About me
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About me.
I studied painting, drawing and printmaking at Liverpool in the late 1960s, and was taught by some excellent artists and teachers including Adrian Henri, Sam Walsh, Roger McGough and Don McKinlay.
I was an art and design lecturer for thirty five years, often drawing, painting and printmaking alongside my students, and very regularly working with them directly from the life model.
During a short holiday in Cornwall in 2017 I did some drawings of the landscape in a sketchbook, and this kick started a renewed enthusiasm for painting as a studio activity. In May 2018 I began oil painting regularly.
In 2019 I re-discovered American Abstract Expressionism through reading Ninth Street Women, written by Mary Gabriel. This helped clarify and confirm some long held ideas I’d had about painting, but didn't know how to articulate. Currently, I try to work simply and minimally just the other side of the little gap between the figurative and the abstract, while avoiding preconceptions and preplanning. It is important for me to keep the abstract nature of paint, shape, colour and materials at the forefront of my thinking about the pictorial problems encountered, and to attempt to treat them with the utmost importance. The paint and colour are not just mediums inhabited by images, they are significant images in themselves, and in fact much more significant without the tyranny of figurative imagery.
Qualifications
BA (Hons) in Fine Art, Liverpool College of Art (Liverpool Polytechnic) 1969.
MA in History of Art (with Distinction), University of York, 2007.
PhD in History of Art, University of York, 2013.Thesis title 'Colour, Paint and Gold: the Materiality of English Manuscript Illumination in the Twelfth Century'. Supervisors Professor Christopher Norton and Dr Jane Hawkes. External Examiner Professor Jane Geddes, University of Aberdeen.
Publications
‘Verdun, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 70, Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm', Manuscrits numérisés de la Bibliothèque d’étude Verdun: Méditations et Oraisons de Saint Anselme. Complementary notes, 2011. (http://www1.arkhenum.fr/bm_verdun_ms/_app/index.php).
‘A Change of Clothes on the Morgan Leaf: the Apocrypha Master’s Illustration of the Transition of Saul’ in Boulton, Hawkes and Herman (eds) The Art, Literature and Material Culture of the Medieval World, Four Courts Press, Dublin 2015.
'An Unusual Hell Mouth in an Old Testament Illustration: Understanding the Numbers Initial in the Twelfth-Century Laud Bible' in Boulton and Bintley (eds) Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2019.
Some of my academic research, including recent publications, is available to read on the Academia.edu website.
Get in touch: hrstirrup@yahoo.co.uk
07949 1867652
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