Everybody Loves The Sunshine

Rotherhithe artist Ed Gray has brought together a collection of his many London lido paintings, prints and sketches for an exhibition, ‘Everybody Loves The Sunshine’, to show along with his latest artwork of Parliament Hill Fields Lido.

When he talks about the work it is evident that, for him, visiting a lido is more than just going swimming: “For nearly thirty years I’ve made paintings of London and my relationship to the city where I was born. London’s lidos are one of the themes I always return to as I move through the city with each shifting stage of my life. Lidos represent all the joy I feel for urban living, the shared communal experience, and the inclusive stage-set that invites all actors to appear regardless of age, race or creed or income. Over the years London’s lidos and Hampstead Ponds have helped me cope with grief as much as they have helped me celebrate life.

In the anonymous space of the lido we become part of a greater unified physical mass. We shed ourselves as we enter the moment and take time to collectively worship the intermingling elements of light and water. We drift within ourselves and then amorphously outwards into the hubbub of the surrounding bathers and swimmers. We empty and refill.

I began this painting pre-lockdown, sketching bathers over a number of hot days when the lido was busiest. I put all of my sketches aside and worked on other city paintings as London shrank and life changed during the COVID crisis. The unmade painting stayed in my head throughout this time while I painted political scenes that had gravity to them. In my eyes I held the light of the lido and my dream to return to swim there once it reopened.

Slowly, in the absence of the lido, I began to paint this scene. I wanted the beautiful curve of Lissenden Gardens to be at the heart of the painting and it took two versions to fit it in and get the figures to the right scale. In the end I borrowed from Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool 1971 to create the final composition. The butterfly is a Gatekeeper butterfly, found on the Heath and the somnambulant men seemed like gatekeepers before this portal to paradise. I mixed sand into the paint because this is our beach, where we come like so many families to watch our children freeze and laugh and play and grow in proportion and ambition each year while they learn to swim and we learn to let go of them.

It always feels like the first time here, eternal, until the light fades and all aglow we hastily gather our belongings to head home with renewed faith into some unknowable time ahead, some other space away from here.”