John Heywood-Waddington

Artist Statement

My paintings are about movement, rhythm and intensity of feeling. The human figure has always been a strong inspiration for subject-matter, fuelling my ideas.

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.

My paintings are rooted in physicality and the body - I move around a lot when painting, making gestural, expressive use of the brush. 

There are two sorts of narrative in my work. One is grounded in the representational, figurative tradition and the other is performative, process-driven, where the act of painting becomes a subject itself. What interests me is the interplay and tension between these two approaches to my work - and between the languages of abstraction and figuration. 

Much of my work originates in a recognisable world: from lost souls in pub interiors, recreational scenes in rural landscapes; wild, 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 want to distil in the painting. 

Cinema has always been a strong influence in my work. One of the rare qualities painting has, for me, is its capacity to magnify and slow down these fleeting moments, cinematically, highlighting the incidental detail and drama in the apparently mundane. 

In the process-driven body of my work, I invite the viewer to contemplate the journey of the painting’s construction, the narrative of mark-making and vigorous, expressive brushstrokes - which tells its own story. Embracing accidents, material and process, I explore the territory of psychic landscapes and automatism. 

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.