mixed media on canvas, 51 x 61 inches (130 x 155 cm)

acrylic on paper, 18 x 24 inches (46 x 61 cm)

gouache on board, 18.5 x 18.5 inches (47 x 47 cm)

mixed media on canvas, 66" x 66" (168 x 168 cm)

(sebastien@adrien-kavachnina.com)

gouache on board  19 x 19 inches (49 x 49 cm)

gouache on board, 19.8” x 19.25” (50 x 49 cm)

mixed media on canvas, 68” x 68” (173 x 173cm) 

gouache on board, 19.5” x 19.5” (50 x 50 cm)

watercolour + pierre noir on paper, 11 x 14 inches (28 x 36 cm)

mixed media on canvas,  60” x 60” (152 x 152 cm)

mixed media on canvas, 66” x 66” (168 x 168 cm)

(sebastien@adrien-kavachnina.com)

mixed media on canvas, 62 x 72 inches (158 x 183 cm)

printed by Coriander Press, London.

This can be ordered from serena@serenamorton.com

or purchased here on the PRINT page of this website.

 In 2010 when I exhibited the Amazon painting on the floor I surrounded it with large paintings of that "first woman" asleep in nature.

acrylic on board, 18 x 27 in ($6 x 59 cm)

mixed media on canvas, 62 x 72 inches

gouache on board, 16 x 22.5 in (41 x 57 cm)

2016, acrylic on canvas, 66" x 66" (168 x 168 cm) 

gouache on board, 15 x 22.5 in

2015,  gouache on board,  19” x 26” (49 x 66 cm)

2015, gouache on board, 17” x 22.5” (43 x 55 cm)

acrylic on canvas, 62 x72 inches (158 x 183 cm)

 2016 gouache on board, 19.5” x 26.75” (49 x 67.8 cm)

gouache on board, 18 x 27 in (46 x 59 cm)

2015,  gouache on board,  19.25" x 24" (49 x 61 cm)

2016 gouache on board, 19” x 28” (48 x 71 cm)

2008, mixed media on linen, 66” x 132” (168 x 236 cm)

This is a detail from the centerpiece of the show. 8 paintings join together to describe the ground floor rooms which Picasso was using as art studios. Visitors will be able to walk from room to room to view the hundreds of artworks that he was creating in April, 1956. The entire painting is a still life in which Picasso has placed or created every element.

 2016, watercolor and gouache, 13.5" x 12"

2016, gouache on board, 18” x 27” (46 x 69 cm)

gouache on board, 19 x 23 inches

acrylic on canvas, 66 x 72 inches (168 x 183 cm)

mixed media on canvas, 62 x 62 in (153 x 153 cm)

gouache on board, 18 x 23 inches

acrylic on canvas, 62 x 72 inches (153 x 179 cm)

gouache on board, 19 x 23 inches

After college, I worked on a film in New York. It was the early 80s, and there was graffiti everywhere. You'd see a new Basquiat poem on a wall one day, and within week later other artists had added to it. Until then I had thought of painting as being rather static and dead, but this kind of painting was alive and metamorphosing every day.

One day on the film set, I had to keep a crowd at bay inside the entrance of the 34th Street subway station. Keith Haring appeared and started drawing on a poster and we struck up a conversation. I told him that his job looked a lot more fun than mine.  He invited me to have a go, but I said that I didn't think I could paint over his work. Later, we went to a party together, and he encouraged me to buy some spray paint and find myself an empty wall.

I knew about a building on West 56th Street and 7th Avenue that was empty and condemned to be torn down. My boss had just moved out but I still had the keys. One weekend I bought  spray paint and covered some walls in abstract graffiti. I passed out because I wasn't wearing a mask. Upon awakening, I blew my nose and colors came out. I looked around and saw that the room was filled with images from my imagination.

