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An Artist's Life in London

My Town

David Gentleman has lived in London for almost seventy years, most of it on the same street. This book is a record of a lifetime spent observing, drawing and getting to know the city, bringing together work from across his whole career, from his earliest sketches to watercolours painted just a few months ago. Here is London as it was, and as it is today: the Thames, Hampstead Heath; the streets, canals, markets and people of his home of Camden Town; and at the heart of it all, his studio and the tools of his work. Accompanied by reflections on the process of drawing and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a celebration of London, and the joy of noticing, looking and capturing the world.

David Gentleman is a painter and printmaker, working in many mediums. He has designed British postage stamps and coins, and the platform-length mural, blown up from his wood engravings, well-known to Londoners, at Charing Cross on the underground. His studio is at the top of an early Victorian house in Camden Town between the crowded, rackety Camden Lock and the green spaces of Regent's Park and Primrose Hill.

David Gentleman has lived in London for almost seventy years, most of it on the same street. This book is a record of a lifetime spent observing, drawing and getting to know the city, bringing together work from across his whole career, from his earliest sketches to watercolours painted just a few months ago. 
 
Here is London as it was, and as it is today: the Thames, Hampstead Heath; the streets, canals, markets and people of his home of Camden Town; and at the heart of it all, his studio and the tools of his work. Accompanied by reflections on the process of drawing and personal thoughts on the ever-changing city, this is a celebration of London, and the joy of noticing, looking and capturing the world. 
 
'David has spent a lifetime depicting with wit and affection a London he has made his own' Alan Bennett 
 
 'He delivers a poetry of exultant concentration ... The surface fusion of the sensuous and the sharply modern is echoed by Gentleman's imagery' Guardian 
 
 'The artist and illustrator has been responsible for some of the most-seen public artworks in this country' The Times 
 
 'Perhaps the last of the great polymath designer-painters' Camden New Journal

David Gentleman

Over seventy years of quintessential London views in one box 
 
In 1950, aged 19, David Gentleman arrived in the capital, ready to begin his life as an artist. Over the next seven decades, he would sketch, paint, and engrave his way through London, documenting the cityscape, and shaping it, too - most notably through his iconic mural in Charing Cross Underground Station. 
 
Combining world-famous imagery with unexpected scenes of daily life in the city, this box of London artworks is a treasure trove for all those who flock to the capital. 
 
'David Gentleman is London's visual laureate' Quentin Blake

David Gentleman

London Postcards

Summary

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