Yeadon’s ENGLANDIA. An exhibition of 50 recent paintings on national identity. JohannStadthalle, Dresden, Germany. 7 September – 6 November 2013     Landscape With Pylon 2   The exhibition, Englandia, is in between fiction and autobiography and is what I have jokingly referred to as auto-plagiarism. The theme of the work is, in part, the contradictions between the natural and the artificial. Tommy, my mother’s ventriloquist dummy*, whom I now look after, signifies artifice and is a kind of mascot to […]

    Francis Bacon once said that he would have liked to have painted a smile, but could not. It always ended up as a grimace. I like this ambivalence, of an innocent smile that transforms into something ominous. These grotesque, grinning, laughing heads and chimeras form part of a Bestiary and are a  family portraits. Johnny Green and the ‘little girl doll’ annie were my Grandmother’s ventriloquist dummies. Tommy was my Mother’s dummy. Grandmother, Annie Howarth, stage name Josephine […]

From 7th February 2012. Admission free – during opening hours! Browns Independent Bar, Earl St., Coventry. [tel 02476 221100] Statement: My paintings of these dolls are in between autobiography and fiction. The ventriloquist doll is a fake human being, it is a fraud, it is artifice, like a three dimensional caricature or cartoon that comes alive. Thus a painting of a ventriloquist doll is a fiction of a fiction, a copy of a copy, a fraud of a fraud, that is, […]