Over the next year I covered all the rooms with paintings and even painted the roof, but the city kept putting large locks on the door and signs saying, 'KEEP OUT GRAFFITI ARTIST.' Behind my empty building, the fire escape was only a couple of feet from the fire escape of the Hotel Wellington. I spied a dark room that was full of rolled carpets and furniture. I climbed up and found the window open. The bathroom had running water. That 7th floor room became the entrance to my studio.

English art dealer Robert Fraser came to New York looking for graffiti artists for an exhibition called "Paris/New York." I took his assistant to the Hotel Wellington on 7th Avenue. By then, the hotel staff thought that I lived there. I bought a newspaper, as I did every day, and the bellboy said, "Good morning Mr. Elwes." We took an elevator to the 7th floor. I opened the door to the room with a credit card and we stepped out of the window and climbed across to the fire escape of "my" building. Fraser liked my paintings and invited me to be a part of an exhibition with Basquiat and Haring.

Robert wanted me to stay in London and do a solo show on Cork Street. He said, "You know that you are the only English graffiti artist?" He took me to meet Basquiat. We had a great connection, but I wanted to go to Paris and learn how to paint with a brush. Robert was still interested in a show and asked to see my Paris paintings in six months.  Sadly, he became very ill and succumbed to Aids. He was one of the great art dealers, and I was amazed and grateful that he had shown such belief in me. 

I painted graffiti at night but police often followed me around. After painting "Fish" I decided to only paint on dilapidated or temporary walls.

Back in London I started painting graffiti in the streets. I searched for interesting walls that could frame and be a part of potential paintings. My brothers and I had grown up in London in the sixties, and bomb sites (left over from the war) had been our playgrounds.

I painted graffiti at night but police often followed me around. This was an empty building on the corner of the Kings Road opposite Safeway. No one ever knew that I was painting graffiti on the streets because it was safer to just keep quiet about it.

Here is one of the four panels on the wall of my studio. (70 x 300 inches) 

( It has also been exhibited as a giant floor painting (280 x 300 inches) in Los Angeles and London. Visitors find themselves walking over hundreds of exotic, flowering plants while searching for the source of the river.) 

In Colombia, we would wake each day at 5am and have coffee on our balcony, gazing at the rainforest which extended all around us. At that early hour one could see a snow-covered volcano in the distance, protruding from the canopy.

One January, my friend and I drove a jeep as far as we could up the volcano. We put on plastic suits and rubber boots and climbed the rest of the way through a cloud forest. It was like nothing else I had ever experienced on earth. There was no ground. We crawled through tunnels in the foliage. Sometimes we were deep below the surfasce and saw strange grubs and caterpillars living there.

Eventually we reached a plateau just below the crater. There we found a source of the Amazon River. It was summer and all the plants were flowering. I had ropes and tent pegs and we made a grid around the source, dividing the area in twelve large rectangles. Over the next eighteen months I painted each rectangle until I had a vast painting of the exact landscape.

This colorful, rain-drenched ecosystem seemed like it could exist at the bottom of the sea. Every few years, the volcano explodes and molten lava kills all life on this plateau. But the rain is constant, the river continues to come up from the ground, and life begins again. It is in a constant cycle of life and death and rebirth. It is the kind of ecosystem that existed millions of years before humanity and one that should exist millions of years from now. 

I painted that place because it demonstrates to me that as we degrade the natural world we are making more and more for ourselves to survive. Even after a nuclear holocaust other forms of life will likely proliferate again beginning at the vents at the bottom of the sea and at the high-altitude sources of rivers. 

Here is another of the panels on the wall of my studio. (70 x 300 inches) 

"In this installation, Elwes deals with the most prodigious artist of our time during one of his most intense phases of creativity.  In the mid-fifties, Picasso had just fallen in love with his last wife Jaqueline.  His great rival Matisse had recently died, and he had no one to compete with.  Luckily, Jaqueline's face reminded him of one of the women in Delacroix's masterpiece, 'Women of Algiers,' and thus began a series ofpaintings in which Picasso pitted his talents against those of the old master.  Suddenly, the whole ground floor of his villa was filled to the brim with portraits of Jaqueline interspersed with representations of himself as bull, owl, goat and satyr.  Elwes' work describes a period after April, 1956 when Picasso had just completed several paintings of his own studio, a rare occurrence.  He then made an amazing painting of his muse in his studio.  In that painting, Jaqueline is looking at a blank canvas on an easel.  It is a meditation on the making of art." 

