John Heywood-Waddington

Artist Statement

Making use of gestural, expressive brushwork in my paintings, I’m interested in movement, rhythm and intensity of feeling, and the interplay of abstraction and figuration.

The human figure has always been a strong inspiration for subject-matter, fuelling my ideas. My paintings are rooted in physicality and the body. 

Deriving much of my source material from personal photos, observational drawings and sketches, there is often a suggested narrative - though the viewer can draw their own conclusions. 

There are two narratives in my paintings. One is the representational, figurative and the other is process-driven, where painting becomes a subject itself. 

My work often originates in a recognisable world: from pub interiors, recreational scenes in rural landscapes; stormy seas with freezing bathers, or ghostly, semi-abstract seascapes to urban milieus in which figures look off into the distance, absorbed in solitude, facing the unknown future. 

These are everyday scenes - fragile, fleeting moments that I aim to distil in the painting. One of the qualities painting has, for me, is its capacity to magnify and slow down these fleeting moments, distilling the incidental detail, peculiarity and beauty in the apparently mundane.

Recurrent themes and motifs are landscape, both metaphorical and physical - the vulnerability of the human within nature, time’s transience, the solace of the past yet also the ambiguities and illusions of memory.