April 2024 Just back from a great drawing trip to Hong Kong with the prize money from the TBW Drawing Prize. Had a fab time drawing at Happy Valley Race Course, all the great sky scrapers around Admiralty and Bank Street and at the very busy Yee Wo Street at Causeway Bay. So much energy, just hope I captured that feeling.

 

     

 

February 2024 Really enjoying working on sets of monotypes which when several are put together will make a really large construction Site

                      

November 2023 – Time & Place – Pasmore Gallery,  Harrow School Delighted to have been invited to have a solo show at the Pasmore Gallery in Harrow School. First time I have showed Drawings, City Prints & Movement Prints together

 

       

 

         

 

 

2023 Very happy and excited to have been given First Prize at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prizes – Many thanks to judges Dennis Scholl, Barbara Walker, Laura Hoptman and Anita Taylor at Drawing Projects Uk. Battersea Tube Station & Developments Compressed Charcoal

150 x 213cms

Really pleased to have been selected for several exhibitions including my work East Bank Noir V for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition hung in the Architecture room selected by Peter Barber. Also Contact Sheet, one of my boxer prints got exhibited at the Bainbridge Print.

 

  

Over the last few months I have been enjoying working on large drawings, monotype prints and paintings.  The prints range from Boxers, Tap Dancers to Architectural prints. I have been working on monotypes inspired by the Bechers, Muybridge and Film Noir. Also I’ve been experimenting with painting, yes, what a shock. To be honest mainly black pen drawings with white acrylic painted over parts but realistically that’s as much as you will get from me. Really enjoyed getting back to making large drawings in the studio, in particular the new Battersea Tube by Grimshaw architects flanked with developments by Foster + Partners, Gehry, Wilkinson Eyre/Scott. Also finally got round to drawing the large room with the massive whale skeleton at the Natural History Museum,.

                  

2022

Very happy to say that on April 7th a book that I co-authored with my husband Paul Brandford – City Sketching Reimagined will be published, hooray. It kept us focused during lockdown and we are very happy with the results. Published by Batsford Books and available online and in bookshops. Based on my work and practices it also has exercises, tips and techniques with examples by myself and Paul. It is in an A-Z format which we think makes it user friendly and allows us to be chatty and informative and we are enormously proud of it.

I have also this April had a two person show with Helen Shulkin at the Anise Gallery – London called Moving Cities and am showing works at Creative Debuts London X at the Adidas Flagship Store Oxford Street, London

 

                                 

2020

Like most of the world, I am currently in lockdown and have been for the past few weeks, unable to use my studio or any printmaking facilities, I  have had to work in my bedroom at home. The main thing of course is that I have had to dramatically change my scale, but I have continued to work in charcoal and also in pen and chalk. Although having to stay at home has been challenging I have used my time to work out what I what to do when I can get back in to the studio. I have been thinking about cities, crowds, traffic that busy, energetic urban life that we have always taken as the norm but has in most counties come almost to a  stand still. This noisy, vital, city life is the basis of most of my work and I will be interested to see what my work responses to the situation will be. I am looking forward to being challenged and to producing  new work with this in mind.

Below are some small scale pieces that I have been working on, I have been grateful just to have kept going in this strange situation the world has found itself in. The top one Fractured journeys was picked to be in the TBWDP – London

  

November 2019

Very happy to have been awarded the Trinity Buoy Wharf Working Drawing  Prize with a smallish pen sketch. This is a plan for my large drawing of Cable Cars New York  – Roosevelt Island Cable Car below.

