Colin E Self (born 1941 in
Rackheath,
Norfolk
Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the Nor ...
) is an English
Pop Artist, whose work has addressed the theme of
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...
politics.
As a student at the
Slade School of Fine Art
The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised a ...
from 1961 to 1963 Colin Self received encouragement for his drawings and collages from the artists
David Hockney
David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists o ...
and
Peter Blake. Visits to the United States and Canada in 1962 and 1965 heightened his consciousness of Cold War politics and events such as the
Cuban Missile Crisis and the
CND marches led him to create highly-innovative prints such as Nuclear Bomber No.1 (1963), one of the earliest multiple plate etchings, and paintings such as ‘Waiting Women and Two Nuclear Bombers’ (1962–63). He also explored the relationship between violence and sexual threat in drawings of glamorous models and his iconic ‘Leopard-skin Nuclear Bomber’ sculptures.
Following his trip to the United States in 1965 he produced a series of drawings based on American nuclear fall-out shelters,
Art Deco
Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...
cinema interiors and of hot dogs, which he described as being ‘as important a 20th century development as (say) a rocket.’ His highly personal and distinctive style of drawing led the artist
Richard Hamilton to call him ‘the best draughtsman in England since
William Blake.’ During the 1960s Self showed with the
Robert Fraser Gallery, London. As printmaker, Self has been a great innovator and was a central figure in the 1960s boom in
printmaking. Drawing images from a variety of commercial sources, he created the Power and Beauty series of screenprints (1968) at Editions Alecto while his etching suite Prelude to the 1000 Temporary Objects of Our Time (1970–71) sought to provide a unique record of society in the event of its possible destruction
Suspicious of the commercial art world Self worked in isolation during the 1970s, seeking a sense of solace through the production of atmospheric watercolours and charcoals of the landscapes of his native county Norfolk, and Scotland. From 1972 to 1974 Self worked in collaboration with the German potter Mathies Schwarze at the Töpferei Schwarze Pottery near Cologne, Germany. A trip to the former Soviet Union in 1985-6 provided further stimulus to his explorations of Cold War culture. His collages from the 1980s to the present day combine his interest in
Surrealist juxtaposition and the subconscious, with an inventive visual imagination. Some of these works such as ‘Burning Man Jumping from Building’ (1983) and ‘New York Disaster’ (1998) appear remarkably prescient in the light of events such as the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, while others create lighter, often humorous narratives from found material in everyday life – an extension of the language of Pop art. In 1997 the
Tate Gallery held a show of all its holdings of his work. Since 2000 Self has worked on his ‘Odyssey/Iliad’ suite of etchings, in which the artist has returned to his 1960s technique of multiple-plate etching to re-tell the classical story by Homer using contemporary found-imagery and themes.
A
retrospective of his work entitled 'Colin Self: Art in the Nuclear Age' was held at
Pallant House Gallery in 2008, curated by art historian Simon Martin. Public collections holding work by Colin Self include
Arts Council of Great Britain,
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of t ...
,
Pallant House,
Tate Gallery and
The Priseman Seabrook Collection.
References
External links
Colin Self Interview Part 1
Colin Self Interview Part 2
Colin Self Interview Part 3
{{DEFAULTSORT:Self, Colin
1941 births
Living people
Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art
Alumni of Norwich University of the Arts
People from Broadland (district)
British pop artists
English printmakers