Art's on the menu as Tom goes back to basics with three courses
ARTIST Tom Newell only moved away from Sheffield because his girlfriend got a job in London but he soon found his feet in the capital.
He soon began contributing to fashion and arts mag Dazed and Confused and through that was commissioned by fashion designer John Richmond to accessorise a new store in Paris.
He has also designed for record company Moshi Moshi on material for the band Slow Club, including a poster for the label's showcase at the SXSW event in Austin, Texas.
"Though Sheffield has always been the centre of my universe since I began jumping on the train from Chesterfield where I grew up, I was pleasantly surprised by London. There's a different vibe down there, a wider audience," he says.
But Newell remains a presence in Sheffield and has an exhibition of his work currently on show at the Forum caf bar in the Devonshire Quarter.
Themed around food and culinary stuff appropriate for its setting in a caf bar, he has called it Hollow Legs – "it's something my mother was always saying."
The wall-based pieces are divided between starters on plates, main courses on boards and sweets on mirrors. "I work straight on to the material in pencil and paint. I like to work things through, it's an organic way of working," he says.
He has also recently completed a commission to celebrate the launch of the Chimney House at Kelham Island, a newly restored building with a 93ft chimney running through it.
Newell illustrated the section which runs through the Meeting Room, a new venue for events and business gatherings, with a story from the history of the building.
It features Sarah the elephant, a permanent resident of the site when it was Sheffield Rolling Mills, who was used as the forerunner of a fork lift truck in the mills. Sarah is shown powering a cog which in turn generates a flood of water from a tap from which three salmon are shown leaping across the chimney.
This depicts the three-fish payment system – in which workers of the steel and rolling mills had permission to take three fish home with them at the end of each week from the waterway outside the Chimney House to help supplement their small weekly wages.
In keeping with the Chimney House's ethos of furnishing the building with locally-sourced materials, Newell used paint from Stokes and brushes from Pinders.
The Chesterfield-born artist is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University. "While I was doing Fine Art at Psalter Lane I did mostly conceptual work and it was only when I came out of that I returned to the basic drawing I had done as a kid," he explains. "It has always been there since drawing on the front of my maths books and doodling.
"I got back into it because I was in a band, The Carol-Anne Showband, and we needed flyers and posters. The excuse to draw things in this way was to promote our gigs and then I was asked to do posters and CD covers for other bands.
"I also decorated the walls of Syd & Mallory's Boutique at the Forum and really began to develop a visual style that I was happy with and other people seemed to like."
The next logical step was to move on to producing his own comic, entitled Pictorial Showboat. "My work was always character-based and to have a sense of humour although with a sinister side to it."
A lot of his designs are based on music and its sub-cultures such as skateboarding.
In Sheffield prints of his work are available via the Archipelago gallery on Sidney Street, for whom he produced his Goodship Sheffield prints and carrier bags. He says he is open for individual commissions such as making personalised plates like the ones in Hollow Legs to order.
He operates via his website, tomjnewell.com, inserting his middle initial after discovering the domain name tomnewell.com had been claimed by a lobster fisherman.
Hollow Legs continues at the Forum until May 9.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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