The large drawing is 215 x 151 cms

May 2019

Happy to finally add another gallery page to my site, this one slightly different to my others and covers my found objects and sculptures. I go mudlarking on the Thames and have for the past four years been collecting items especially old leather shoes, ceramic pieces and metal and nails and I have been putting them together in to sculptures and wall hangings. At first site they seem vastly different from my other work, but they are all connected – movement, cities and time which has always been my passion and carries on from my 2015 Show at the Anise Gallery, Time & Tide

There are over 200 pieces of old shoes here, laid on to canvas that is torn into a generic flag shape. Called To Be A Pigrim, a lot of the shoes I found on a site on the Thames where the Mayflower set sail to Plymouth before it’s epic journey to America and questions our ideas on migration – When do fleeing people stop becoming worded as Pilgrims and become Refugees,

Check out Found Objects & Sculptures for more examples

March 2019 – Looking forward to seeing my work in two exhibitions this month. I will be exhibiting Cable Cars – New York in the Lynn Painter Stainer Awards at the Mall Galleries, London

and two monotypes will be shown in MARCH an exhibition at the Brentwood Road Gallery Romford as part of Women’s History Month. Below is my print Battersea – Cranes – Battersea Power Station

December 2018 – Very happy for one of my prints – One Park Drive II to have been purchased by Clifford Chance for their prestigious print collection. I am also in the Christmas exhibition at the Felix and Spear Gallery 71 St. Mary’s Road London W5 5RG   until 26th January 2019

                            

October and November 2018 are proving to be very busy and am happy to say that I am in four exhibitions. As part of my residency at Clifford Chance in Canary Wharf I have an exhibition on until 2nd November called Docklands Diary. This drawing Diary of a Site took over a year to complete and shows the early construction of Wood Wharf whilst the monoprints below were executed in a way that captures more fleeting change and concentrates on the new towers being built including One Park Drive, Herzog & de Meuron’s first residential tower.

                                 

I am one of four artists in the 4B exhibition in Tonbridge at the  Old Big School Gallery, other artists include Louise Bourgeois, Christy Burdock and Meghana Baniseerand and the exhibition is on until Saturday 10th November. Pleased it’s such a big space that it has allowed me to put three of my large drawings in and also some monotypes, including some  my favourite Olympic work

                  

I will be exhibiting in a mixed show in Halifax at Dean Clough Crossley Gallery – Defining the Elemental from October 27th, showing one large drawing of New York – Rebuilding Ground Zero and several smaller drawings and prints.

Last but certainly not least I will be in another mixed show War – Brentwood Road Gallery in Romford with work quite different from my other urban work, I will be showing a triptych on the First World War called Cause & Effect based on photographs of war wounded and the Tonks archive. Phew, happily a very busy time!

Really enjoyed working with Cameron at the Felix and Spear Gallery in Ealing for my solo show Metropolis in February. I exhibited drawings and monoprints, a selection of which is below and am happy to say that my Piccadilly drawing is still on show downstairs at the gallery.

Open Studios – Great Weekend

The Open Studios went very well, I showed my large new drawing of the Roosevelt Island Cable Car and my just framed Shibuya Crossing drawing, some new smaller drawings of the Emirates Airlines London Cable Car and my Metropolis monotype series. I was awarded a bursary and chose to make a brochure about my work explaining through images and texts how I arrive at my large drawings,  so anyone who wants one of these for free, please contact me with your snail mail address and I will send you one. Thanks to everyone who popped in to make it a successful weekend.

It’s summer so that means OPEN STUDIOS and this year they are on Saturday 29th & Sunday 30th July 12-6pm Bridget Riley Studios Studio 302  43 Dace Road London E3 2NG. They are part of Hackney Wicked so lots of other open studios, music and shenanigans in the area and of course Hackney Wick is now one of the most trendiest places on earth. I went to New York a couple of months ago sketching and will be hopefully showing some of these and my large drawing just concluded of the Roosevalt Cable Car. I have never been on it before but it’s brilliant. In fact I enjoyed it so much, I have started a cable car project called SpAn which includes journeys in  London and Porto. Emirate Airlines kindly let me do a whole days journey on their London cable car across the Thames, sketching, taking photos and videos so that is my next large drawing and I have nearly finished a dry point of the journey which I will be showing at the weekend.  Hope you can join me, there will be a cold beer waiting.

