GRAHAM KERSHAW
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BIOGRAPHY

Graham Kershaw was born in York in 1977. After realizing a talent for capturing a likeness while at school he went on to study for an MA in Fine Art at Edinburgh University and Art College. The third year of his course he was awarded a place on the North American Exchange scheme, attending the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

On graduation he became Artist in Residence at Shell House Gallery in Ledbury, over which time he learned picture framing, which has proved to be a useful associated skill over the years since. He also undertook his first big project, "Poetraits" - producing a touring exhibition of portraits of a dozen celebrated British poets which were shown alongside specially written poems by each. This proved to be a great success, reaching 13 venues across the country from Torquay to Edinburgh. It also suggested the balance of private and public commissions with annual substantial projects that Graham would continue to undertake.
In March 2004 he moved from Ledbury to Birmingham in order to continue the development of his career as a portrait artist. Further commissions and projects followed, including "Welcome to Birmingham" (2004) "Spaghetti Poetraits" (2005) "Warm Fronts" (2006) and "Birmingham Laureate Poetraits" (2007) - a public commission from Birmingham City Council to create a commemorative exhibition of "Poetraits" of the 10 city's Poets Laureate to date.
His many other commissions over this period included a painting of Sir Edward Elgar, commissioned by the English Symphony Orchestra, to be used as the official image for the 2004 Elgar Festival; a portrait of Mgr Patrick Kilgarriff, which now hangs in the Venerable English College Library in Rome; and a portrait of Derek Seymour, former Headmaster of Bloxham School in Oxfordshire.
2008 was dominated by the painting of a large 20-person dinner party group portrait - a scene which Graham composed by picturing each of the subjects separately and compiling them together in the finished imaginary work. It was also in 2008 that Graham began experimenting with a kind of animation. This evolved from his wanting to modify the "Poetraits" idea to better suit performance poetry, and with the addition of an audio track featuring the subject poet reading their poem it became apparent that the painting itself would also have to fit a time-line. Hence Graham began photographing each portrait as he painted it, later animating this stream of images together and co-ordinating them with the audio. This produced a remarkably effective whole - a product he has come to term a "Revelation".
Graham had a portrait accepted into the Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition in May 2009, and also received a grant from the Arts Council to produce a series of six "Midlands Performance Poetraits", to be shown as part of Birmingham Book Festival in October. As well as continuing to receive commissions (notably his first commissioned "Revelation"), he began experimenting with a live version of the "Performance Poetraits" concept. He spent the summer in New York, having arranged to paint 5 New York based performance poets. They then composed their response poems and, along with the 6 Midlands based ones, these became a live event at the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe, Manhattan in January 2010, which proved a great success.
Immediately after the success of the New York event Graham spent 4 weeks in the Dominican Republic, where he learnt Spanish and began a new project focussing on the annual La Vega Carnival, which will combine developing images of the Carnival mask-wearers with specially composed Dominican music. In September he spent 4 weeks in California collecting the source images for a West Coast version of the "Performance Poetraits" project.
2011 has seen Graham continue to develop his portfolio showcasing the "Revelations" technique in a variety of evolving ways. The big step forward has been to introduce the animations into videos - at first in a relatively simple way, but soon in more complex and involved scenarios which have meant figuring out new technologies and considering filming methods and storyboards. He had one such video "Revelation" accepted in to the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists annual open portrait exhibition in May, and in September received his first public commission for a video "Revelation" from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. This proved a great success and Graham hopes it is the first of many more to come.