about the artist
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Dale Atkinson is by most definitions a 'narrative artist', but not a 'start to finish' one and not a particularly obvious one.
He is a figurative painter and draftsman whose work, as loosely allegoric as it is descriptive, relies upon the dynamo of suggestion to move it forward. Lost swimmers, passing comets, insomniacs laying traps for sleep or saw wielding manifestations of conscience will occupy the same uncertain arenas as chairs remembered from childhood and yesterday's bully. They tap into a subliminal world of intrusive sub plot where reason, if it exists, is the dummy pill and figure, object, line and colour are left to guide the dialogue.
As a painter his approach from first to last mark is one of endless shifts and interrogations. Initial impulses can take root and develop, or survive only as fossilised traces, consumed by the painting’s own evolving direction. He explores the circular relationship between what is known or seen and the disarming, yet oddly more real, undertow of conspiratorial chatter lurking just beneath - the secret futility, that recognises itself and yet hopefully, instinctively continues to recalibrate.
Born in Sunderland, Atkinson first studied at Sunderland Art College and then at Newcastle University. Now living in Gateshead he has exhibited nationally and internationally throughout his professional career. Atkinson’s paintings and drawings are held in public and private collections throughout the UK, USA, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
July 2020
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Selected Solo
2020 New Work Gallagher & Turner, Newcastle
2017 Beeswinged Gallagher & Turner, Newcastle
2013 News from Home University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
2009 Artist in Residence (2006-08) Kings Place Gallery, London
2009 University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
2005 Paintings & Drawings University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
2003 Almost Icarus University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
2002 Recent Work University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
2000 Recent Work Gallagher and Turner, Newcastle
1997 The Samling, Dovenest, Cumbria
1997 The Maggot Bites Again University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
1994 Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
1993 Middlesbrough Art Gallery
1991 Recent Work Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic Gallery
1990 On the Threshold of Meaning Plymouth City Art Gallery (two man)
1988 Recent Work Anne Berthoud Gallery, London W1
1987 Recent Work Anne Berthoud Gallery, London W1
1986 Recent Work Anne Berthoud Gallery, London W1
Selected Group
2017 The Art of Menschlichkeit Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, Vienna
2016 Drawings from Moore to Hockney Mottisfont, Hampshire
2016 Self-Portraiture in the 21st Century Piano Nobile. London
2013 Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Competition Kings Place, London
2010 University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
2007 Winter Show University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria
1999 Derby Museum & Art Gallery, Derby
1999 Soccerarti Wembley, London
1998/99 Recent Work ING Barings, London
1998 Croydon Clocktower Art Gallery, London
1998 Walsall Museum & Art Gallery, Walsall
1998 Lyrical Orientations Beatrice Royal, Eastleigh
1997 Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle
1997 Summer Show Beatrice Royal, Eastleigh
1996 Gallery Goetz, Basel, Switzerland
1996 Europ' Art, Geneva, Switzerland
1996 Washington Arts Centre, Tyne and Wear
1996 Maclaurin Gallery, Ayr, Scotland
1996 Art 96, London Contemporary Art Fair
1995 University Gallery, Univ. of Northumbria, Newcastle
1995 Hong Kong Contemporary Art Fair
1995 Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, Miami Art Fair, U.S.A
1995 Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, Strasbourg, France
1995 Contemporary Art Fair, London
1994 Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair, Universal Studios.
1994 Money Money Galerie Goetz, Basel, Switzerland
1994 Christopher Hull Gallery, London
1993 Open Door, Holborn, London
1993 Smith's Galleries, Covent Garden, London
1992/93 Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales
1992 Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow
1992 Gray Art Gallery and Museum, Hartlepool
1992 Ship of Fools Acorn Gallery, Liverpool
1991 A View of the New Royal Overseas League
1991 Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery
1990 British Painters Blue Stone Gallery, Anchusa, California
1987 Contemporary British Art Anne Berthoud Gallery
1986 Works on Paper Anne Berthoud Gallery, London W1
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The Schlee Collection, Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire
The Treadwell Collection, Burgenland, Austria
The Ruth Borchard Collection, London
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne
AirUK/ Northern Arts
Private collections worldwide.
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I’ve been staring at a painting all morning and now, as per on sunny days, against this wall of the studio, a band of light is raking over the canvas. It usually takes about an hour to make its pass so I generally just get on with something else. The studio itself is built onto the side of the house, I’ve rented space in the past, but excepting the odd time someone else turned up, hung about talking, drank all your coffee, and then ‘finished early’, mostly it was like creeping around the Mary Celeste. They were never great spaces either, one was dark with asbestos walls and I’m pretty certain haunted, another above a pizzeria where all the time you just felt hungry, and the last so large, airy and on the face of it apparently what all artists crave, that I froze. The room at home suits me fine: it’s light, it fits and is always available. I draw at my late grandmother’s kitchen table, paint mostly at a wall easel devised years ago in Bristol to save whacking nails into the landlord’s plasterwork and, best of all, can close the door.
