ELEANOR AND CHRIS PUT
WEXFORD-BASED singer-songwriter Eleanor McEvoy will present a pioneering collaboration with the acclaimed English painter Chris Gollon in the Presentation Centre, Enniscorthy on Saturday, March 18, at 8.30 p.m. The collaboration will include lyrics and melodies from the songs on McEvoy’s 2016 album Naked Music alongside 22 of Gollon’s stunning paintings inspired by the music on that album. The exhibition, which opened in IAP Fine Art’s new gallery space in Monmouth, London, last week, has the general title of ‘Gimme Some Wine’ after Eleanor’s song of the same name, which in turn took its inspiration from Gollon’s painting ‘Dreaming of Leaving’.
The McEvoy- Gollon artistic partnership came about after Eleanor bought a painting by Chris in early 2015 depicting a female nude pouring champagne entitled ‘Champagne Sheila’. The work began to inspire the theme for her next album ‘Naked Music’ which featured her own compositions and new songs co-written with Dave Rotheray, formerly of The Beautiful South, and Lloyd Cole.
‘ The first time I met Eleanor we immediately clicked artistically, albeit from a different art form. I was sent a demo for the new album Naked Music and invited to make one painting, perhaps for the front cover,’ said Chris, who ended up doing 25 paintings as he was drawn into the new territory of a woman’s point of view.
It’s not the first time that Chris has collaborated with a musician. An acclaimed artist who has exhibited widely, his work was shown at Art Chicago and alongside Yoko Ono and David Bowe in Root, a cross-over exhibition of contempoary music and art at Chisenhale Gallery, London.
Novelist Sara Maitland’s book Stations of the Cross, published in London and New York in 2009, was wholly inspired by and features Gollon’s paintings entitled Fourteen Stations of the Cross which were commissioned by the Church of England for