Visual Essay

Gordon's Wine Bar

I chose to look at Gordon's Win Bar situated on Villiers Street, London, as I was drawn to its atmosphere, cavernous interior and history.

Gordon's wine bar is thought to be the oldest wine bar in London and has been established in its present form since 1890. Its original décor has been maintained, the walls are covered in memorabilia and historical newspaper cuttings faded with age.

Memorabilia 

 

  1914 August on deceleration of war. 

I first started to look at different wine and champagne bottles and drew them using different media.

Biro pen

Fine-liner pen

Coloured pencils

 Collage

 Quick sketch in Gordon's, however I do not feel that the pen reflects the atmosphere of the bar effectively.

Lino cut

Lino prints

Gordon's wine bar observational drawings

Chalk and charcoal which I feel is more effective at portraying the atmosphere of the bar.

I then put some of the wine and champagne bottles back into these scenes but did not think that this worked well.

David Hockney's Photo-montage

After looking at Hockney''s photo-montages, I decided that I would use my chalk/ charcoal images to create the shape of an arc to represent the cavernous ceiling of the wine bar.

I used the coloured bottles to go round the arc to show how some of the wine bottles were lined up and displayed in the bar; however I felt that the colours detracted attention from the chalk/ charcoal images.

I then used the lino bottle images which I felt worked better.

I created a wall made of lino bricks and converted it to grey scale to fit with the image.

I then tried the wine list as a background instead. Although I liked the bricks I felt that this worked better, however the background and the bottles merge together slightly.

I thought that the wine list worked better in the lighter colour as it contrasts with the bottles. However the bottles now look as if they are floating.

Final Outcome

After looking at the memorabilia Gordon's wine bar has on the walls, I photo-shopped my final image into some of the photo frames to see what it would look like as part of these images. As the images are old and have a sepia tone to them I have altered the tones of my final outcome to fit with the other images and memorabilia.