Press Release for Streetlife Serenade: 30 Years of Painting City Life Ed Gray at The House of Annetta

Press Release

Streetlife Serenade: 30 Years of Painting City Life

Ed Gray at the House of Annetta

25 Princelet Street E16QH

July 4 – July 20

Mondays & Tuesdays 11am-5pm

Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays 11am-8pm

Free tours for schools and local community groups by appointment

Archive: www.edgrayart.com

Contact: info@edgrayart.com  07914919778

Artist’s statement:

Thirty years ago, I left the creative chaos of art college in Cardiff to return to my home city of London. I knew I wanted paint people, that’s what I’d always done, ever since I began to draw. Colour drew me in at first, palettes so pleasing they made me hungry, but soon I was moved by the wisdom and wit within Charles Schulz’s Peanuts’ perfect line drawings and the concise graphic narratives and skilfully rendered reportage of Herge’s reporter Tintin, boosted by a side order of anarchic capers in my Whizzer and Chips comics of course. One day my dad showed me a book of 18^th century London painter William Hogarth’s work. I didn’t understand the layered Georgian narratives in Hogarth’s scenes back then, but I recognised the Londoners romping, raving and roving through his clustered scenes. In Cardiff I’d begun to paint fish markets and caffs, learning to befriend and persuade fishmongers and caff owners that I’d be no bother and keep out of their way as I drew. I tried to learn to be bold enough to stand in the street and draw faces, finding ways to capture flitting and fleeting urbanites, to capture character in a few strokes with only a few seconds’ observation. I was learning to hold a stare, to avoid confrontation, to blend and be a part of the street, to be visibly invisible, but most of all I was learning to be present enough to really look.

In 1996 I left my studio in a squat on the old Kent Road, pacing self-consciously up and down the ancient highway, trying to find a way to draw what I thought I was seeing. It was another five years before I felt able to venture into the city with my sketchbook and pencils and really begin to sketch life of the city. I cast my net in different city streams and brought my haul back to a bedroom in Brixton, fileting my drawings to piece together moment, memory, echoes and rework all these elements into a canvas. In a few years I was in another studio, Success House in the old W H Cornelius Toy factory on the Old Kent Road, working all kinds of jobs to fund my painting habit, before training to become an art teacher. I took a job in a secondary school in Peckham in 1999, the start of a 26-year career in art education. 15 years later I managed to make a painting that said all I felt I could say about the Old Kent Road, for now.https://www.edgrayart.com/gallery/london/south-london/old-kent-road-adoration-of-thomas-a-becket/

House of Annetta, a place of wonder, mystery, disconnection and connection, absence and presence, a true place of contradictions- an empty house filled with the absence of Annetta herself, and the weight of unknowable stories of the vanished communities who once lived there. Its present-day incarnation is now brim-full with stories of present communities.

This exhibition Streetlife Serenade features narrative paintings of London life loaned from collectors from my thirty-year career, and paintings of New York, Tokyo and Bangkok, with street drawings and some prints of highlights from along the way. In addition, there are two large new paintings about London communities being exhibited for the first time. The first, Remembrance, West Lane War Memorial Rotherhithe (2025)https://www.edgrayart.com/gallery/london/south-london/remembrance-west-lane-war-memorial-rotherhithe/ is about the motionless silence of loss, tribalism, sacrifice, conflict and ritual, and the second, Triumph of Shoreditch, Shoreditch High Street Train Station (2024)https://www.edgrayart.com/gallery/london/east-end/triumph-of-shoreditch-shoreditch-high-street-overground-station/ is about the vital call of the roaring city and the unrehearsed choreography of the street in response – the eternal dance of life that leads us onwards.

Ed Gray, Rotherhithe 2025