Artist of the day: Artist of the day, July 22: Humphrey Ocean, a contemporary British painter and Royal Academy Professor of Perspective (#751)

Monday, July 22, 2019

Artist of the day, July 22: Humphrey Ocean, a contemporary British painter and Royal Academy Professor of Perspective (#751)

Humphrey Ocean RA (1951) is a contemporary British painter and Royal Academy Professor of Perspective. He went to Ampleforth College and then spent two years at Tunbridge Wells School of Art, going on to do a Foundation Course at Brighton College of Art and DipAD Painting at Canterbury College of Art.

From 1971 he was bass player with the band Kilburn. They opened for The Who on its Christmas tour in 1973, after which Ocean resigned from music with the notable exception of recording the single "Whoops-a-Daisy".

In 1983, Ocean painted Paul McCartney's portrait as part of the first prize in the 1982 John Player Portrait Award with his painting Lord Volvo and his Estate and the following year painted the poet Philip Larkin's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, a work described by the novelist Nick Hornby as "unanswerable".

In 1988 Ocean travelled to Northern Brazil with the American anthropologist Stephen Nugent, eager to expose colonial caricatures of the region. Their subsequent book, Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks, was published in 1990, and features evocative illustrations of Brazil. In 1999 the National Maritime Museum commissioned Ocean to paint a picture of modern maritime Britain. Throughout the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, Ocean's paintings were exhibited in many of the leading museums in the United Kingdom.

In 2002, Ocean was Artist-in-Residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, culminating in how's my driving, an exhibition linking 17th-century Dutch genre paintings with south London suburbia. That year he was awarded an honorary fellowship by Canterbury College of Art where he had been a student between 1970-1973. In 2009 he worked on an Artangel project Life Class: Today's Nude directed by Alan Kane, shown on Channel 4 television. He also painted Catherine Hughes in her role as principal of Somerville College, Oxford.

In addition to his portrait of Philip Larkin, he is perhaps best known for his iconic etching, Black Love Chair, which appeared on the cover of Paul McCartney's 2007 album Memory Almost Full. This is an image McCartney chose from the series of etchings begun in 2003 when Ocean was working with Maurice Payne in Miankoma Studio in Amagansett, Long Island.

Ocean was elected a Royal Academician in 2004. Since 2012 he has been Royal Academy Professor of Perspective, a position once held by J. M. W. Turner.

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