Nick Pearson

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Congratulations to all graduating students at Coventry Fine art for a great show. It has been lovely working with you al...
24/05/2026

Congratulations to all graduating students at Coventry Fine art for a great show. It has been lovely working with you all - since you and I all first arrived at the university in 2023. Thanks for the flowers!

See more + interviews

Current 2nd years/next year’s 3rd years: I’ll try to get back to Cov for your show too - make sure you send me an invite!

See you all and good luck in all you do - it’s been a blast!

Great to see a show with no agenda – other than painting. It really felt, at Serpentine South, on a spring Friday, that ...
05/05/2026

Great to see a show with no agenda – other than painting. It really felt, at Serpentine South, on a spring Friday, that painting is quite enough!
 
‘Paintings are always asking questions and each painting asks its own set of questions. Every few moves you make, you’ve set up a whole set of new problems that you then have to answer. I want to leave that openness.’ – Cecily Brown
 
Brown’s fabulous ‘Picture Making’ [1–7] is difficult, intuitively complex, physical and rewarding – a real pleasure to be aware of being forced to look really hard. From paintings the size of desktop screens to the damn-near cinematic. Activated gestural paint-as-material, thoughts of Monet’s lilies, playful, visceral surfaces, teeming with imagery.

Then Sunday: could there really be two naffer, more over-used titles than ‘Threads of Life’ and ‘Heart to Heart’ (Chiharu Shiota [8–11] and Yin Xiuzhen [12–19] respectively)? But two, typically epic, Hayward shows I nearly missed. Fortunately, esteemed colleague, from Cov Uni was visiting London for the Shiota and we agreed to meet up – very glad we did!
 
Imagined, unseen traces of use – things we carry with us; a well-used doorway, surrounded by keys, hanging from a red, vein-like web. The clothes we shape through wear, re-shaped into suitcase-cities  – waiting for collection on an airport carousel (we, become those waiting for the luggage!).
 
Black threads in Shiota’s installation, ‘During Sleep’ – reading like an ink drawing in a photograph – is a scribbled network of knotted filaments, enclosing institutional dormitory beds. Tangled bedcovers, the absent sleeper still present - more traces.  

Xiuzhen’s was one of those shows you didn’t actually go for but were happy you did. The well-publicised Shiota exhibition, under the marketing & insta-friendly visuals was serious and subtle work. Xiuzhen was more playful and mixed – a range of early and later work that included sculpture, mixing the artist’s clothes, travel & transport, along with some quietly violent and beautiful ceramic pieces into which clothes or other personal items had, in various ways, been embedded. Somewhere between - and both - picture and object.

Bank holiday notebook: Frinton-on-SeaThe drawing started on the right hand side of the spread . . . but spread to the le...
14/04/2026

Bank holiday notebook: Frinton-on-Sea

The drawing started on the right hand side of the spread . . . but spread to the left, into the sea and some written notes.

Why did we go to Frinton, on the Ess*x coast? Because it was there. Because it was a fashionable and exclusive resort in Edwardian times up to the 1930s and because (as we imagined it would be) is consequently and charmingly, a little up its (slightly faded but still appealing) self.

It didn't have a chip shop until the early 1990s and over four days, we became occasional visitors to its oldest (and only) pub the very friendly  which opened for business in 2000!

Evening restaurant choices were not complicated by a great deal of choice, but what was there was fabulous and not at all 'faded'!

Frinton is famous for its Modernist 'seaside art deco' architecture from its pre-WWII heyday and we stayed in 'Eco Deco' (pic 2) a lovingly self-designed and built property, belonging to Penny and Richard. Penny designed, Richard built this 1920s-30s-style Modernist house a few years ago, based on the local 'Art Deco' buildings (mostly designed by Oliver Hill in the 1930s). I didn't know Hill when I first saw it and it reminded me more of my favourites, Le Corbusier and Robert Mallet-Stevens. The owners live on the right side of the ground and the upper floors - and it was a pleasure to stay there in the nicely appointed apartment that was originally going to be the garage (there was even a 'Mondrian' painted by hand on the kitchen cupboard door!).

