Second Thoughts About a Second Lockdown Home Haircut – Self Portrait No 2

Acrylic on canvas
45cm x 30cm

Born in Liverpool in 1948 and educated at Bourneville and Swansea Colleges of Art. Taught art, beginning at Hylton Red House school, Sunderland, rising to Head of Department at three London comprehensive schools – Enfield Chace, Enfield; Creighton, Muswell Hill and Highgate Wood, Crouch End. Worked since 1988 to date as an artist/ decorator specialising in the applied arts of painted woodgrain and marble, broken colour finishes, trompe l’oeil and murals.

Solo exhibitions at the Tabernacle Gallery, Powis Square, Notting Hill and The Custard Factory, Birmingham, showing my portraits of British jazz musicians. Painitngs recently shown in the open exhibitions of the Hampstead Art Society and Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.

Early in career worked as an illustrator for newspapers football programmes.

This painting is the second in a series of three self portraits about one trivial consequence of the Covid lockdown, home haircuts. The first two paintings deal with the prospect of my wife inflicting her lack of haircutting skills upon me, and the third records a welcome return to the hairdresser. They were an attempt to help deal with the overwhelming sense of sadness and loss brought about by the Covid epidemic which had a devastating affect on many families and friends.

I have a strong link with Liverpool art through the work of my grandfather, Robert Blackburn. He was a student at the Liverpool Universirty Department of Applied Arts, also known as The Art Sheds. Together with fellow students of the sculptor C.J.Allen he played a significant role in the creation of the Victoria monument in Derby Square. Robert, who exhibited regularly at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool and other galleries in northern England, died tragically young at the age of 30 in 1910.