extract from an essay by Fred Hoffman (Curator of the Basquiat retrospectives at MOCA and the Brooklyn Museum)

Each month, the Madoura Pottery would deliver several crates of ceramics, and this is where most of them were unpacked and painted. Sydney Picasso spent several hours examining the installation and told me many stories about the details. On the right above the sofa, there is a bullfight painting made by Claude Picasso for his father with the inscription, "pour mon papa cheri."  Above that is a painting of a bowl of cherries which was a secret portrait of Claude's mother, Francoise Gilot. On the the sofa rests a kite which Picasso made for Paloma and Claude. In the center of the room, Picasso is taking apart the children's stroller in order to create a sculpture. 

"These paintings are literally a feast for the eye and mind.  Each of Elwes’ paintings is the result of copious research, from which he  has assembled all extant documentation on any and every item which Picasso surrounded himself with.  These include all the notebooks, sketches, African masks, works in production (such as paintings, prints, ceramics and sculpture), as well as gifts from friends, articles of clothing and even artworks by his own children.  All of these 'things' have been  included in Elwes’ work with the goal of accurately documenting the conditions in which the master worked." 

(extract from an essay by Fred Hoffman)

The entire painting wraps around three walls. This image shows half of it. 

In the center is a mirrored door. To the right is a painting called "The Shadow." In that painting, Francoise Gilot is asleep on a sofa the day before she left Picasso. He entered the room, and his shadow fell over her body. On the left easel is a painting of his new wife sitting in the rocking chair looking at an empty canvas on the easel. 

This is the other side of the painting studio. On the mantlepiece, there are two bottles of absinthe and a sculpture of a boy's head that was in Picasso's Bateau Lavoir studio fifty years earlier. On the sculpture stand to the right, there is a red, toy bus made for his children. The chair in the center is now on display at the Picasso Museum in Paris. On the chair is a newspaper which Picasso used as his palette. The newspaper absorbed the oil from his colors allowing them to dry far more rapidly. This was how Picasso was able to produce so many paintings.

On the easel to the left is a print of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." The work surrounding it seems to be influenced by that painting. Jacqueline, dressed as one of Delacroix's "Women of Algiers," appears in two paintings and in three ceramic plates on the floor. The other ceramics are of goats, owls, bulls and satyrs, creatures that Picasso identified with.

There is a book of poems by Rimbaud on the table by the window. In the corner of the room is sculpture made out of pipes. Some artworks in this painting (like that sculpture in the corner and the kite on the sofa) have not survived the test of time.

On the chair to the left is a painting by Picasso of his studio. On the chair in the center is a painting of his wife in the studio looking at a painting of the studio on an easel.

On the shelf in the center of the wall, there is a bust of Dora Maar, an African sculpture, a bird cage and a gold clock that was a gift from Picasso's art dealer, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler.

Tiles that Picasso and his daughter Paloma have painted are displayed on the table. On the right wall is another little painting by Paloma of her step-mother, a bullfight announcement, a boomerang and the famous "Bull's Head" sculpture made from a bicycle seat and handlebars. Throughout this painting there are French newspapers from April, 1956 that can actually be read.

Each year, I start a new bull painting with my children and their friends. 

For me, painting a bull is also about facing fears because I was almost killed by a Spanish fighting bull when I was nine years old. The bull paintings usually take many years to complete.

I made this artwork a few weeks after being gored during a Spanish fiesta. 

My father and grandfather were both painters. Painting is something that has been handed down from generation to generation. When I make a bull painting, I feel a connection with the early cave painters.

I also feel for the bull and try to see the world through his eyes.

The bull paintings usually take many years to complete. I always keep one on the wall of my studio and each night I apply the left over paint from my palette.