For Carl Laubin's website please click here

Saturday, 13 October 2012

St Paul's Cathedral

  Work from a group show, 2010, exhibited in St. Paul's Cathedral for its 300th anniversary:

Carl Laubin, New Change
160x120cm, oil on canvas, 2010
David Watkin says of Carl Laubin's work, in the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition, 'Images of St Paul's in the 21st century';

'One of his (Carl Laubin's) most imaginative capricci is ‘A Different Perspective’, painted in 2010 especially for the exhibition mounted at the cathedral that year, ‘Images of St Paul’s in the 21st Century’. Though small in scale, it shows convincingly what Wren’s Great Model design for the cathedral of 1672-4 would have looked like from Ludgate Hill, had it been built. Wren’s favourite scheme, it was inspired by Bramante’s equally unexecuted Greek Cross design for St Peter’s, but in addition to this Renaissance source had façades with Baroque re-entrant curves as in Bernini’s first design for the Louvre. Wren had planned what was basically a centrally planned building with no projecting choir or transepts and scarcely even a nave, so not surprisingly the clergy rejected it on grounds of practicality. Laubin shows it from the west with Wren’s towering entrance portico inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, its pediment richly filled with sculpture. Sufficiently large blocks of stone could not be found for columns in the giant order rising through two storeys, so in the cathedral as executed, Wren had to be content with a portico of two tiers of columns.'
A Different Perspective, Proposals for a new Cathedral and Baptistry by Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor Respectively (unbuilt), 60 x 45cm, oil on canvas, 2010

'It seems that the only other attempt to show the Great Model design in perspective as built is the watercolour in the collection of the Dean and Chapter, painted in c.1930 by H.L.G. Pilkington, a talented perspective artist who was inspired by William Walcot. Carl Laubin’s painting qualifies, in addition, as a capriccio because he unexpectedly includes on the south side the circular, domed baptistery which Wren’s disciple and assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor, planned but which remained unexecuted. We know it only from a single not highly developed drawing by Hawksmoor which Laubin has skilfully transformed into a fully three-dimensional building.'
'A Different Perspective' is still available to buy, as are the following works:
Study for 12-18 and 10 Seconds, 50x40cm (unframed),
oil on canvas, 2010
12.18 and 10 Seconds
Oil on canvas
The two titles above refer to the exact timing of the Lord Mayor's Parade, which is precisely scheduled to the second.

Nouvel Change, 132x96cm (138x102cm framed),
oil on canvas, 2010
Reflections on the Stock Exchange, 71x106cm
oil on canvas, 2010

Please contact the artist for prices and further details carl@carllaubin.com
www.carllaubin.com