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.
Art
Ocean's earliest notable work as an artist was as a designer and pencil-artist for record album covers and sleeves; in particular, he contributed pencil drawings for the cover and lyric insert for 10cc's 1975 album The Original Soundtrack,[2] and inner-sleeve art for Paul McCartney and Wings' 1976 album Wings at the Speed of Sound.[3]
Philip Larkin, acrylic on canvas, 1984, Humphrey Ocean (NPG 5746)
In 1988 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 2002, Ocean was Artist-in-Residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, culminating in how's my driving, an exhibition linking 17th-century Dutch genre paintings with south London suburbia.[5] That year he was awarded an honorary fellowship by Canterbury College of Art where he had been a student between 1970-1973.[6] In 2009 he worked on an Artangel project Life Class: Today's Nude directed by Alan Kane, shown on Channel 4 television. He also painted Catherine Hughes in her role as principal of Somerville College, Oxford.
Gabor, gouache on paper, 2009 Humphrey Ocean
A handbook of modern life
Ocean came to prominence with his exhibition A handbook of modern life (2012–13) at the National Portrait Gallery London curated by Rosie Broadley who wrote:
"Working swiftly in gouache on large sheets of paper in his studio, Ocean paints his sitters, including family members, friends and professional acquaintances, in simple forms and bold colours. The project has an obsessive character that is compelling and, when seen together, the portraits are an exuberant display of the artist's love of painting, colour and people. The sitters have shared the experience of sitting for a portrait, but Ocean has illuminated something unique about each person-how they tilt their head or how they wear their shirt - with an immediacy that tethers the image to the day they visited the studio."
Etching
Black Love Chair, aquatint, 2004 Humphrey Ocean
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.[7] This is an image McCartney chose from the series of etchings begun in 2003 when Ocean was working with Maurice Payne in Miankoma Studio in Amagansett, Long Island.
An armchair (page from Dot Book 1999-2001) Humphrey Ocean
Dot Books
In 2017 Ocean exhibited Dot Book 1 in Drawing Together at the Courtauld Gallery London curated by Dr Ketty Gottardo and Dr Ben Thomas who wrote:
"Humphrey Ocean’s Dot Book also represents a type of artistic wayfaring, on a local scale, as it could be described as recording a notional trip to the supermarket where it becomes ‘impossible to get to Sainsbury’s’ because there are so many arresting motifs to discover along the way which prompt the thought ‘I like that and I want to tell somebody I saw that’. However, this is not a case of taking a line for a walk but of a series of vivid illuminations registered, as it were, at thirty miles an hour throughthe windscreen of a family estate car. The unremarkable objects, logos and snatched views of corners of suburbia collected together in this album of precise, crisply executed drawings are all 'perfectly ordinary' (to use the title of one of Ocean's exhibitions)."
Recent
Roadsign, enamel on steel, 2015 Humphrey Ocean (for the 50th Anniversary of the British Road Sign exhibition at the Design Museum)
In 2013 Lord Volvo and his Estate (1982) by Ocean was voted one of 57 of the nation’s favourite paintings and appeared on billboards around Britain in Art Everywhere organised by the Art Fund.[9] In 2014 he completed a portrait[10] of Randy Lerner for the National Portrait Gallery. In the same year he advised on Turner's approach to perspective in Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner.
For BBC Radio 3 he presented The Essay about Impington Village College (2016) and on Radio 4 he featured in Will GompertzGets Creative (2015), Only Artists with Mark Alexander (2018) and Start The Week (2019). In 2019 the Royal Academy published a 320 page full colour monograph of his work, written by Dr Ben Thomas, and also A Book of Birds by Humphrey Ocean. At Eton College in 2022 the exhibition Fresh as Paint was Ocean's personal selection of objects and art from the school collections. In 2022 the British Museum acquired seven works, four of which were displayed in 2023 in New Acquisitions in the Department of Prints and Drawings.
In 2024 That Was Close at hairdresser DKUK in Peckham (you look at art instead of mirrors) was followed by his first one-person exhibition at Christine König in Vienna, Das Bild und sein Buch.
Humphrey Ocean is married to artist Miranda Argyle and has two daughters, Ruby and Beatrice. He lives and works in south London.
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