Dreweatts, Pippa Middleton, and a host of acclaimed artists join forces to raise funds for deaf children across the UK

Dreweatts are proud to be hosting this truly exceptional Charity Auction, in collaboration with Pippa Middleton, Sophie Ryder, the Mary Hare School and over 25 esteemed and upcoming artists to raise essential funds for a new Mary Hare Primary School for deaf children across the UK. "I am delighted to be involved with this auction of art that has been brought together by Dreweatts Auctioneers and Mary Hare School... I am full of admiration for the range and calibre of the pieces to be sold and I hope you will find something that inspires you to support this cause." - Pippa Middleton, Ambassador Mary Hare School.

Bid for Art to Change Lives

This life changing charity auction, taking place at 7.30pm on Monday 2 September 2019 at Donnington Priory, Newbury, will be an evening to remember as Pippa opens proceedings and these exceptional works donated by a host of acclaimed artists are auctioned live and online. Having discovered just how much the school and staff transform the lives of profoundly deaf children, Dreweatts invite you to view and bid for a work of art that will not only be truly special to own, but the money raised will change the lives and prospects of deaf children across the UK.

We could not agree with Pippa more wholeheartedly when she says "This auction is part of our appeal to raise enough funds to build a brand new Primary School for the pupils. I hope you will want to be part of this exciting and important project."

The full collection can be viewed online but to whet appetites please see a few highlights below -  including works by the children - due to go under the hammer on this magical evening.

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Learn more and watch the video about The Mary Hare School Story 

Sophie Ryder - RA Celebrated Sculptor Transports Us To Another World

“There is little doubt that 20th and 21st century British sculpture has been one of the defining forces of contemporary art. Sophie Ryder has been one of the most original forces contributing to the tradition” is what Peter Murray CBE, Founding and Executive Director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park says about Sophie.

The youngest student after Turner to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts, and an international artist with works showcased in major outdoor exhibitions across the globe, Sophie Ryder’s world is one of animal and mystical creatures constructed from wet plaster, old machine parts, scavenged toys, tangled wire, torn scraps of paper and acid baths. Her hybrid beings are steeped in mythology and cultural symbolism and yet at once they are tender and self-aware, resonating on an immediate and human level.

Used to working ‘big’ and renowned for revelling in all the challenges such ambition brings, with this piece Sophie has scaled down and as a result presents us with the exquisite, more petite Maryhare. As with each Lady Hare that Ryder evokes, Maryhare is an anthropomorphic counterpart to the Minotaur of Greek mythology. With her hare’s head and a human body based on Ryder’s own, she immediately takes on a deeper and more personal significance that both amplifies that mystical connection we can experience when engaging with the animal world, and also reminds us of the wonderfully blurred lines and definitions within us all. 

Jonathan Yeo - From Attenborough to Kidman, Bush to Blair, Hirst to Delevingne, Own a Piece by One of the World's Leading Figurative Artists

Born in London in 1970, Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists. He has painted and worked with iconic and celebrated figures including Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, actors Dennis Hopper, Nicole Kidman and Idris Elba, artists Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry, supermodel and actor Cara Delevingne, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and has produced official commissions of HRH The Duke of Edinburgh and HRH The Duchess of Cornwall which now hangs at Clarence House and within the Royal Collection.

His work has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries around the world and has been the subject of several major mid-career retrospectives in the UK and internationally. Entirely self-taught, Yeo rose to prominence as a figurative painter by the age of thirty following several major official commissions, such as that of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, at a time when painting generally, and portraiture in particular, had fallen out of fashion.

His collage of George Bush in 2007, however, earned his reputation as someone known for both traditional and experimental portraiture. Along with his Collage Series, Yeo has explored more conceptual themes in his series of paintings looking at cosmetic surgery and increasingly his portraits are addressing wider concepts and themes within the paintings’ narrative.

David Gray – Acclaimed Musician on Liverpool Art College Days & Painting Pembrokeshire

Globally lauded musician David Gray’s happiest childhood memories are from the time his parents moved the family from Manchester to a tiny two-up, two-down fisherman’s cottage in the fishing village of Solva, Pembrokeshire, to start their new clothing business and life in West Wales.  It is here that he developed the first of his many creative talents - that of landscape sketching and painting:

“I’ve always been drawn to landscape painting and growing up in Pembrokeshire surrounded by incredible scenery certainly played a part in that. I painted and sketched this view many, many times. It’s a view of a very distinctive rocky headland that juts out at the end of Newgale beach, a beautiful stretch of sand a few miles from Solva, the village in West Wales where I lived from 1976–1990. This version is one of a series I did in March/April 1988 while I was studying for a BA in Fine Arts at Liverpool Art College.  The series of charcoal sketches and oil studies of which this picture forms a part, went on to culminate in a couple of large-scale oils both of which I sold in the summer of 1989. I used the money from those sales to help fund buying microphones and sound equipment for my band at the time ‘Waiting for Deffo’. We were just starting to get serious about playing our own shows in Liverpool, Manchester and beyond."

Should you be the successful bidder who secures this evocative landscape painting, you may like a little music to accompany your blissful drift off to Pembrokeshire ... an EP of the acoustic version of David's most recent album Gold In A Brass Age has just been released and can be found HERE.

Mark Coreth - Master Sculptor of Animals in Motion

Born in London in 1958 Mark soon moved to the family farm in the Kenyan highlands where the Equator ran through the house and an idyllic childhood spent surrounded by exotic Flora and Fauna fostered Mark's early and continuing passion for wildlife and the sculpting of it.

