Liam Aalvy: feast of the great lakes

When planning the work for his debut solo exhibition at BEERS, Liam Alvy would take long walks in nature with his dog, in a wooded area near the lakes around his home in Yorkshire. The result is Feast of the Great Lakes, consisting of a series of new paintings in his quirky, recognizable style. The works have a sort of naive charisma to them – situated partway between an obvious painterly prowess and the hyper-stylization that lands within the realm of illustration or even the strongly contoured, recognizable shapes traditionally used in tattoo art. Alvy, a tattooist since his early twenties, has obviously honed his skills as a draftsman, and his prowess as a painter is immediate.
In, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami speaks about inspiration while running in nature. How the seed crystal for creative thought is both omnipresent and invisible, "The sky both exists and doesn't exist," he writes. Similarly, Alvy found inspiration for this body of work while running past a family of ducks. "My dog dove into a lake trying to get a duck, and the idea of painting that sparked an excitement within me," he writes. "Essentially I'm painting what I see on a daily basis walking my dog around the lakes. Ducks, swans, cormorants, and of course occasionally frogs." He goes on to explain how, as a child, he collected tadpoles in the spring and watched them turn into frogs, when he'd release them. "I've often used them in my work to symbolise a struggle, or battle within. Placed in a scene with a cormorant for example, is like the frogs symbolising conquering your demons."
The white tiger is similarly laden. The result of a rare genetic mutation, they seem to represent the unattainable, the allure of purity but the ferocity of the soul with an almost ethereal, magical grandeur.
So while these compositions of leaping frogs and twisting tigers are unmistakably graphic, they also exhibit a rigorous artistic sensibility that comes with years of creative training both in the studio and hovering over the tattoo chair.

The exhibition opens tonight from 6-8pm and is Alvy's debut London solo exhibition.