MICHAEL TINGLE

Michael Tingle is a shy and quiet but very funny artist. He has lived and worked in Devon for the last decade but is returning to East Anglia for a major show of ‘parodies of Old Masters featuring Signman and Barbie’.

I'm always looking out for signs and symbols that can combine the ancient with the modern, so it seemed inevitable that the ubiquitous sign-man of international information signs would find his way into some drawings I was making of Greek friezes. He drove his car into the composition making a classic traffic jam.

Another icon of world wide fame, Barbie, strikes me as an unintentional parody of ideal beauty; a modern plastic Venus. She has shown no traces of aging over her 50 years of life proving beyond doubt that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Recently I made a reworking of Giorgione's pastoral painting Concert Champêtre; one of the figures is using a mobile phone, and in the background a phone mast grows disguised as a tree. This led to a series entitled 'Landscapes with good reception' that capture something of our mixed attitudes to nature.