Humphrey Ocean
| Humphrey Ocean | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Humphrey Anthony Erdeswick Butler-Bowdon June 22, 1951 Pulborough, West Sussex, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Canterbury College of Art (now the University for the Creative Arts) |
| Known for | Painting, drawing, writing |
| Notable work |
|
| Spouse(s) | Miranda Argyle |
Humphrey Ocean RA (born 22 June 1951) is a contemporary British painter and Royal Academy Professor of Perspective.
Ocean was born Humphrey Anthony Erdeswick Butler-Bowdon, on 22 June 1951 in Sussex, England, and went to art schools in Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Canterbury.
It was at Canterbury that he was taught by Ian Dury, then a painter. From 1971 he was bass player with the band Kilburn and the High Roads formed at Canterbury with Dury. They opened for The Who on its Christmas tour in 1973, after which Ocean resigned from music with the notable exception of recording the single "Whoops-a-Daisy" written by Ian Dury and Russell Hardy, for Stiff Records in 1978.
In 1983, Ocean painted Paul McCartney's portrait as part of the first prize in the 1982 John Player Portrait Award and the following year painted the poet Philip Larkin's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery, a work described by the novelist Nick Hornby as "unanswerable". Four years later, Ocean travelled to Northern Brazil with the American anthropologist Stephen Nugent, a lecturer at the University of London, eager to expose colonial caricatures of the region. Their subsequent book, Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks, was published by Fourth Estate (HarperCollins) in 1990, and features evocative illustrations of Brazil. In 1999 the National Maritime Museum commissioned Ocean to paint a picture of modern maritime Britain. Throughout the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, Ocean's paintings were exhibited in many of the leading museums in the United Kingdom. In addition to his portrait of Philip Larkin, he is perhaps best known for his iconic etching, Black Love Chair, which appeared on the cover of Paul McCartney's 2007 album Memory Almost Full.
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