Works

Shangri-La 1990 - 2010

Coffee II

  • Mixed media
  • 56 x 76 cms
  • 2001

Coffee II

The emblematic, even heraldic, quality, of Coffee II (2002) recalls Greaves' days as a sign writer, illustrating Marmite pots and Raleigh bicycles. Pictures of a coffee jug, for example, began as a depiction of a coffee pot on a shelf and, partly in remembrance of a café in Belsize Park in London, Greaves also included a decorative cross pattern derived from its tiled walls.
Eventually, as Greaves deconstructed the coffee pot, he felt able to leave out the situating shelf and the decorative tiles, reconstructing the jug, as though from a model, to create a new schematic form: 'the structure was pushed through the sieve of the mind and remade as a painting, as something which could not be remade in reality'.
Such boldness was a breakthrough, leading to recent works that similarly reinvent form.

Literature

Derrick Greaves: The Pleasures of Drawing, James Hyman Gallery, London, 2005, (cat. 14), illustrated (un-numbered).

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Enquiries: JAMES HYMAN GALLERY