Viva Lewes Issue #126 March 2017

THIS MONTH’S COVER ARTIST: RUPERT DENYER
This month’s cover was painted by Lewes-based
artist Rupert Denyer. The scene, which might feel
all too familiar around this time of year, is one he
stumbles upon frequently in his own cellar: “I’ll
normally paint a ‘found’ still life,” he says. “It’s
difficult to set something up without it looking a
bit awkward. Usually I’ll see something, and that’ll
be good enough.” The objects featured include a
collection of his grandfather’s antique tools: “he
used to be a carpenter and he was always interested
in antiques, too - towards the end of his life he
had a stand at Lewes Antiques Centre. When he
died, he had hundreds of old tools, tenon saws and
screwdrivers and drills, and a lot of those were
passed down to me.” Our theme immediately
conjured up the image of a mess of hand tools,
cables and, of course, a cup of tea (look closely and
you’ll see the mug features one of those iconic
Lewes designs from the Tom Paine Printing Press).
“I’m very interested in form,” Rupert says, “I think
that’s why I don’t work from photographs. Going
from one flat surface to another flat surface doesn’t
work for me.”
After studying Graphic Design and Illustration
in London, he went to train at a private atelier
in Florence, where the approach to drawing was
considerably different. “At college I’d had a tutor
who was really good, but brutal. I might spend
six weeks on one drawing and when I showed it
to him he would roll out a sheet of tracing paper
over the top of it and say ‘the perspective isn’t quite
right here’ or ‘this line isn’t right’, and I’d have to
go back and make corrections. So by the time I got
to Italy I was quite tentative. At the atelier there
was no intellectualising of anything, it was a purely
visual process, learning how to create mass, and
that was a really good basis for learning how to
paint in oils.”
His home studio in Lewes is filled with paintings,
from his time living in Italy, to the five months he
spent painting the streets of Lewes, to portraits
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