Alan Halliday b 1952

In Rehearsal

Watercolour

28x38cm

Framed

Alan Halliday is a figurative painter whose larger canvases reach out towards the abstract. He was trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art where he was taught by Anthony Blunt and Anita Brookner. He exhibited at the International contemporary Art Fair at the Barbican Centre (1984), Olympia (1985,1989, 1990) and Los Angeles (1986, 1987, 1993), as well as in London and throughout the country. In 1985, for the Chelsea Arts Club, he designed a Venice Carnival Ball at the Royal Albert Hall and held nine one-man shows at the Royal Opera House.

Halliday has painted in Russia, South America, the Middle East and throughout Europe. He has painted the Royal Opera, the Royal Ballet, Birmingham Royal Ballet, English National Opera and the English National Ballet, the Kirov, the Bolshoi, the Paris Opera, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, the Joffrey, Nederlans Dans Theater, Rambert, Dutch, Australian and Stuttgart Ballets.

Following four exhibitions at the National Theatre, Halliday was made artist-in-residence with the Cincinnati Ballet, and also with the Caracalla Dance Theatre in Montreal, Paris and Beirut, culminating in an exhibition in Beirut.

Beyond the theatre, Halliday painted St. George's Hall after the fire at Windsor Castle. The work was acquired by the V & A. In 1993 he was invited to record images of devastation at Bishopsgate following the bombing of the City of London: the paintings are in the Museum of London.

Halliday has also painted on film locations including Rebecca, Thomas Hardy's The Scarlet Tunic, The Tichborne Claimant (with Sir John Gielgud and Stephen Fry) and BBC's film adaptations of Tom Jones, Vanity Fair and Great Expectations. In 1999 Halliday painted the BBC film of David Copperfield on location in Suffolk and Norfolk and also at Elstree.He also painted the filming of Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate as well as Stephen Fry and Jude Law in Wilde.

He has painted at Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside and at the Chichester Festival Theatre. He was honoured with an exhibition at the Accademia Italiana in association with The Royal Ballet, and exhibited paintings of the Kirov Opera and the Kirov Ballet at the Bruton Street Gallery in London. At the 1998 and 1999 Aldeburgh Festivals, he exhibited paintings of the operas of Britten and Mozart, including Mozart paintings from Glynebourne. He then completed a new series of paintings of the Kirov Opera and the Kirov Ballet from the wings of the Royal Opera House, as well as executing a second series of large canvases for Orient Lines for the Crown Odyssey cruise liner.

Bill Kenwright commissioned him to paint Noel Coward's Fallen Angels and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. In March 2001 Halliday painted the Bolshoi Ballet from the wings at Drury Lane and the Kirov Opera and Ballet at the Royal Opera House. He subsequently returned to Russia in the summer of 2001 to paint St. Petersburg. In November 2001, he held a joint exhibition with Yolanda Sonnabend, one of the greatest stage designers of the twentieth century, and The Actors Centre in London invited Halliday to exhibit at The Spotlight in Leicester Square. Halliday then executed thirty-five paintings for a thirud cruise liner, the 'Discovery'.

In 2003 he exhibited paintings of St. Petersburg and the Kirov Ballet at Nicholas Guedroitz in London to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg. In 2004 Halliday was commissioned to hold an exhibition of his paintings of Chichester Festival productions at the Chichester Festival Theatre; and for Montreux a series of large canvases on Lake Geneva. In 2005 Halliday exhibited at Art London with Camburn Fine Art; he was made artist-in-residence with the Chelsea Festival and had a major showing of paintings based on Carmen at the Henley Festival. Since then Halliday has been exhibiting with the SW1 Gallery in Victoria, the Dadbrook Gallery in Buckinghamshire and at the QI Club in Oxford, curated by Clico Kingsbury.

In 2006 he made a series of paintings at Waddesdon Manor and exhibited with Camburn Fine art at the Art on Paper Fair at the Royal College of Art. In the summer of 2006 Halliday continued to make an extensive collection of paintings of the Kirov Opera and Ballet, and the Bolshoi Opera and Ballet when both companies were performing in London concurrently. This season included operas and ballets by Dimitri Shostakovitch which Valery Gergiev brought to the London Coliseum to mark the Shostakovitch centenary. In the West End he recently made paintings in performance of A voyage Round my Father, with Derek Jacobi, Stephen Sondheim's musical comedy Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Fry's 'Cinderella' pantomime at the Old Vic, and continues to paint performers and performance from around the world.

At the re-launching of the InterContinental Hotel on Hyde Park Corner in March 2007, Halliday held a major exhibition of paintings of St. Petersburg and the Russian Ballet which was well-reviewed by a number of Russian newspapers; the exhibition transferred to Pushkin House in Bloomsbury Square in conjunction with an exhibition at the Air Gallery in Dover Street, all curated by Dadbrook Gallery. Halliday has since been made Resident Artist with English National Ballet and painted the Company's seasons at the Royal Albert Hall, at Versailles and on tour in Liverpool and Bristol.

In February 2008, at Pushkin House the Wagner Society, in conjunction with Dadbrook Gallery, presented an exhibition of Halliday's paintings of the Royal Opera's new production of Wagner's Ring which was attended and patronised by opera stars and luminaries including Sir John Tomlinson, Marina Poplovskaya and Keith Warner, the director of the Royal Opera's Ring cycle.