’s Children’s Cinema. There was a rush to sit right at the front so that these enormous images floated straight above and engulfed you.
The photographs of the cinema facades I took in December of 1966, which had made a deep impression on me, were used as source material for these paintings. Today these particular cinemas no longer remain in this state, most having been spoilt by ill-conceived modernisation.
By the end of the two years in LA I had completed fourteen cinema paintings which were shown at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles in May 1968. It’s great to see Hollywood Pix again, I think it was one of my best paintings from this series.
Private correspondence with Antony Donaldson, October 2018.