The Unseen Collection

The Unseen Collection 

Last Monday I enjoyed the opportunity to give a new friend a guided tour of my collection of thirty-one paintings in Symphony Hall Birmingham. Although he's a regular concert-goer, he had only seen a couple of them before. The earliest of my action-portraits of great names in classical music, all programmed to perform at Symphony Hall, were painted in 1990/91, commissioned by the first Director Andrew Jowett, now retired. The most recent in 2013.

Despite popular demand for a public exhibition of the collection and despite various proposals during the last twenty-eight years, only a privileged few occasionally get to see a handful of my works at receptions in the Director's Lounge; even less see the paintings in the back-stage corridors. There are just two on semi-public view.

Elgar's Dream, my largest watercolour ever, inspired by The Dream of Gerontius, commissioned by Robin and Jayne Cadbury and unveiled by Yehudi Menuhin in 1996, has limited access on the Level 4 Foyer while you grab your drink during the concert interval. An Elgar fan, my guest was delighted to finally get my detailed description of his favourite painting. 

My Mahler Experience can be glimpsed on the ground floor but is often cordoned off, eclipsed by the blinding bright panels of advertising in The Mall and Convention Centre. I wonder with some trepidation what will happen to these major works, when the spacious new foyer is built (see below). A radical re-hanging, presumably. An artist is often powerless to intervene, once his works have left the studio, when he discovers it with a horribly wrong frame or wall colour. Right from the beginning I was fortunate to be able to consult with the excellent Birmingham Framers Gale & Co. Ltd (Est. 1845) about the framing of this Collection.

photo: Page\Park Architects

Yes, you can now buy some cards and my memoir A Life Painting Music, if you can find them amongst the Chopin Boards, Victoria Eggs, coffee mugs and toy Ukuleles in the little Gift Shop. 

But as a Birmingham man approaching his eighty-fifth birthday this year, I guess this is one last plea for a professionally curated public retrospective of the original paintings of the Symphony Hall Collection (preferably somewhere in Birmingham), expanded by a selection from the enormous number of my other paintings that bring art and music together - Yehudi Menuhin with Ravi Shankar, Georg Solti, Bernard Haitink conducting Stravinsky's Firebird, paintings of the Netherlands Dance Theater and so on. And hey - what about a painting of the wonderful new Music Director of the CBSO, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla?

Meanwhile, bravo to Classic FM for providing this Link to their online Gallery of a major selection of my work, so that it can be viewed by a global public. Thank you!

The Mahler Experience - Symphony Hall, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 160 cm., 1993

I've written blogs on the making of this Collection and on specific paintings. Just scroll down or go to the search bar (right). More general information and images can be found on my website at www.normanperryman.com.

______________________________________________________________________