Tasty art collection plates up in East Yorkshire
A COLLECTION celebrating Britain’s love affair with baking is launching at Artmarket Gallery in Cottingham this weekend.
The artists behind the rotund Impossimals characters, Peter and Jayne Smith have created the A Cup of Tea and a Slice of Bake collection after being inspired by the success of baking shows such as The Great British Bake Off.
Peter said: “It reaches down into what Britain’s actually about. It’s the core of British society, it’s so quintessentially British It couldn’t scream any more British if it tried, in fact we tried getting into the spirit even more by entering village shows and baking cakes.”
A Cup of Tea and a Slice of Bake is the couple’s latest addition to their existing portfolio of Impossimal artwork, which they have been jointly creating for 13 years.
Peter said: “It’s quite a weird way of doing it, everything we actually paint we create for real, so if you see a big biscuit or cake, we’ve made it. We make it out of clay or anything else that comes to hand, then we sit in front of it photograph it. We both come up with the Impossimal ideas and both build the little statues that form the image, but I do all the oil painting.
“It’s quite surreal when you have something like a foot and a half bourbon in front of you with an Impossimal holding it.” 
From 1-4pm this Sunday, Peter and Jayne will be at the gallery to explain the recipe behind the success of their Impossimal characters – which have been bought by over 13m people worldwide.
Peter added: “I used to paint portraits and they get incredibly boring so I thought what if instead of capturing somebody’s appearance, we’d instead capture the feeling of that person in the painting. So I started really simple, trying to capture people using a round body and a long head.”
Every Impossimal the artists has created over the years is somebody they know whether it be friends, family, or in the case of this collection, their next door neighbour Ken.
As part of the exhibition – which will run until December 11 – Artmarket Gallery will also be showcasing a selection of the most popular Impossimal works from the last 12 years, along with six limited editions, a boutique piece and a selection of 3D wall sculptures exclusive to the display.
The works will also visit 13 other galleries on a UK tour that will see the artists’ work exhibited in Sheffield, Bournemouth, Nottingham, Norwich, Reading, Solihull, Stoke on Trent, Kent, Northamptonshire, Wolverhampton, Keswick, and Milton Keynes.
The couple are currently developing an Impossimals cartoon series they hope will be ready to pilot in January of next year.