A busy week A busy week for us all at Cov University this week - I’m only just recovering!Tuesday saw ‘Pandemonium’ a po...
08/03/2026

A busy week

A busy week for us all at Cov University this week - I’m only just recovering!
Tuesday saw ‘Pandemonium’ a pop-up one-night-only show of 2nd yr work very generously curated by and .shalgosky among the huge, colourful - and very present - ceramic work by world-renowned Japanese artist, Takuro Kuwata at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre:

Pics: with Charlie Buck and his ‘Ear not Broken but Communication Failure’ (laser-cut cardboard); General view of the Tea Bowl Punk/Pandemonium mash-up; Jimmy Wilson, ‘Frustration!’ (Mixed media); John Wilson, ‘Kiln forged, Yard Bound’ (coloured plaster and glazed ceramic); Teya Nedelcheva, ’Through the Walls’ (sublimation print/mixed media); Pat Farrell, with her ‘Clash’ (silkscreen print/mixed media); Rokshika Robinson, ‘Ah-chi-ah: Can’t Hear, Louder!’ video projection; Ella Wilson, ‘What’s the Value?’ (mounted photographs and print bound in pulped drawings); John Wilson talking to visitor.

Wed-Fri saw my (now regular!) ‘Production Week cardboard sculpture workshop’ with 30+ students from Fine Art, Graphic Design, Illustration and Foundation. A productive – and exhausting – few days in the Hyperstudio space . . . and great work. Well done everybody!

Too busy in Rome, enjoying Rome, to post. Here’s ‘Day 3, pt 2’ now I’m back home (1-11 from Vatican Museums/Sistine Chap...
05/02/2026

Too busy in Rome, enjoying Rome, to post. Here’s ‘Day 3, pt 2’ now I’m back home (1-11 from Vatican Museums/Sistine Chapel). . .

1. ‘Gallery of Maps’: 40 large, fresco Italian maps, c.1580
2. Raphael, ‘School of Athens’, 1508. Surrounded by Euclid, Averroes, Pythagoras, etc., Plato and Aristotle walk towards an opposite mural depicting a victorious Christianity. Raphael didn’t complete the last 2 of 4 rooms as, on the night of his 37th birthday, weakened by pneumonia, he passed out during s*x (source: Vasari). Too embarrassed to admit it to physicians his mistress called, they treated him for something else – which killed him!
3–5. Giogio Morandi, 1959 drawing and ‘Still Life’, 1957. Things and the observed relations between them, painted with such presence, yet remaining like half-remembered memories of things. Then – a brave acquisition! – Francis Bacon, ‘Study for a Pope I’, 1961.
6–8. half of Michelangelo’s great, High Renaissance ‘Last Judgement’ (1535–41) was under bloody scaffolding! Disappointing – as I was looking forward to the portrait of his enemy, Master of Ceremonies da Cesesna, depicted in Hell with donkey’s ears and a snake biting off his privates, bottom right!). Great job of the ceiling (1508–12) though!
9. Before Julius II got Michelangelo to redo the ceiling, it was decorated with the popular blue background and stars – as around this doorway, given an added trompe-l’oeil curtain effect.
10. On leaving, this fabulous, unlabelled Roman relic – a drinking trough or sarcophagus (?) with mask – beautifully placed.
11–12. Before the day ended (and Campari called!) we had to get to Santa Maria della Vittoria for Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St Teresa’ (1652), depicting the 16th nun’s description of her ‘ecstatic’ meeting with an angel – Teresa describing him ‘piercing her very entrails’ with his spear and the look on her face suggests something a bit more worldly than spiritual!
13–15. On the way to that Campari, San Carlo alle Quattre Fontane, designed by Francesco Borromini. I liked the spaces, ceiling and this staircase (which I guess doesn’t get photographed too often!). This is lovely, flowing, unusually ‘minimalist’ Baroque.

Day one on a joint birthday, long w/e to Rome. Only been here half a day and I’ve eaten too much already!We visited the ...
31/01/2026

Day one on a joint birthday, long w/e to Rome. Only been here half a day and I’ve eaten too much already!
We visited the Pantheon this evening. Beautiful, over-grand and really impressive. Built originally by Marcus Agrippa in around 25 BCE. Rebuilt and ‘modernised’ by Hadrian in 125 AD - making it, in its current Hadrianic form , Rome’s oldest, fully intact Roman-period building - at around 1,900 years old!
1-7 exterior and interior shots and (8) creatures from the Pantheon Fountain in the piazza.

Highlights, from the past couple of weeks (Serpentine and Workplace): ‘Transforming the gallery into a listening space'....
29/01/2026

Highlights, from the past couple of weeks (Serpentine and Workplace):

‘Transforming the gallery into a listening space'. I’ve always liked Peter Doig as a painter and he has a fabulously catholic taste in music, which I like. Yes, we can all listen to music as we work, but Doig has a really absorbent ear. I liked the idea of the show, but we were pretty irritated by the people sitting on the floor ‘watching’ the guest DJ playing his choice (through beautifully sculptural vintage speakers) in addition to Doig’s playlist. Great music, but I was too conscious of trying not to crush people’s fingers with my leather-soled size 9s, as I tried (unsuccessfully) to look squarely at some large paintings!

