19 Facts About Clive Head

Clive Head was born on 1965 and is a painter from Britain.

Clive Head had a precocious talent in art and at the age of 11 attended Reeds Art Club, a social club organised at his father's factory.

In 1994 Clive Head founded and became the Chair of the Fine Art Department at the University of York's Scarborough Campus, where he again teamed up with Steve Whitehead, and became friends with the art theorist and Clive Head of Art History Michael Paraskos.

Clive Head then moved on to producing urban realist paintings, closer in theme and style to the work he had made as an art student in Aberystwyth.

In 1999 Head gave up teaching and signed to Blains Fine Art in London and with the gallery run by the founder of the Photorealist art movement, Louis K Meisel Fine Art in New York, even though Head was not, even in Meisel's eyes, a Photorealist painter.

Nonetheless, the connection with Meisel led to Clive Head being included in several editions of Meisel's survey books on Photorealist painting, particularly in the sections dealing with contemporary painters whom Meisel suggested had moved beyond old-fashioned Photorealism.

Also stemming from the connection with Meisel, in 2003 Clive Head joined Michael Paraskos in taking part in The Prague Project the first of a series of group visits by figurative painters to different cities around the world, out of which paintings were produced for a group exhibition.

In 2005 Clive Head was commissioned by the Museum of London to produce a painting of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

However, 2005 Clive Head was debilitated by a neurological disease that had a devastating effect on his muscles.

Stylistically Clive Head is almost unique in contemporary British art in the way he has developed a highly personal language of art that is focused very specifically on painting.

Clive Head's starting point for any painting is to stand in a specific location, such as the entrance to a London Underground station or a coffee shop, where he will gather information by sketching, photographing or simply experiencing the scene.

One of the primary differences between Clive Head's painted realities and the reality of everyday life lies in the way space is defined.

In earlier works Clive Head used a realist language of painting to render his experience into something coherent and whole.

In interviews Clive Head has always insisted that the language of realism he uses is not the same as the language of photography, and it is true that his paintings do not resemble photographs.

Indeed, Clive Head has been consistently critical of the futility of painters copying photographs.

Clive Head has stated he 'rejects the Modernist fragmentation and instead seek a seamless surface.

In terms of subject matter, Clive Head tends towards urban scenes, particularly London, although he has painted New York, Moscow, Los Angeles, Prague, Rome and Paris, amongst other places.

The most straightforward example of predetermined imagery is photography, but for Clive Head it is not the use of photography itself that is the problem, it is the adoption of the predetermined, or imposed, language of the photograph by the painter.

Notably Clive Head opposes other, non-photographic, solutions to pictorial problems where those solutions are predetermined, such as systemic art and contemporary Salon Painting.