Tony Bennett - Fly Me To The Moon Painting

Prior to attending my degree course I had been experimenting with painting in a cloisonné style not unlike that of Patrick Caulfield and Valerio Adami but using mixed media. At art college I developed this style further by continuing to paint using bold, block colours but now using Liquitex acrylic on canvas and without the black outlines. After graduating in 1982 I continued to paint for a short while and sold a few paintings, but then focussed on a career that involved writing, arranging, performing and teaching music. I returned to painting in 2011 using a similar stripped-down figurative style of painting, but now concentrating on nudes and portraits of my favourite rock, pop and jazz musicians. Conventionally, an artist chats to the sitter whilst their portrait is being created in their presence, resulting in the subject’s personality becoming captured within the image. My portraits are painted to a backdrop of the “sitter’s” music playing, which enables me to encapsulate in a painterly fashion my interpretation of their musical identity. Requests for commissions are most welcome.