ED GRAY: LEARNING TO LOOK (AT LONDON & BEYOND)

A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION BY ONE OF THE UK’S FOREMOST PAINTERS OF PEOPLE & PLACES

Greasy spoon cafe: a London institution.

The painter Ed Gray has an exhibition of his paintings and prints (and sketches) on at The House Of Annetta in Princelet Street, Spitalfields (literally a minute’s walk off Brick Lane) until July 20.

Yes, I should have given Yak readers more warning – considering its been hanging since July 3 (and I went to the opening…) - but the opening was so rammed and I was off to Suffolk the following morning and... (add excuses). I re-visited on July 10^th. and this made me determined to write on Ed and his art.

But I had to post on Wimbledon/Serena first.

Anyway, you have a few days left and as the exhibition is free entry and open until 8pm daily I do suggest you pop along.

There’s lots of reasons to visit, not least Ed’s exhibition is held in a historic Huguenot, fire-damaged house that, as its scraped back to floor boards, conveys a real sense of a bygone age – now called House Of Annetta, its owned by an architectural firm and is, apparently, used for exhibitions of art/science/social justice.

While the house Ed’s exhibiting in is historic, the surrounding area is a thriving mash-up of London past-and-present. Upon exiting, you can head north and, in a few minutes, reach the two surviving beigel shops (the last survivors from the pre-1970s era when Whitechapel was the epicentre of London Jewish life – make mine a cream cheese and salmon beigel, ta).

Surrounding the beigel shops are hipster bars/cafes, Shoreditch having transformed into a youth mecca at the start of this century (I’ve lived in London long enough to recall when Brick Lane was largely Asian and textile/clothing manufacturers). If at the top of Brick Lane I suggest you cross the Bethnal Green Road to Flashback Records, always good for a dig.

Or you could walk south down Brick Lane, passing the myriad vintage clothing shops and Rough Trade’s megastore (dull it tis), through the remaining Bangladeshi shops and curry houses, and onto Whitechapel Road where The Whitechapel Gallery resides.

This public space is more often than not focused on art with a “contemporary” conceptual bent; contrastingly, Ed Gray’s art is “traditional”, in the sense its figurative and describes people and the communities they live in. These are big, bold paintings that exist as exaggerated snapshots of everyday urban life, always observant, sometimes celebratory, other times caricature. Not exactly the kind of thing that gets nominated for the Turner Prize then.

A painting featuring the late, great jazz singer Jimmy Scott performing at Ronnie Scott’s.

Ed is a painter in the London grain – Hogarth’s vivid paintings and etchings of 18^th century Londoners’ boozing and frolicking are what initially inspired Gray and he continues this tradition, while Edward Burra’s spiky, expressionist-influenced paintings have sharpened Ed’s brushes.

I also believe Beryl Cook’s bright, affectionate portraits of her working class neighbours have surely helped shape Gray’s gentler works – he portrays all kinds of people and is always interested in both how similar yet different our species is. Cook wasn’t embraced by contemporary art institutions, but she certainly found an audience and collectors - as Ed has done, he’s now successful enough to survive without a dealer gallery.

Thinking about it, the photographer Martin Parr, who specialises in shooting the English at play, his loud images shot through with sarcasm, is possibly the only living British artist I can think of who also attempts to document the ordinary people who share this bustling island. Although Ed’s approach is gentler, less focused on the absurd, than Parr.

Here’s George & Mark Baxter in George’s narrow tailor’s shop. RIP George.

Funnily enough, I got to know Gray’s paintings not through going to exhibitions but due to dropping in on George Dyer, a Jamaican-born tailor who occupied a small shop on the Walworth Road.

George was a lovely man – he died a few years ago – and always told great stories (for instance, he was at school in Peckham in 1972 when Bob Marley and Johnny Nash turned up and sang for the pupils, then kicked around a football with them) and in George’s tiny studio, where he knocked out beautiful mod suits, there was a large painting of George and Mark Baxter, a local writer.

