Charlie Kirkham

The Dragon Beyond Saint George

George & The Dragon Series

This series started with a visit to Southwark Cathedral, where a panel showing a battling George and the Dragon inspired a drawing and painted copy. Year later, a trip to Coventry Cathedral re-ignited a fascination with the traditional English folklore.

What was it about George and the Dragon that held such long term appeal?

Driving home it seemed like the Dragon had followed me, staring back from the logo of my Takeaway, hovering over movie posters, dancing in fire on computer game cases.

Boiling the kettle it seemed like the steam was the Dragon’s breath reminding me to tell the story. The Dragon was a vanished master, a creature created of magic that once ruler a world where the extraordinary met the everyday.

George, our chivalric hero, seemed to play a strange role. Saving a princess, saving a village but at the cost of the final Dragon leaving the world forever.

The phantom of that lost, last Dragon started to appear in my drawings, piece by piece telling the story of their strange life, death and legacy.

The 21st Century Minotaur

Life after the Labyrinth

“The architecture of the Minotaur’s heart is ancient. Rough hewn and many chambered, his heart is a plodding laborious thing, built for churning through the millennia. But the blood it pumps—the blood it has pumped for five thousand years, the blood it will pump for the rest of his life—is nearly human blood. It carries with it, through his monster’s veins, the weighty, necessary, terrible stuff of human existence: fear, wonder, hope, wickedness, love. But in the Minotaur’s world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it.”
― Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

Inspired by the Steven Sherrill book, this series imagines the Minotaur living int he 21st Century. The Minotaur character mutates into multiples of itself, challenging the binary monochromatic world with it's otherness. In this series of watercolour and ink paintings we join the Minotaur as it tries to make sense of life as an outsider.

SGFA @ Barbican Library

30 members show

5 - 27 February 2020

Thirty members of the Society of Graphic Fine Art show the best of their current work. The Society of Graphic Fine Art is the only national society dedicated to drawing in all forms and mediums. In 1919 the Society came into being at the time of the rise of modernism and the feeling that the traditional drawing skills were no longer needed. The SGFA hopes to be a leading voice in the resurgence of drawing today. Following this show in the Barbican Library, the next Open show will be in July at the Mall Galleries, London.