Adam Birtwistle
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Adam Birtwistle (born 1959) is a British artist whose idiosyncratic portraits of composers and musicians are represented in the
Biography
Adam Birtwistle was born in
In 1986 he attended printing classes at the
Commissions and paintings
Two paintings by Birtwistle have been purchased by the
In 1999, he was commissioned by Curtis Price to paint a portrait of his father for Dukes Hall at the Royal Academy of Music.
The following year, 2000, he was asked to paint portraits of six composers, whose operas were to be featured during the 2001
Among others, Birtwistle has done portraits of the painters Craigie Aitchison and Peter Blake. Fascinated by ‘performers’ of all descriptions, his subjects vary from the astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, and Winston Churchill, through to the actor Jeremy Irons and Dame Marjorie Scardino. In 2008 he was commissioned by the broadcaster Nick Ross to produce a series of ten paintings called "Black is White" to confront racial stereotypes. The exhibition was launched by Trevor Philips who chairs Britain's Commission for Equalities and Human Rights. The cycle includes a triptych of arguably the three most significant American black civil rights activists, Marcus Garvey, Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, along with race reversal portraits of the iconic faces of Marilyn Monroe, Jessye Norman, Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Abraham Lincoln and Birtwistle's second take on Sir Winston Churchill though this time painted as he would have looked with black skin pigmentation.
Critical comments
Lord Gowrie, chairman of the Art Council (1994/1998), described Adam Birtwistle as "an artist who brings off something uncommon and difficult. He is a serious painter with wit. This quality shows in both composition and brushwork."[6]
Dr Charles Saumarez Smith, secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy and formerly director of the National Gallery, regarded Adam Birtwistle as "one of the best of his generation" (*), while art critic Godfrey Barker called him "…one of our most distinguished portrait painters in what is, presently, a Golden Age of Portraiture in Britain."[6]
Object of the Week Daily Telegraph 20 May 2002... Glyndebourne, the celebrated Sussex opera house, unveiled six paintings of people closely associated with it. They were all by Adam Birtwistle.[citation needed]
References
- ^ a b c "Adam Birtwistle - National Portrait Gallery". www.npg.org.uk. Retrieved 2 December 2019.
- )
- ISBN 978-0-521-89534-7.
- ^ portrait of Sir Harrison Birtwistle National Gallery
- ^ portrait of Elvis Costello National Gallery
- ^ a b Adam Birtwistle Exhibition Catalogue for Piano Nobile Gallery, London