PRESS RELEASE

Abstract and Non Figurative Work

- A Different Challenge

The London Sketch Club

- Spring Exhibition

Thursday 21st March 2013

- 6.30pm until 9.30pm

Saturday 23rd March 2013

- 1pm until 5pm

7 Dilke Street, London SW3 4JE

www.londonsketchclub.com

Image: Frank Phelan, 'Kite'

acrylic and charcoal 101.5 x 137cm

Background: The London Sketch Club has always been the home of professional graphic artists.

It has three exhibitions a year, a comfortable mix of figures, landscapes and the decorative

commercial pictures of its professional and lay member painters.

In an unusual break with tradition, in honour of its current President, the distinguished Irish artist

Frank Phelan, it is showing only abstract work by its members.

If you are interested in some exploratory and subtle non representational work, and how these

generally conservative painters react to a very different challenge please come to the open

evening - 21.3.2013 at 6.30pm - This is also a rare opportunity to visit this historic artists' club.

History: The London Sketch Club was formed as a result of a ridiculous row between factions at

the Langham Club, another sketching club, which started life in 1830 as the Artists’Society in

Grays Inn Road. Arthur Rackham, Sir John Tenniel, Charles Keene and others were happy to have

bread and cheese with beer in the evenings. However, there was a bunch of ‘

wanted something more substantial after slaving in a cold studio all day. These included Dudley

Hardy, Lance Thackeray, Robert Sauber, Tom Browne and Cecil Aldin, all fine artists, who wanted

HOT food. So they left en masse in 1898 to form their own club and were soon joined by the great

black and white illustrators, Phil May, Bert Thomas, Frank Reynolds and Harry Rountree, John

Hassall, the ‘

, H M Bateman, who did ‘

Heath Robinson, ‘

, his brother Charles, and another ‘

Dulac.

The Club has been meeting every Tuesday evening since then, through two World Wars, to paint

or sketch, followed by food and wine, and neither the format, nor the aims of the Club, has

changed in over 112 years. In the intervening years, such luminaries as James Pryde, one half of

the Beggerstaff Brothers, George Studdy, creator of Bonzo the Dog, Afred Leete, of ‘

Needs You’ fame, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A P Herbert, and, more

recently, Sir Peter Blake, the cartoonists, Jak, Mac, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, have

passed through the dark green door off Tite Street in Chelsea. The Club thrives today, with a

membership comprising professional artists, illustrators, cartoonists, architects and musicians,

who meet every Tuesday for life drawing followed by hot food.

upstarts’who

Poster King’

The Man Who . . . ’series of cartoons, William

The Gadget King’

fairy’painter, Edmund

Your Country