Cover - Viva Lewes

The Flag (left) and Fireworks by Graham Sendall
Graham Sendall
A Sussex painter with an idealised view of England
The many fans of hyper-local artist Peter Messer
will be interested to pop into a small exhibition in
Pelham House of a Burwash man with a similar – if
not identical – ethos.
Graham Sendall paints stylised-realist scenes of his
village and the surrounding area, of allotments and
churches, country signs and red post boxes. They are
entirely unpeopled, which gives them a slightly eerie
quality, as if they are a slice of a who-knows-how-itmight-end
narrative. Something is about to happen
in them. It’s always quiet… too quiet.
“I work in a different medium from Peter,” says
Graham, fresh from hanging the exhibition in the
hallway of the big hotel. “I use acrylics, and paint
on large three-by-three-foot frames. But there are
similarities to our work, a number of people have
commented on it. We both distort reality, though
in different ways. I move things around. If I don’t
like the position of a tree I’ll move it to the other
side of a building. I’ll alter perspective to make a
better composition. There’s an idealism about my
work. Although none of it is premeditated. It just…
comes out like that. I like paring things down. I’ll rid
a house of its drainpipe, and airbrush passers-by and
road signs from pavements.”
Graham last year was runner up in the coveted Singer
Friedlander/Sunday Times award (with a prize of
£2000) for his painting Big Tree. Having started
painting five years ago, after retiring from a career
in graphic design, he was surprised and flattered by
the honour. “I entered the competition in 2005, and
made it onto the shortlist, which is then exhibited,”
he says. “So I was hoping for a repeat of that when I
entered Big Tree. I was stunned to win a prize.”
He cites another Sussex painter, Eric Ravilious, as
a major influence, and there’s certainly a common
feel to their work. “I was also influenced by the
between-the-war posters that British Rail used to
commission,” he says. “They had a way of taking out
detail, and reducing everything to a simple colour
palette, which was what I was aiming at when I
started out.”
Indeed, much of Sendall’s work has a mid-lastcentury
feel to it. Stepping into the exhibition is
like stepping back in time, to a simpler, more naïve
world, before the streets were clogged with cars,
where the beer was bitterer, and old maids biked
to Holy Communion through the mists of early
morning. V Alex Leith
W W W. V I V A L E W E S . C O M
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