Picture Post 16: Circus People

I love the way this this painting plays with a tension between harmony and separateness. The composition and the beautifully balanced range of blues draws you in. Even the starkly contrasting reds are balanced at either side of the painting. Yet the more you look at the individuals, the less part of a group they feel. Their expressions are fiercely independent and little seems to unites them. There seems to be no connection. Yet the painting brings them together in a warm unifying embrace.

Inside Michael Randall's Studio

MR 504 Circus People, oil on canvas, 1060 x 1370 1990s.

This large scale painting features a group of circus performers from Romania. Perhaps surprisingly, the inspiration was a small black and white photograph, the date is uncertain. The colour in Michael’s sketches for this work (see selection below) was established from the beginning.

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WAR DAMAGED MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS – Tate Britain

  The galleries echo with call and response, from war to war, place to place. The sounds recall last breaths and death rattles, slow exhalations. As much as distant wars, fallen armies and martial music, it is hard not to think of other musics, other times. It is impossible not to think of the soaring, …