Michael Upton (1938)
United Kingdom

"Michael Upton was born in Birmingham, studied at the Birmingham College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools, during his career he won a number of awards, including the Leverhulme Scholarship in 1960 and the Abbey Scholarship in 1962, which enabled him to spend a year at the British School in Rome. He was a visiting lecturer at a number of British Art Colleges and from 1981 he taught post-graduate painting at the Royal Academy Schools.

During the 1960s Upton exhibited with the London Group and was included in a number of important group shows. By 1972 he was included in ‘A Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain’ at the Hayward Gallery. At that time Upton was known principally for his conceptual work—mixed media installations, videos and performances, on which he often collaborated with Peter Lloyd-Jones. These works were chiefly concerned with time and change, and they were shown at the Whitechapel, the Serpentine and the ICA Galleries in London. He never entirely abandoned painting however. Although in his student days at the Royal Academy Schools Upton engaged in brief flirtations with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, movements that were then dominating the art world in London, he swiftly returned to working on a much smaller scale with which he always seemed more comfortable. Upton’s paintings were often executed in muted tones, carefully, even painstakingly, placed one against another. He often chose to paint still life groups that included some of the same objects that he used as props in his performances and these compositions were sometimes repeated several times, producing small series of paintings that are somewhat reminiscent of film stills. These works too were concerned with change. In an interview in 1981 he said, I use multiple images of the same subject to heighten the slightest changes within the remaking of the same image. The viewing of slight changes in an object can lead to an awareness of the phenomenon of CHANGE in everything. The scrutiny of these changes can heighten the relationship of the viewer to the object, perhaps even increasing marginally the viewing time of an individual object over its average 2 seconds. The small scale of the works (intimacy) can increase this rapport.

Upton’s move to Mousehole in the early 1990s, with his friend, Sally Fleetwood, was therefore watched with interest by friends in London to see how he would engage with or seek to subvert the traditions of painting on the peninsular. Previously very much an urban artist in terms of his inspiration, to their surprise his subject became the landscape of Cornwall and his approach was marked by the same considered placement of paint in small planes of colour, one next to another. But for the first time Upton, by then very ill with diabetes, found a new freedom in his use of colour and his Cornish paintings are celebrations of the swiftly changing light across the cliffs and hills, of the bustling ports of Newlyn and Mousehole and the woods of Lamorna. "

(Source, website, Messum)

Work :

• Scrutiny (1974)