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THIS IS ARTIST'S Biography

MICHAEL QUIRKE

b. 1946

SHOW ARTIST'S PAINTINGS

1982 – 1985 studied at St Martin’s School of Art.  1978 – 1988 worked under Maurice field, founder member of the Euston Road Group.  Although Michael Quirke was first known for his vivid portrayals of the circus and circus life, his landscapes and flower works have won him worldwide recognition and acclaim.  Michael Quirke works in the mediums of oil, pastel and gauache.  His mastery in all these mediums and his bold use of colour have won him admiration worldwide.  He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions all over England.  In 1989 he had his first one man show t the Ophelos Gallery in London.  The work of Michael Quirke can be found in many private collections in England and abroad, including France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the USA.

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“London Pride – The paintings of Michael Quirke”

 “The blue-grey towers of commerce have destroyed forever the skyline of London and have thrown all the great buildings out of scale, yet London remains a city of atmospheric corners where history is alive.  The conductor Sir Barbirolli, born a Cockney, remarked on London’s distinctive smell, nowadays polluted from vehicle exhausts but in his day a mixture of fog and the aroma of coffee from the Lynos Corner Houses.  Among London’s many recorders, Monet has caught its atmospheric poetry, Sickert its seedy music-hall life, and Ouerbach and Kossoff its monumentality.  At the other end of the scale, Hugh Casson has made a shimmering water colours of its showpiece buildings and its tourist crowds.

 But where is that other kind of painter who can paint what London actually feels like and smells like, one whose long experience can paint its ever more vibrant night life?  Where is the painter who can convey the unmistakable black of the London taxi cab or the lonely lurid emptiness which so often defies its teeming streets?  He is working still and his name is Michael Quirke.  He trained in London at St Martin’s School of Art, and then he worked with Maurice Field, founder member of the Euston Road Group.  His first one man show was in the Ophelos Gallery in London, in 1989.  It is his particular gift that he can paint what Barbirolli called the smell of London.  And because emotion is best recollected in tranquility he paints his London canvasses in his country studio: a famous town still dominated by the abstract of the fifties.

 London is familiar.  We know the grand outlines of its major buildings and we are not surprised to find them on canvas.  Yet there are so many London monuments reserved for the painter alone which await the ideal interpreter.  Whistler made his name with his noctumes of the Thames, his veils of mauve and his Battersea blacks stirring the pool of memory and emotion.  Michael Quirke has turned his attention to busy streets at night and those pools of light outside a theatre where the crowds are drawn like moths to a flame.  Our thrill of anticipation at a comedy which the Financial Times has declared ‘side-splitting’ and ‘unmissable’ can be recalled along with other emotions, but Quirke makes us notice too, the enticing corner of an alley, the thrill of what we can’t see.  His aim is not solely prosaic, for following hard on the pleasure of recognition comes the deeper satisfaction of the harmonies and discords of colours and shapes making the whole picture vibrate and move like Mondriar’s late Broadway Boogie-Woogie.  Smaller paintings glow like jewels and beckon from their gilded frames. 

Quirke snakes off the restraint as he conveys us to Hampstead’s fairgrounds where all is full swing.  The fairy lights and the merry-go-round horses are garish in real life and remain so in the paintings, but on closer acquaintance a tight and witty design is apparent.  These are not the well mannered fairgrounds of Dame Laura Knight, however.  In one large painting the molten-gold cornice of a merry-go-round recedes into space, not with the boring assurance of careful academic painting, but ‘con biro’.  The sound of a Gavioli organ may be missing, yet the paintwork summons it up and urges us towards the candy floss.  In his concert hall scenes, Quirke invokes the ghost of Sikert but stresses the lively oddity of the visual experience.  Musicians become liquorice allsorts in the pattern of the ensemble, bathed in a red-plush glow.  And we always get a good seat with Michael Quirke! 

What a future Michael Quirke has!  This experienced and much collected artist might paint a series of London Street Café’s or blue plaque houses next, but he could never exhaust Dr Johnson’s favourite city.  Indeed, although Michael is also a poet of the tranquil Hertfordshire countryside, I fancy that one day soon, people will be talking about Michael Quirke’s London.  They already are!”

Edward R Mayor, Art Historian and Artist

August 1997