There’s also a hard white chair (never make a studio too comfortable), a stool that often crops up in the paintings, a couple of freestanding easels, a small drawing chest saved from a skip outside my old school in Sunderland and, centre stage, a walk-around palette that I’ve used since Art College in the mid 1980’s and which has to be periodically chiselled of its paint mountains. There’s another palette too, smaller and with a thumb hole, that’s propped up in the far corner. It’s dusty now but used to belong to a friend with whom I once shared a studio. He died several years ago, but has been the trigger for a couple of paintings, one quite recent that he shares with another lost friend and which will be part of an exhibition about to open in Newcastle. It isn’t clear cut, not much of my work is, and it isn’t morbid either; rather it places them as one single figure at a point on a seemingly linear trajectory from which there’s no going back, where the certainty ends and even navigating by the stars becomes impossible. It’s not a complicated idea or a large canvas, but went through a lot of stages before it worked. Titles are never easy either: you don’t want to be obvious - the viewer’s imagination still needs to be coaxed - though not too obtuse. I’ve called it The Uncertain Pilgrim but am already having doubts.
And rightly so, I suppose. Give it a day or two; I’ll be wrestling some other stroppy canvas by then. Doubts aren’t such a bad thing anyway. They’re what keep things moving forward, but also probably why four solid studio walls (and the familiarity of what’s between them) are so important.
Dale Atkinson, September 2020
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Q. What’s your background?
A. I was born in the Ashbrooke area of Sunderland, about 100 metres from Christ Church and the same again from what was then the Art School in Backhouse Park. This, and for a few years that edge of Barnes closest to the Tunstall Hills, were the parts of town in which I grew up. My art education took in what was luckily for me a superb art department at Southmoor Comprehensive School, a foundation year at Sunderland School of Art and finally, via a brief spell in London, four years at Newcastle University. Upon graduating I was taken on by The Anne Berthoud Gallery in London and also enjoyed a few years working in Bristol. Since 1990 I’ve lived back in the North East and from about 1994 until recently been represented by first the Nicholas Treadwell Gallery followed by Mara Helen Wood at the University Gallery.
Q. What inspires your work?
A. Materially I’d say most things have the potential to spark something or simply find their way into my work. Though of course, like anyone, these are inevitably subject to those underlying personal themes that are inherent in our reading of them and, of course, whether paths cross at the right time. If a fiend with a saw turns out the best way to comment upon being robbed of one’s singularity; or an Adam and Eve scenario is what grows from a story in a newspaper, then fine, for as long as it feels right, probably more important is the puzzle of what comes next. The finding of ways to translate their part in the idea, or whatever they add to it, onto canvas or paper. There’s never just one thing behind the motivation or need to make an image, it’s more the balancing of many parts in a process. My approach to work was once described as ‘greedily inclusive’ and I think that probably comes close to summing it up.
Q. What is your working process like?
A. Physically, my working day generally begins at around 7-7.30am and carries through until the light goes if I’m painting or otherwise until about 8pm. Later in the evening I’ll usually spend another hour or so reviewing and trying not to fiddle with the day’s work, or else preparing for the next day. None of this is fixed, however, that just seems to be how it goes. I’m not a good sleeper, I can usually fall asleep easily, I can even do it standing up, but remaining asleep for more than a couple of hours is difficult, so my day can just as easily start at 4am – great in the summer, but freezing in the winter.
As for the way I work, well my instinct is to keep things open for as long as possible. There’s a subject, of course, the idea that prompts beginning the work in the first place and there are the imagined early solutions that lead you in. But irresistibly during the evolution of any piece, the idea and your interpretation, even validation, of it will evolve too. The reason for the work itself needn’t change and is only rarely sent off in a different direction completely, but still it does develop and with it, naturally I suppose, so do you. I guess that’s part of the point. The effect of this is a working method, which right to the end of any painting or drawing is a process of alteration, of overworking and erasure.
Q. Where do you make your work and what’s good about working here?
A. For the last twenty years I have occupied an open ceilinged, white walled studio built on to the side of my home. I’ve rented rooms in the past, but for one reason or another either given up on them, or them on me. The importance of a good place to work, somewhere to open up properly, takes a while to figure out, but once you find it, you know. This space has felt right from the start; there’s plenty of glass, so good natural light which is what I paint by; it’s available any time and is sufficiently cut-off that I can vanish when I need to. There’s a chair, a stool, my late grandmother’s kitchen table where I draw; a few easels that usually have a couple of paintings on the go at once; a large walk-around palette and a drawing chest. But this is a working space too, so there are also piles of things, all over the place - papers, rags, tubes of paint, old brushes, portfolios and frames, all the stuff that collects in a studio. Most of my time is spent here.
