I'm still spending far too much time rummaging around the "Your Paintings" website and as a result I'm stumbling across many artists who have previously passed me by. Today, I want to introduce you to Charles Pears. He was active during the first 50 years of the 20th century and was an illustrator, a marine artist and an official war artist.
The illustration aspect is important; a cleanliness and a graphic quality shines through all his work. He produced a lot of artwork for posters and its easy to see this way of working carrying into his more personal work.
I've picked out this painting because it is startling. It shows a crowd that is both made of individuals and a monolithic entity in its own right. The crowd has a gravity, a slow but inevitable and unstoppable movement as it heads towards the building. The building itself is perhaps more typical of Pears' work, with its simple yet detailed draftsmanship. The mobility of the crowd gives the building a permanence and the relationship between crowd and building is similar to that between sea and ship in his other work. The sky, roof and foreground are constructed from characteristically flat, clean colours.
It was made in 1918 and is about 130cm x 58cm and is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
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