I am enjoying being in Instagram my address is jeanettebarnesart if anyone feels like having a look.

Just had an article published by It’s Nice that  http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/jeanette-barnes-charcoal-architecture-drawings-051016

Jeanette Barnes captures the evolving shape of the city in her charcoal drawings

              

Artist Jeanette Barnes creates large charcoal drawings of cities, capturing the energy and savage nature of construction and change in her work. London-based Jeanette is currently artist-in-residence at Clifford Chance in Canary Wharf and has been sketching the construction of the Wood Wharf cross rail station. “I use compressed charcoal or charcoal for my large drawings, pencils for my sketches I do on location and printing ink for my monotypes,” says Jeanette. “Funnily, I don’t see my work as a conscious absence of colour, it’s all just marks, I do use some colour in my prints sometimes but it’s very monochromatic.”

Her large-scale works depict the bustle of the streets and traffic, the movement of cranes sweeping across the sky and the mystifying process of buildings being assembled. ”The large size is important as I want to be a part of the space and energy of the city, immersed in the paper so it’s a total involvement of being in that space, hopefully for the viewer as well,” says Jeanette. The dark marks merge into each other to create tonal landscapes that communicate the vitality of the city as it transforms itself minute by minute, day by day. “I’m inspired by the likes of Franz Kline, De Kooning and Auerbach,” explains Jeanette. “They all have this total involvement in scrabbling after something beneath the surface and a fantastic rhythm in their marks.”

Jeanette’s will exhibit her works in a new exhibition Sense of Place at Radley College, Oxford, 7 – 21 October 2016.

My large commissioned drawing of Radley Chapel was unveiled at my solo show Sense of Place, fortunately to very positive feedback – phew!

I am having two Solo Shows URBAN CONNECTIONS 26th Sept – 10th Feb at the Broadgate Tower, 20 Primrose Street, London EC2A 2EW By appointment only, please contact me.

                       

And SENSE OF PLACE , Sewell Centre Radley College Oxford, Abingdon OX14 2HR 7th – 21st October, daily 10-5pm  01235 543 039  pv 6th October 6-8pm  Amongst other works I will be exhibiting my large commissioned drawing of Radley Chapel

I have a short time lapse video on you tube of me sketching and photographing areas around London, capturing the energy and the speed of the city

I’m very happy to say that I will be exhibiting drawings and prints at the Art16 London Art Fair, Olympia from May 20th – 22nd with the Anise Gallery, Stand C3 with artists Alex Evans and Thomas Gorst.

       

In January I was amongst a group of artists to be invited by the Royal Drawing School, where I am a tutor, to exhibit  at Christies in New York. I submitted my large drawing of Concourse – Grand Central Station, New York.  I would have loved to have personally gone out to see the show, but it was on when there were terrible snow storms which closed all the airports, so am quite glad I didn’t attempt it.

Between November and December 2015 I had a solo show at the Anise Gallery in Shad Thames called Tide & Time with work specifically related to rivers, the Thames and also the Walbrook, a hidden river that flowed into the Thames in ancient times. Over the past eighteen months I have become fascinated with artifacts found on the Thames foreshore and have begun incorporating the finds into artworks . The show included a  combination of drawings, monoprints, collages and found objects.

  

  

Between March and April 2015 I had a solo show Site Specific at the Eleven Spitalfields Gallery in London. A combination of large drawings, sketches and etchings. The gallery, a beautiful Tardis of a space,  allowed me to include  six of my large drawings.

   

I was invited to take part in a print exhibition at the Brentwood Road in Romford as part of a celebration of Women’s art, ‘More than a Woman’ I have been increasingly interested in working in monoprint and it allowed me to include some of my more experimental work. Included was a  piece of work made about Annie Beasant and the Matchgirls strike, the mouth in the middle of the work is a phossy jaw, the terrible industrial disease the women used to get from the phosphorous on the matches. Along with a couple of urban prints I  included  an image of an ancient Egyptian heads I saw in the British Museum, fascinating stuff.