Humphrey Ocean

Humphrey Ocean (born 22 June 1951) is a contemporary British painter.

Humphrey Ocean was born Humphrey Anthony Erdeswick Butler-Bowdon, on 22 June 1951 in Sussex.

He went to Ampleforth College and in 1967 went to Tunbridge Wells School of Art for two years, going on to do a Foundation Course at Brighton College of Art and DipAD Painting at Canterbury College of Art.

It was at Canterbury that he was taught by Ian Dury, then a painter.

That year he was awarded an honorary fellowship by Canterbury College of Art where he had been a student between 1970-1973.

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.

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, and inner-sleeve art for Paul McCartney and Wings' 1976 album Wings at the Speed of Sound.

In 1983, Ocean painted Paul McCartney's portrait as part of the first prize in the 1982 Imperial Tobacco Portrait Award with his painting Lord Volvo and his Estate and the following year painted the poet Philip Larkin's portrait, also for the National Portrait Gallery, a work described by the novelist Nick Hornby as "unanswerable".

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.

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 1999 the National Maritime Museum commissioned Ocean to paint a picture of modern maritime Britain.

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.

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.

Ocean was elected a Royal Academician in 2004.

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.

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.

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."

He was Royal Academy Professor of Perspective 2012 - 2020, a position once held by J. M. W. Turner.

In 2012 he was made an Honorary Doctor by Canterbury Christ Church University and in 2015 an Honorary Doctor by University of Kent.

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.

In 2014 he completed a portrait 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.

Ocean designed a road sign for his friend Margaret Calvert for the 50th Anniversary of the British Road Sign exhibition at the Design Museum (2015) and showed in books + papers (2015), "Wären Fluss und Meere Tinte..." (2017) and books + papers 2 (2019) at Christine Koenig Galerie, Vienna.

For the BBC, on Radio 4 he featured in Will Gompertz Gets Creative (2015), presented The Essay on Radio 3 on Impington Village College (2016) and Only Artists with Mark Alexander on Radio 4 (2018).

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 through the 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)."

In 2018 Ocean's solo exhibition I've No Idea Either of works on paper and sculpture was at Sims Reed Gallery London. In 2019 he had a solo exhibition Birds, Cars and Chairs in the Keeper's House at the Royal Academy of Arts.

A 320 page full colour monograph of his work was published by the Royal Academy of Arts in autumn 2019.

Simultaneously published by the RA is A Book of Birds by Humphrey Ocean. In 2020 he showed his painting Self in Me, Myself, I at Christine Koenig Galerie, Vienna.

Fresh as Paint, Ocean's personal selection of objects and art from the school collections was shown at Eton College in 2022.

In 2023 four of his seven works recently acquired by the British Museum were displayed in New Acquisitions in the Prints and Drawings gallery.

Humphrey Ocean is married to artist Miranda Argyle and has two daughters, Ruby and Beatrice.

He lives and works in south London.

His art is featured in several collections, including British Museum, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; British Council; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; National Portrait Gallery, London; National Galleries Scotland: Portrait, Edinburgh; Government Art Collection.