A shadowy practice
Graham Crowley: I Paint Shadows at the Walker Art Gallery | Jodie Comer returns to Liverpool | Latest NW arts news
Two major pieces of theatre news coming out of Liverpool this week - firstly that Jodie Comer will bring the UK tour of her Olivier Award-winning one-woman play Prima Facie to her home city in March 2026 - public booking for the Liverpool Playhouse run opens on Thursday, March 27.
The second is the Epstein Theatre will reopen almost two years after it closed in June 2023 due to Liverpool City Council cutting its funding. Anthony Proctor, the Epstein’s most recent theatre manager and programmer, has returned as general manager and theatre director and promises a full autumn programme of shows. Test events are set to take place over spring and summer, with the official launch being a Gala Night on Friday, September 19 - Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s birthday - with local acts and celebrities.
Against the national backdrop of arts funding cuts and theatres at risk, this is very good news indeed, not least because The Epstein’s closure created a gap that is not filled by Liverpool’s other large city centre theatres - that of literally providing a stage for local community groups. There are other venues in Merseyside that do this of course, but having a such a grand 380-seater theatre slap bang in Liverpool City Centre that supports local community groups in its programme is a major statement about the importance of engagement in the arts for all.
‘I don't want to be on the winning team. I just want to be on my team’
Surprised. Disorientated. Uneasy. Challenged. Thrilled. These are some of the things you might feel during the initial few minutes of stepping inside John Moores Painting Prize 2023 winner Graham Crowley’s exhibition I Paint Shadows.
The first impression is the colour - the police tape yellow and black that we’re used to associating with warnings. The yellow is consistent - cadmium yellow, which is just a touch too bright, too citrus and too unnatural to be comfortable to look at. The black though fades into grey, looming out of the canvas as if the shadows are competing with the yellow brilliance for attention. If the background were painted white, it would not have the same disconcerting effect.
I suddenly thought, ‘crikey, this is really interesting’ - Graham Crowley
Appreciating these works require a new way of seeing - or rather looking, as it’s an active process rather than a passive one. As the exhibition title states, Crowley paints the shadows rather than the objects in the scene: A ladder can be recognised as a ladder through the yellow patches left bare by Crowley’s brush. The legs of a stool are not so much embathed in light as abandoned by shade.
Once you settle into looking at them in this sort of back-to-front fashion, the objects seem to lift out of the canvas behind them, and the paintings begin to make visual sense.
“I’ll tell you what was exciting was the fact that a shadow could fall in such a way as it could describe something that wasn't apparently there, shadows sort of running up walls, for instance,” says Crowley, 75, gesturing at the shadows of two sticks on a door in the piece Workshop: Hastings. “And I suddenly thought, ‘crikey, this is really interesting’.
“So I'm attributing equal weight, if not greater weight, to the shadow. There's a whole load of these paintings of workshops. I don't know what the objects are on the shelf, but I know there's a shadow there.”
What he is aiming for, he now realises thanks to someone’s observation about his John Moores winner Light Industry the other day, is a perfect balance between “the actual configuration and the abstraction to a point where it's right on a razor's edge”.
Crowley’s subjects are scenes familiar to him, which he recalls from memory while working, thinking about where shadows might fall. He often paints a location multiple times, using a wet-on-wet process more often practised by abstract painters. He first covers the whole canvas with cadmium yellow, which is left to dry. Then he covers the whole surface with liquid resin, which he paints into while it is still wet. Sometimes, he masks area of the canvas, such as areas which will represent windows, before applying the resin.
“By virtue of being wet into wet, it means that you have to work quickly. Once it's dry, it doesn't work. But it took me 50 years to find out how to do it. If I'd known how to do it straight away, that painting would have won the prize 50 years earlier,” says Crowley, who won on his 10th attempt.
Creating a style that subverts our ‘normal’ way of seeing, fits his pattern. Crowley has never quite felt like a natural piece of the art world, or as he puts it: “That I've got the wrong bus.”
He left Essex, where he grew up, for St Martin's School of Art in 1968, when for “the first time there was a different kind of model of reality, if you like, or set of aspirations”.
“I suddenly thought, oh, I'll have some of that, because what's going on around here is just absolutely awful,“ he says. “I mean, we're talking about doilies that went over toilet rolls and lavatories with a fluffy lid.”
But amidst the thrilling potential for change - the seed bed of feminism, of environmentalism, of gay rights - he discovered art school had its own stuffiness, its own snobberies around what students should be producing. Conceptual art was what it was all about - painting, it was thought, had had its day. So of course Crowley was immediately drawn to it.
“Painting was regarded as countercultural. And I thought, this is really interesting,” he says. “There was the hegemony of painting, as it was always referred to, and then sort of this decline in its credibility. And then gradually thinking, no, hold on, that's what interests me. I don't want to be on the winning team. I just want to be on my team.”
Graham Crowley: I Paint Shadows is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until Sunday, July 13.
Latest arts news
🎒 Rita, Sue & Bob Too will end its nationwide tour with a four-night residency at the Liverpool Olympia next month. Starring X Factor, I’m a Celebrity and Dancing on Ice star Jake Quickenden, it will run from from Wednesday, April 9 to Saturday, April 12.
☀️ Helios, a 7m-diameter illuminated sculpture of the sun, is the latest Luke Jerram creation to visit Liverpool Cathedral. Catch it from Friday, April 4 to Friday, May 9.
📢 Holly Graham, Manchester Art Gallery’s artist in residence, has created new work inspired by the organisation’s archives and collections, exploring the legacies of expansionism, colonialism and exploitative labour involved in the history of the cotton industry. It includes a Victorian style cotton printed costume, modelled on the silhouette of a dress worn by African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond. Remond, who visited Manchester in 1859 to deliver an anti-slavery speech in the Athenaeum, which now forms part of Manchester Art Gallery’s footprint.
In case you missed it
Now booking
Disney in Concert: The Sound of Magic will tour to Manchester Bridgewater Hall and Liverpool Philharmonic Hall in spring 2026, with music from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Moana, Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Frozen, The Lion King, Fantasia, Encanto, Beauty and the Beast, and more performed by a symphony orchestra.
Last chance to see
Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine, starring Helen Carter, has been extended at the Liverpool Everyman until Saturday, April 5. Read my ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review.
One for the family
Two larger-than-life history professors and a live musician make new tales from the unhinged minds of the audience in The Story Forge: Make Your Own Myth.
A co-production between the award-winning Rubbish Shakespeare Company and comedic podcasters the Silly History Boys, it promises to be a high-octane adventure, told through their distinctive fusion of clowning, silly storytelling, physical comedy and live music.
Find it at Unity Theatre, Liverpool, on Saturday, April 5 and at The Atkinson, Southport, on Thursday, April 17.
Thank you for reading the 124th edition of Stored Honey. If you enjoyed what you read then please hit the ❤️ button as it helps to get it shown more widely.
I’m off now to the Williamson Art Gallery to listen to Angela Samata talk about ‘outsider art’ in the first of three free talks organised by Wirral Arts & Culture Community Land Trust (of which I’m a board member). In the meantime, you can get hold of me on Instagram, on Bluesky, in the comments or by replying to this email.
Have a great week,
Laura
P.S. Remember the artist who painted Eric Cantona as a resurrected Roman?