Graham Kershaw was born in York in 1977. It was while a pupil at St Peter's School that he realised a facility for drawing and painting the figure, and particularly for achieving a likeness. He began to focus more on his art in sixth form, putting together a portfolio and gaining a place at Edinburgh University in 1995, to study for an MA in Fine Art. For his third year of the five year course he managed to fight off strong competition to spend the year at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was here that he gained a greater insight on what becoming a professional artist meant. He spent the remaining two years at Edinburgh exploring other aspects of artistic creation - particularly mapping images onto three-dimensional constructions - before returning to more traditional figurative painting on graduation.

After university Graham moved to Malvern and subsequently to Ledbury, Herefordshire, where he became Resident Portrait Artist at Shell House Gallery. Duties also included all aspects of commercial gallery work as well as picture framing. Over the three and a half years he spent at the gallery he successfully completed many private commissions and held frequent shows of his portraits, as well as exhibitions of his still life paintings. He works in oils on canvas and also in pencil.

In the spring of 2002, during a brief break in commissions, Graham came up with the idea of the "Poetraits" project - to paint a series of celebrated contemporary British poets, who would in turn compose a poem in response to their portraits. The project was completed by the summer of 2003 and launched as part of the Ledbury Poetry Festival at the gallery in July of that year. The show then embarked on an extended tour of the country, from Torquay to Edinburgh, taking in a total of 13 venues and touring until April 2005. The project was a great success and marked the first of a series of such projects. (For more information about this and other projects click on the green projects button below.)

Graham left Shell House Gallery at the end of 2003 and moved to Birmingham in March 2004 to further the development of his career. He got a part time job in a city centre cheese shop, continued working on private commissions and undertook another project, "Welcome to Birmingham". This time the subjects were eight students from St. George's Community College in the north of the city, and the exhibition was shown as part of Celebrating Sanctuary Week in June. Graham cast the hands of each student and displayed them below their portraits to encourage physically meeting them, which he felt an important part of the welcoming process. This project too was a real success and went on display at St Martin's in the Bullring in the Centre of Birmingham, and then on to the college as part of Black History Month (October).

More recently Graham has worked on an extension of the "Poetraits" project, which, in collaboration with Poetry Central, was expanded within the Midlands into a grander concept to include workshops and competitions among the general public, and particularly schools, producing a larger exhibition of portraits and responses to represent the region. He produced six further portraits of Midlands-based poets to act as inspiration for this development, and the ensuing exhibition went on tour around Birmingham libraries and local Midlands literary festivals.

In June 2005 Graham gave up his part time work at the cheese shop in order to concentrate entirely on commissions and projects. One such commission led to a trip to Rome to hang the resultant portrait in the library of the Venerable English College. (See the "Commissions" page by clicking on the yellow "C" button below for more information on this and other commissions.)

2005 also saw the production of the "Warm Fronts" project - Graham's most ambitious project to date which involved painting 12 regional and national weather presenters for a charity calendar. (Details can be found on the "Projects" page.)
In early 2006 Graham was commissioned by Birmingham City Council to paint portraits of the 10 past Birmingham Poet Laureates, five of whom were part of the Midlands "Poetraits" project above. The images and supporting exhibition were completed over the summer, and went on display at the Central library in Birmingham to coincide with National Poetry Day and the inauguration of the eleventh Laureate. (For details of the project and the exhibition tour see the "Projects" page.)

During 2006 Graham also continued to take on private commissions, to do further demonstrations to groups of artists and took on some private tutoring. On top of this he went back into working part time at a city centre framers, in order to bring some stability and structure back into his life - something which he felt had been missing over the previous year of total self-employment.

2007 saw Graham consolidate his various interests further. His "Laureate Poetraits" continued their successful tour around the Midlands, and his reputation continued to grow with each commission. In June he took over the management of the framing workshop, still working part time in order to keep his focus on the priorities of his developing career. His style began to crystallize, influenced by the lessons learned from his project work. The experiences of painting the later portraits in the "Laureates" series signalled a break from necessarily acknowledging the parameters of the canvas, beyond its determining the general format of the composition. This was to enable a focus on creating a balanced image, with equal attention therefore being paid to the dabs, shapes and colours of paint towards the fragmented extremes as to those of the obvious focal point. (This development was reinforced during the production of the accompanying catalogue to the "Laureates" exhibition. When reproducing the images - themselves on a white background - onto a white page the canvas edge disappeared completely, leaving the shape of the painted image to stand alone.) Other work included a commission to design the new logo for the Birmingham centre for UK NEQAS - a chemical quality assessment company - based on the Bullring bull in Birmingham city centre (see the "Commissions" page for details). The wind orchestra, in which he plays trumpet, toured to both Germany and Southern Ireland, and he joined the Birmingham Running and Triathlon club with the intention of completing his first triathlon in 2008.

2008 marks the beginning of preparation for another ambitious project based on the "Poetraits" theme but turning the spotlight onto poets whose focuses lie in live performance. (Details to follow on the "Projects" page as and when the project is born.) Graham has a number of commissions already lined up for the early part of the year and further demonstrations of his technique booked. With a little luck and a lot of hard work Graham anticipates this coming year being an important one in the story of his creative life.