John Heywood-Waddington

Artist Statement

My paintings are about movement, rhythm and intensity of feeling and, though there is a suggested narrative, the viewer is invited to draw their own conclusions. Figures look off into the distance or, absorbed in solitude, face the unknown future, caught in fragile, fleeting moments. Often these moments are everyday, recreational scenes - there’s nothing posed or grand about them. It’s in the painting that I hope to capture, magnify and distil a lyrical quality in these activities: people in cafes or bars distracted, or on a journey somewhere - lost in landscapes. Prizing the materiality and physicality of paint as much as the subject matter, how I paint becomes as important as what I paint. In a sense, the paint becomes the subject. I want the painting to evoke the process, the performance of the artwork’s construction, and for the viewer to feel the intensity and physical presence of the marks, the brushstrokes and the colour, as much as I want them to recognise the external world represented - and recreated. My subject matter is of the world: landscapes, people, everyday scenarios and domestic interiors, but what excites me is the point in the work’s construction where the representation becomes a dance between figuration and abstraction, the language of gestural brushstrokes and mark-making asserting its own meanings. Recurrent themes and motifs in my work are landscape, both metaphorical and physical, the vulnerability of the human within nature, yet our salvation through it, time’s transience, nostalgia, that longing for the solace of the past, and the ambiguities, illusions and unreliablity of memory. Primarily I’m a painter, but my interests and experience extend to other art forms such as film-making, print-making, poetry and writing.