My painting “The Old Ice Cream Factory” has been selected for the “Reality Removed” exhibition  at The World of Glass in St Helens.

This painting is quite large for me at 82 cm x 82 cm. I painted it during my residency at Liverpool Hope University in 2014. At the time I was making paintings of Liverpool buildings that have a special significance for me and, like the other paintings in this series, “The Old Ice Cream Factory” has a story.

When I was a very little girl my mum would sometimes tell us that if we behaved on our shopping trip she’d take us for a treat. On the rare occasions that we went into Liverpool that could mean a visit to Reece’s Café for a Knickerbocker Glory. The building in my painting was known locally as The Dairy and belonged to Reece’s. It was demolished years ago but still sometimes surfaces in my dreams. It’s one of those places that I’ll always connect with in my memories – not just of childhood but years later when I would pass by as an adult on my way to work when the building was derelict.

The cafe was where the Superdrug store is now in Liverpool (see below) and the dairy was on Brownlow Hill behind The Adelphi Hotel and Lime Street train station.

I found a few images of the old dairy online here. I have my own photos too somewhere. I need to dig them out. In the meantime, here’s a photo of how it looked, taken from the myspace account linked above.

Reece’s Cafe was made famous as the place that John Lennon and Cynthia held their wedding reception in 1962. You can read more about Reece’s on this blog. There is also a discussion about it here.

About the Exhibition

What we see, we understand because it is real or realistic; but what happens when we remove the reality in art?  Space, time and structure take on a limitless entity that require you the viewer to interpret art when reality is removed.  Figures become shapes become colour become monochrome, sky merges into horizons slipping into shorelines that leave no boundaries.  Like the borders of great countries and empires only the canvas edge or form surface can dictate the parameters of what is defined.

The exhibition will open to the public on Saturday 11th March, run until Friday  28th April 2017.