Brian Cheeswright's Page
Brian Cheeswright's Page
Profile Information
- Member type
- Artist
- If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?
- Drawing, Painting
- About my artwork
- Beginnings can come from anywhere: with a scrap of a found image in a grubby newspaper; a character written in a book; someone half-glimpsed through the dusty window of a tube train. I do not inquire too closely into the history of my sources, preferring instead to begin back in my studio with only the seed of something. What takes over then is the very slimy, organic smell and erotic consistency of oil paint itself. The source material is only really an ‘excuse’ to begin the all-engrossing ‘act’ of Painting.
Each canvas is a process of discovery but as an Artist who has definitely rejected the open-endedness of Abstraction the results of my endeavours are inescapably Figurative. People and their pathologies are what intrigue me -or rather my own Pathology and the strange myriad of personalities that make up that thing I call Myself.
I am the animator of an endless procession of quirky, sometimes grotesquely awkward, often haunting and restless ghosts that seem transmogrified and depopulated from the history of Art: the dismal, psychological Expressionism of Edvard Munch; the naked dead in the drawings of Egon Schiele, the cut and paste of Pablo Picasso and the fleshy, cartoonish giants of Philip Guston and Max Beckman: Napoleonic Soldiers, Victorian Guttersnipes, Homeric Adonises and Mediaeval Maidens all trapped now in a dumb, ambiguous narrative from which I and later the viewer is left to create their own narratives.
My Grandfather was a Spiritualist “Medium”. Acting through a Spirit Guide he conducted evening Séances in the parlour of his house in North London. He would produce photographs of the ectoplasmic forms which he conjured up. For me the process of ‘summoning’ up the subjects out of the moment by moment act of painting is often arduous, with the surface being constantly built up and erased. Forms emerge like spectres which I must nurture and makes solid; editing down and re-shaping them into glowing, fleshy beings from the dark formless flat void from where they came and from which- if I have a bad day in the studio- they are doomed to return.
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