Artist     Francis Hewlett
Title      Accordian Player
Date      1989- 93
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       185.5 x 216cm
Ref          897

Purchased directly from the artist in1999

Other websites featuring this artist's work
www.rwa.org.uk/memfrm.htm
www.cornwall.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=29057

Accordian Player
I was a student at Bristol College of Art in 1948 - 52, and was fascinated by the theatre’s splendid interior and drew there after the evening life class from 8.30 until the theatre closed a couple of hours later. Sickert was still a very definite memory and I went initially with the vague notion of producing pictures in the Camden Town/Sickert Tradition. But because of the teaching we received as young painters at Bristol, which consisted of huge amounts of intense drawing from reality and very little else, my nightly stints at the Empire accumulated hundreds of drawings, many of them intricate and sophisticated which I was far too immature to make into satisfactory paintings.

By the time I left Bristol for the Slade, I had enough drawings for at least four major pictures. These pictures were now very unlike Sickert in that I had become obsessed with the whole interior space of the theatre with its extraordinary problems of perspective and this necessitated drawing there during the daytime when it was empty apart from the cleaners and technicians roaming the great cavern of the auditorium.

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