Donald Urquhart

The earliest of these drawings come from a series titled Peroxides on Parole made in 2000 to serve as flyers, posters and wall decorations for ’The Beautiful Bend’, an eclectic and gloriously camp nightclub which the artist co-founded in the early 1990s. Drawn in black ink on the pages of an A3 sketchbook, Dors, Dusty, Jayne and Davis Scowl were originally photocopied, pasted up around the club’s King’s Cross interior, and taken home at the night’s end by anyone who wanted them. The poses of these legendary movie stars in their simple, understated portraits were lifted from single or composite frames of different films in which they appear, carefully chosen by the artist and paused to allow him time to sketch. Dors is a portrait of 1950s sex symbol Diana Dors, who was, in her time, the British equivalent to Marilyn Monroe. “The image is from Diana in Adam and The Ants’s Prince Charming video,” discloses Urquhart. “She was older then, but I tried to make her a bit more glamorous.”