Peter Edwards – Latest Features

Saturday 25 August 2007

An interview with Peter Edwards.

You can read the interview below.

Peter, your portrait of poet Wendy Cope features on the leaflet for the MOMA Festival, which runs from 19-26 August at MOMA, Y Tabernacl in Machynlleth, is any of your work on display there?

“The Wendy Cope is on display now until September, I’m not sure of the exact finish date. Nothing else of mine is showing, unless the portraits of Ruth Lambert or Sir Kyffin Williams, both in the permanent collection, are on display. You would have to ring them to find out.”

On the poetry theme, I’ve also seen your work on a poster for an event called 40-Love, a tour in October to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of the groundbreaking 1967 collection The Mersey Sound, an anthology of contemporary poetry from Merseyside.

“Yes, Roger McGough and Brian Patten are on a tour celebrating 40 years since The Mersey Sound was published. My large portrait of the original three, with the late Adrian Henri, which is part of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery, is being used on the flyers and the posters to promote the events. Adrian Henri, was a friend and an important figure in my work.”

What have you been working on recently?

“On Thursday 26th July a dinner was given at Magdalen College Oxford in honour of Ahmed Zewail, Nobel winning scientist from Egypt, based in Caltech California. I sat on High Table the other side of the President, David Clary and his wife Heather, from Ahmed to whom I was not allowed to speak until after the speeches when he was presented with a charcoal portrait of him by me, funded by a Dutch science journal. During the meal my studies of Seamus Heaney and Erwin Schodinger were on prominent display and I realised my effort to get to Oxford through the floods was worth it as the President built his speech around the history of Magdalen (pronounced Maudlin) and latterly how they came to acquire the two Edwards’ on display, teasing the audience as to the object under the cloth on the third easel! The unveiling was agreat success and Zewail suggested I travel to his home in Egypt to paint him there.

In my new London Studio I have finished my first portrait there of Sir John Weston, poet, diplomat, patron of the Arts . . . and fly-fisherman, he also retired this summer as Chair of Governors of Sherbourne School.”