I admired the painting and George told me it was by a local artist named Ed Gray. George died suddenly in 2022 of heart failure, thus I wrote his obituary for The Guardian and they illustrated it with Ed’s painting. Inevitably, we had to meet – and as it turned out we both lived in SE London, this wasn’t difficult.

Now we bump into one another in the oddest places: last autumn I was taken to Ian Dury’s favourite park bench in Richmond Park by Martin Morales, it is a good place to admire the view, and suddenly Ed and family turned up. Great minds etc.

Anyway, Ed’s current exhibition is called Streetlife Serenade and it documents some thirty years of him painting what he sees around him. There are paintings of the streets of Bangkok and Tokyo subway, of Native Indian rituals in Mexico and a fisherman in Bermuda, paintings of all kinds of people in many different places. But most of the paintings are of Londoners.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is Remembrance, a large work detailing a Remembrance Day ceremony in Rotherhithe. While the large numbers of people painted here are standing still – beyond one elderly man laying a wreath – its a busy painting, full of detail and character, telling all kinds of stories, superbly executed, using a circular pattern so to suggest (possibly) the cycle of life.

Shoreditch Station is less than a ten minute walk from House Of Annetta. Here Ed celebrates the myriad humanity that share the neighbourhood.

Ed’s paintings are jammed with people and activity, references and motifs, they’re very London in this sense, not afraid to detail how messy and crazy the Smoke can be. Gray’s fascinated by who we are, especially when sharing crowded spaces - night buses, protests, football fans, greasy spoon customers, sun bathers, cyclists, drinkers and families, the old and young, all ethnicities and backgrounds – his paintings detailing the city at work and play.

Describing Streetlife Serenade’s retrospective of his art Gray states: “In 1995, I left art college in Cardiff to return to my home city of London. I knew I wanted to paint people, that was what I had always done. One day my dad showed me a book of William Hogarth’s work. I did not understand the narratives in Hogarth’s scenes back then but I recognised the Londoners romping, raving and roving through his clustered scenes. In Cardiff, I had begun to paint fish markets and caffs, learning to befriend and persuade fishmongers and caff owners that I would be no bother and keep out of their way as I drew.

Mexicans mourning the femicide that has cost the lives of so many Mexican women.

“In 1996, I left my studio in a squat on the Old Kent Rd, pacing self-consciously up and down the ancient highway, trying to find a way to draw what I thought I was seeing. It was another five years before I felt able to venture into the city with my sketchbook and pencils and really begin to sketch life of the city. I cast my net in different city streams and brought my haul back to a bedroom in Brixton, filleting my drawings to piece together moment, memory, echoes and rework all these elements into a canvas.

“I tried to learn to be bold enough to stand in the street and draw faces, finding ways to record flitting and fleeting urbanites, to capture character in a few strokes with only a few seconds’ observation. I was learning to hold a stare, to avoid confrontation, to blend and be a part of the street, to be visibly invisible, but most of all I was learning to be present enough to really look.”

Remembrance Day in Rotherhithe. Ed’s latest work and what an epic achievement it is.

And Gray does just this: he really looks. Which is a gift, to be able to portray gatherings of people, none of them famous, as they go about the rituals of daily life. His art then is a celebration of the lives we live, even if at times we are ridiculous (or ugly) - a big painting of protestors, both for and against Brexit gathering in Parliament Square, refuses to demonise one side, instead capturing the energies and uncertainties they all display (this work hasn’t sold; it not being an easy one to live with).

If you have the time and inclination I suggest you pop down to Brick Lane and view Streetlife Situation. Ed will be there and he is an agreeable host. Even if his paintings aren’t to your taste, you can wander around this historic part of East London, marvelling at the traces left by the different communities who have lived here over the centuries, observe the rush of humanity and wonder as to how Ed Gray might paint the scene in front of you.

And if you don’t have the opportunity to do so then visit Ed’s website: //www.edgrayart.com/

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Portrait of the artist as a painter: Ed Gray in Spitalfields.