Q. How has your practice changed over time?
A. I’ve never liked to call it my ‘practice’, many do and that’s fine, but to me it’s like borrowing another profession’s language to give what I do relevance. That I do it is enough; it’s the thing, and though this probably doesn’t sound very exciting, always has been. It’s an obsessive marriage of ideas and process that for me has developed rather than changed. I’ve always scribbled things down, in sketchbooks or on pieces of paper though when it comes to it, only really worked them out properly on the canvas. Just as, I suppose, I’ll continue to experiment at the palette, keep my pencils sharp, have doubts and at some point in every work’s progress have to drag it back from the brink. If anything has changed it’s not really the way I work, but probably my own understanding of it.
Q. What’s your favourite work you’ve made?
A. I’m reluctant to say that I’ve ever had a favourite piece amongst my own work. Though it would be true that certain paintings, drawings and, looking right back, even pieces of sculpture do stand out in my memory. Some, because in hindsight they really hit their mark or turned out to be significant as milestones. Some because they were gambles or proved so difficult to resolve, that whether they landed or not, force themselves into the reckoning. There are even a few that, for a while at least, made it onto my own walls. But still, placing one in front of another doesn’t seem fair. If I’m not happy with something these days I get rid of it, the big brush comes out. So by extension – and apart from one or two very early, inevitably naive paintings that though I know it’s wrong, I’d prefer not to have happened – I must surely like whatever survives.
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KINGS PLACE MAY 06 - OCTOBER 08
In the late spring of 2006 I was appointed Artist in Residence at Kings Place, London. At that time there was, of course, no ‘Kings Place’ beyond the address, but rather a hole, men, materials and an enormous volume of earmarked space.
The idea was to follow the construction and evolution of the building on site and remotely, back in the studio. Creatively I was given a pretty free hand, the brief being not simply to record but also respond to the ideas and development of the structure. Two and a half years later and the project has drawn to its conclusion, the space has been filled and shadows are being cast. From a colossal Jocelinesque ‘pit’, through almost Norman towers of concrete jabbing into the sky and spiders webs of girders and ropes, to the final enormous waving glass facade that I can now see as I arrive at, and leave, Kings Cross.
From the start the size of the ‘hole’ drew you to it. Dug down through the earth with subterranean walls of stone and concrete holding back noisy York Way to one side and the heavy calm of the Regent Canal and Battlebridge Basin to the other. Four humongous tubular steel brackets held it open and tiny men made specialised, often puzzling, movements within it. Large masses, borne in by barge, were swung from cranes and as the towers grew the same cranes swung fragile cages holding even more fragile men higher and higher. Yellow tabards with voices from all over the world, blinked in the dark caverns grown under vast temporary platforms. And man size numbers, that could be seen across London, were stencilled from the air as the towers reached each floor level. The early feeling that I got was of an ancient and necessarily brutal procedure, in spite of the modern materials and dream. My response was initially to record what was happening in sketchbooks and in the studio, trying to get to grips with the spaces, the scales, and to order these things in my head. I quickly found, however, that certain niche, if you like, fascinations began to direct the work. The pit walls, the glow of the numbered concrete towers as they measured the night sky, or the capturing of air and space to fill with people and grow new history. Metaphorical ideas began to colour the way I regarded the physical objects, the massive collective roles of the men and the architects intentions, even my own, always uncertain, relationship with London itself.
From Sunderland and the North East, Kings Cross is my entry and departure gate for London and consequently has always played a significant role in my view of the place. The taste of ‘the smoke’ is usually laced with the Kings Cross experience. Stepping off the train in the cold early morning, hanging around waiting to leave at night and the lack of pavement space for days in between. Like any familiar urban area, the land, space and history here are dripping with imagery and suggestion. Secret fields of disused land have surrounded Kings Cross for as long as I can remember along with shop fronts, where you imagine Mr Verloc may be sitting on his stool. The improving views from the top of Kings Place as it rose reminded me why London excites me. The ‘St Pancras’ that first entered my consciousness at school via Kites death in ‘Brighton Rock’, and the array of other familiar silhouettes that always provoke a delicious, if claustrophobic, blood rush. Early in the 1800s this area was home to mountain ranges of ash heaps and horses bones that were the haunt of marauding pigs. The Russians apparently bought the ash heaps to use in the rebuilding of Moscow after Napoleon’s retreat! Earlier still in 60AD, Battle Bridge (as the Kings Cross area was known before 1830) is traditionally thought to have been the site of the final massive battle between the Roman army and Boudica’s Iceni. So much buried or lost in the earth, the air, myth and memory. All this, of course, added to the project’s attraction and while few obvious references made it through the inevitable filtering process they were constant background accompaniments. An important part of my approach was being aware that this new space had already in the past been filled and often forgotten, leaving fragments of objects and stories at ground level but only imaginary stains in the air.
Dale Atkinson
11 November 2008