My Private View of Silent Sentinels proved a great success, and I am very grateful to everyone for making it so. Forty people attended in the end, and I sold 12 pictures which I’m delighted with!
The venue was superb, the perfect balance of a clean white room with the black exhibition stands set the pictures off very well with their white mounts and black frames.
All my favourite friends and family were there, along with some clients and people from the art circuit in Essex. There were a lot of questions about the concept and inspiration for the exhibition and these were hard to answer as each shoot had at least 50 photographs, I ended up taking thousands but exhibited only 28.
The mixture of colours, formats and subjects were driven by the seasons; its been truly amazing enjoying even the coldest of days out shooting, with images such as Autumn Dawn and Winter Home being some of my favourites.
Lloyd Price’s composition ‘Somewhere Safe’ was the most perfect soundtrack for the video of the wider works, we even did a session with him and his synthesisers and Mac on top of one of the Pillboxes. For this, he is honoured with the title ‘Sentinel’ in gratitude.
People wrote some really nice comments in the guest book, I particularly liked Victor’s as he had played in Pillboxes as a boy, which were in fact German ones as he grew up in France – amazing.
I’m so pleased to have held the Private View and I’m looking forward to the exhibition which runs at Central Gallery Southend from 23rd September to 13th October. I’ll definitely hold another, now what to choose as a concept next?
Thanks to Andy Flatman & Tony Felgate for these great photos.