A huge thank you to more than a hundred of you who attended our ‘Beyond the door’ exhibition tonight.
Here are some of our artists with their paintings snd their sitters.
The exhibition runs until Saturday at the Bermondsey Project Space near London Bridge.
You can now vote for your favourite painting in this year’s BP Portrait Award Exhibition at the Aberdeen Art Gallery… If you’d like to vote for Sarah’s portrait of the very brilliant Lola Flash, here’s the link:
A number of members of the Lots Road Group have contributed to the great #portraitsfornhsheroes project started by Artist Tom Croft to honour our normally unsung health workers.
Completed portraits so far are by Maureen Nathan, Hilary Puxley, Colleen Quill and Stella Tooth.
Maureen Nathan‘s portrait is of Dr Anna Stilwell, paediatric registrar currently part of the NHS Bring Back Staff campaign.
Hilary Puxley‘s double portrait of Ashleigh, oil on two canvases, is of Ashleigh Timmins who is a community phlebotomist visiting housebound patients as part of the Torpoint community nursing team. She has three children – and is also in her third year of nursing training! Superwoman!
Ashleigh sent Hilary a couple of photos – one of her looking glam and the other taken at a patient’s house on her first day in PPE. She decided to paint both, with the images slightly overlapping to make a simple point about Ashleigh’s life and those of all NHS heroes.
Colleen Quill has portrayed Ben Singer, after a gruelling shift in the Intensive Care Unit. A Consultant in Intensive Care and ECMO in London’s St. Bartholomew’s, he also works as a Consultant with the London Air Ambulance.
Stella Tooth was paired with Helen Chiverton, a paramedic who responds in an ambulance to 999 calls in London. Helen sent Stella a selfie to work from and told her about her job, “I love it because my patients can be newborn (or in some cases being born!) all the way to the very elderly and everyone in the middle and in every walk and stage of life, and you always have to be on your toes because things can change so quickly and are sometimes not quite what they seem. We carry drugs and equipment to treat and help people having medical, mental and social health problems and dealing with situations in people’s houses or in public places can be challenging. At the moment we, like all other areas of medicine and of course plenty of other fields, are finding that everything has changed and is constantly changing as more is learned about this virus. The PPE we are wearing with patients can complicate things, for example by making it much harder to communicate with people, but I am so grateful for it. We are working with firefighters as well at the moment who are supporting us on the ambulances which is brilliant and the AA are also working with us as well as so many other companies and community groups and individuals, we notice them all and are so thankful for them, it makes such a difference!”
We cannot thank all our wonderful NHS frontline workers, enough for what they are doing for all of us. They are literally our lifelines.
The Lots Road Group has been working behind the scenes during lockdown on an exhibition that will reflect the extraordinary times we are going through. If restrictions are lifted, we expect to stage the exhibition at Waterstones Gower Street’s art gallery from Monday 9 November 2020 to January 2021.
The exhibition, entitled ‘Beyond the door’ will show portraiture generated during confinement when our own front doors have had a heightened significance in their dual role as protection from harm and barrier to freedom. The theme allows exploration of both interior and exterior worlds and our subjects’ experiences during the pandemic. It will also nod towards the door as a symbolic portal through which we will enter a new, unfamiliar post viral world.
The Lots Road Group 