1–6: ‘2 Girls’, 2017; Klangfilm Euronor Jnr Speaker C.A. (1950s) and ‘Studiofilm & Roller Club’, 2025; ‘Lion in the Road’, 2015; ‘Music of the Future’, 2002–07 (our favourite, – with ‘2 Girls’!); ‘Shadow’ 2019; People with their backs to the paintings – ‘watching’ the music!

‘"The Shape of Things" considers material presence and poetic restraint . . . Each artist engages with materiality, not merely as medium but as subject: a site of transformation, reverie, and resistance . . . a reconsideration of how form can hold emotion, how minimal gesture can evoke depth, and how the physical artwork, in its quiet persistence, can become a vessel for the ineffable.’ – Workplace Gallery website

Good to see a small work there by my old mate, Bob Law (no longer with us) perhaps better known for his more austere, emotionally intense – black or white paintings with thin, inset borders. "Examples of early-60s minimalism" – but he told me he was just lying in the middle of a Cornish field, stoned and 'feeling' the edge! Nice show. Good to discover William McKeown too.

7-9: Bob Law, 'Wooden Box Sculpture with Obelisk, Drawing for Sculpture', 1963; Malcolm Bradley, 'Untitled (dummy copy'), 2025; William McKeown, 'Painting No. 271, 2009

In a side meeting room at Workplace, hung another, unlabelled painting that we both liked (No. 10) I’m guessing its Laura Lancaster – can anybody confirm that? Title?

A great end of first semester exhibition of work last week, created as part of the ‘Making’ module by 1st year Fine Art ...
08/12/2025

A great end of first semester exhibition of work last week, created as part of the ‘Making’ module by 1st year Fine Art students at Coventry. Here I am in the first photo (taken by my esteemed colleague and leader for this module, @ jack_c_foster) – looking like I was the only person putting it up! In fact we both did – helped very much by Technical Demonstrator and our good mate, Adam Rushton. The students really pulled together and organised everything else for publicity and the opening event on Thursday (great bar!).

After the pic of the back of my head, works are depicted clockwise, as hung:
Lucy Campbell and Rayne Ashby; Rayne Ashby; Tia Downes; Lewis Watson; Vik Challis-Martin; Alicja Grela, Group monoprints; Saif Ali; Group ceramics (abstracting familiar logos); Lucy Campbell; Derya Sharif; installation shots (x2).

Extra pic taken by 3rd year, – thanks Richie - fluffed it!






# covuni_saci

‘Nuff said!- thanks
14/10/2025

‘Nuff said!
- thanks

One last (late) despatch from Bilbao. A really good career-spanning exhibition of late Modernist painting, again at the ...
28/06/2025

One last (late) despatch from Bilbao. A really good career-spanning exhibition of late Modernist painting, again at the Guggenheim, of Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011).

‘Helen Frankenthaler: Painting without Rules’, starts with her (literally!) ‘ground’-breaking and influential ‘pour and stain’ canvases of the 1950s and 60s, (after seeing Pollock’s ‘drip’ paintings of the 1940s-50s and encouraged by critic Clement Greenberg). In a period characterised by a search for flatness and away from illusion, these were so flat that the paint stained, rather than sat on the surface of the canvas. The show goes on to follow the development of her lesser - known, large (and much less ‘flat’) abstract paintings – and some sculpture – of later years, into the 1990s.

1. Installation
2. ‘Western Dream’, 1957
3. ‘Cape (Provincetown)’, 1964
4. ‘The Human Edge’, 1967
5. ‘Mornings’, 1971
6. ‘Ocean Drive West #1’, 1974
7. ‘Plexus’, 1976
8. ‘Eastern Light’, 1982
9. Anthony Caro ‘Ascending the Stairs’, 1979-83
10. Anthony Caro ‘Ascending the Stairs’, 1979-83 -2
New Yorker Helen Frankenthaler met the English sculptor Anthony Caro in 1959, on his first trip to New York and he became one of her closest friends. Both were interested in what the other was doing and partly influenced by the American contemporary sculptor David Smith. Frankenthaler made ‘Matisse Table’ and other sculptures at Caro’s London studio in the summer of 1972, approaching sculpture the same way she painted – intuitively. 
11. ‘Matisse Table’,1972
12. ‘Star Gazing’, 1989
13. ‘Janus’, 1990
14. ‘The Rake’s Progress’, 1991
15. Installation
16. ‘Requiem’, 1992
17. ‘Borrowed Dream’,
18. ‘Fantasy Garden’, 1992
19. ‘Cassis’, 1995

More info on Guggenheim Bilbao’s website

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