Patrick Caulfield

1. B Watch me eat, without appetite, â la carte, 1973.*
2. Bathroom mirror, 1968.
3. I've only the friendship of hotel rooms.
4. T Ah! storm clouds rushed from the Channel coasts.*
*From Some Poems of Jules Laforgue,

http://www.patrickcaulfieldprints.com/

'No artist of his generation has contemplated the comedy of life with greater intelligence, wit or courage than Patrick Caulfield.'—Mel Gooding, art historian.

Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005).

"In 1956 he started at Chelsea School of Art, initially doing graphic design then switching to fine art and trying abstract expressionism for a bit. At the Royal College of Art, he developed the essentials of the synthetic handling that was to be his permanent way of painting. Caulfield always winced and bridled at being labelled a pop artist. He saw himself, he said, as "a 'formal' artist". Painting in oils on board, he produced images that Hogarth would have commended as worthy of being displayed as pub signs: paintings with conventionally romantic titles (Battlements, View of the Ruins, Bend in the Road) displaying a taste for cutting the crap and appreciating, besides Gris - the subject of a splendid manifesto-type portrait in 1963 - the Tintin comic strips."

"His paintings are substantiated by wily observation and deadpan wit. The paintings absorbed banalities: the painter rendered them worthy, memorable, cherishable even, as emblems of modern life. They brilliantly encapsulate the ways we are seduced by habit, the way things mutely communicate."—William Feaver.