Study For a Garden At the Moment of Awakening

Toby Wills-Hart's canvases are alive with colour, texture and motion. Working in bold oils and acrylics, Toby is a 2023 graduate from Aberystwyth University, and a New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize nominee. Perhaps the most immediately figurative of his works, 'Study For A Garden At The Moment of Awakening' is a riot of deep blues, delicate pinks, rich oranges and yellows with layers of texture and markings suggesting foliage, the movement of boughs and flowers in the wind, and even the suggestion of faces and figures in the foreground. 'The Ecstasy of Being' explodes with joyful pinks, the dark blue, almost black bottom left corner suggesting an ecstatic upwards surge of movement, compounded by the rush of aquamarines and turquoises in the top left and bottom right. With elements of expressionist mark making, and the rich palettes of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gaugin, it is in their abstraction that Toby's pieces are at their most vivid and vital, as he describes his creative process as the paint 'expressing itself through him', surrendering to a meditative process led by instinct and intuition.

Charlotte Brisland, Lecturer in Fine Art (Painting) at the University of Aberystwyth and New Blood Masters Artist:

'Toby embodies painting and discusses his work in these terms. Aligning with painters such as Hilma af Klint, Toby works by intuition, layering paint over paint, a single canvas may be subject to several phases, finally accumulating in a kind of ending which is often re-visited.'