With no formal art school training, his ability is based quite simply on dedication and hard work coupled with an acute and perceptive eye, drawing heavily on experiences gained during his early years in Kenya, and regular sculptural safari's around the world, with his "Backpack Studio". His sculptures reflect his instinctive understanding of the behaviour and physicality of the animals he sculpts.

Working with extraordinary speed, if the original plasticine or clay fails to speak to him within a couple of hours Mark destroys it and starts again. He captures violence, speed and movement, or even tranquillity and pathos with deceptive ease, and is now internationally recognized as the master sculptor of the animal in motion. You can also see his work enhancing the likes of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Natural History Museum London, and indeed Royal homes and gardens around the world. 

Tom Hiscocks - Taking A Horse to Water

Tom graduated from the Cambridge Art School in June 2013 with a first-class honours degree (Fine Art BA). He won the Dr Supanee Gazeley Fine Art Prize in 2013 for his degree show exhibition. Tom's personal interest relates to the layers of life and experience that makes each of us who we are. We typically show the outside layer of our being which, although it may bear some of the physical signs of things we have experienced, will not reveal how we felt about the ways in which we have experienced ‘being’. The same thing can be experienced by different people in different ways. So, it is the suggestion of what happens inside that interests him.

Tom says “I approach my work exploring the ways in which I can reflect these ideas. I have come to making most of my work in layers. I want my work to change as the angle of view changes, and as the context that they are placed in changes”. Tom’s work has been exhibited in solo and shared exhibitions across the UK and Europe. His work already appears in private and public collections across the UK, Europe and America.

Madeleine Banbury - Horse Portraitist to the Duke of Cambridge

Born in 1995 - Mustique Island, St.Vincent and the Grenadines. Educated in Dorset and trained in traditional portraiture for three years at Charles Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy. Madeleine concentrates on painting horses life size in a traditional style, always from life, using her own hand ground paints and hand stretched canvases. This style helps her to achieve an expressive representation which is unparalleled by modern photo or realistic paintings.

Over the past four years she has been working on commissions around Europe and America, travelling to wherever the horse is living. Possibly her most exciting commission, to date, has been a portrait of all 12 polo ponies belonging to HRH The Duke of Cambridge, which is now hung at Kensington Palace. 

Hamish Mackie - Epitomising the Wild & Free

British wildlife sculptor Hamish Mackie has had the privilege of observing wildlife in many corners of the world at first hand. “Observing animals in their own environment, in their natural habitat, is essential to understanding the subject’s physical and instinctive traits. For example, the disposition of a captive predator is very different from that of a predator the wild,” he says. This close observation, often involving intense research trips and sculpting from life in the field, informs Hamish’s whole approach to his work, which resonates with his passion for the natural world. His bronze wildlife sculptures capture instinctive moments of animal behaviour managing to convey the inner core, strength and grace of his subject.

Largely self-taught, his style is unique - he frequently works in spontaneous, often unrepeatable, fluid gestures with a confidence born from many years of mastering his craft. He says “It is close observation of my subject’s behaviour that really brings my pieces to life. I want to convey a sense of character, their spirit. This determines how I handle my material - in a loose fluid manner or in a tighter, more controlled way; with large sweeping strokes, or with smaller detail. A sculpture should have its own power. I want the viewer to feel an emotional response.”

Born in 1973, Hamish Mackie grew up on a livestock farm in Cornwall, England. In the kitchen of the family farm, there still hangs his first bronze sculpture - a calf’s head he made at the age of 12 as a Christmas present for his father. Hamish has works in public and private collections around the world and in 2016, Hamish also presented his sixth Solo Show, Life in Bronze, at Mall Galleries, London to great critical acclaim.

Philip Blacker - From Jockey to Artist, Red Rum to The Fugue, the Grand National to the Melbourne Cup

Born in 1949, Philip became a steeplechase jockey upon leaving school and rode professionally for 13 years, being placed in the Grand National on several occasions and riding 340 winners. It was during this time that Philip developed his latent enthusiasm for sculpture and devoted as much time to sculpture as he could spare from his riding -his first three editions, all racing bronzes based on The Grand National, sold out quickly.

In 1982 he retired from the saddle to concentrate full time on sculpture. Since his retirement from the saddle he has moved on to include a wider subject matter and to experiment with technique. However, his ambition was to work on a grand scale and the opportunity came when he was commissioned to create a life-size sculpture of Red Rum for Aintree Racecourse. Since the success of the Red Rum bronze, he has completed 26 further life-size or larger bronzes of horses, which now stand in Canada, Australia, France, Ireland, Barbados, Japan and the UK.

Pippa's Painting Prodigies - Mary Hare Children's Art

As Pablo Picasso wisely observed “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up”. Playing their part to paint a brighter future for their classmates and prospective deaf pupils from across the UK, the children of Mary Hare School present you with two of the auction's most charming Lots, guaranteed to brighten any new owners walls and futures for years to come.

AUCTION DATE AND LOCATION
Monday 2 September, 7.30pm
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 2JE

VIEWING:
Friday 30 August: 10am-4pm
Sunday 1 September: 10am-2pm
Day of sale: from 10am

All proceeds from this auction and catalogue sales will go towards the Mary Hare Primary School Appeal. The Mary Hare Foundation is a registered charity, no: 1002680

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