Very pleased to have been invited to exhibit one of my seascapes in Silent Disco, an exhibition of painting excellence curated by Graham Crowley, the winner of the John Moore’s Painting Prize 2023 and former head of painting at the Royal College of Art.
25 AugustĀ – 9 September 2024 (by appointment)
Greystone Industries, Greystone House, 87 High Street, Wickham Market, Suffolk IP13 ORA
Call Graham on 01728 747833 or email grahamncrowley@gmail.com to arrange.
View Graham’s walk and talk guide to this year’s exhibition on YouTube
Graham has selected my painting Bending Hectic, the title ruthlessly nicked from a song by The Smile who’s sound accompanied the painting of the work. Weird song, weird painting, tentative shadow, sky of violets and yellows above an impending wave, caught somewhere between a dream and reality.
My muted palette serves the North Sea murk and my introverted nature well. I’m a messy palette painter; letting colours and mixes bump into one another gives delicious, unexpected shifts. Sometimes I renew the palette so there is some control issued over the chaos.
I refer to my photos as source material for the first layer of paint when I work quickly to capture the complicated facets of moving water, the smear of diluted paint and movement of the brush attempting to emulate the ever shifting surface. Beyond this the source is discarded and an illusionary manipulation takes over, a tentative shadow merges into darker passages of paint, light touches in the merest shift, a shadow emerges, appearing and disappearing as with the movement of a cloud. I want my shadow self to meld into nature, yield to its power.