“Contemporary Visions of Paradise Lost” Ed Saye’s New Studio and Artist Support Pledge Award

Ed Saye has moved to a new studio and been awarded an artist support pledge. This relocation also brings new opportunities for showing the artist’s work.

In Search of a Cool Place by Ed Saye, £1,500

The space in which an artist works is of paramount importance: the four walls, the light, the locale in which it can be found. As Ed Saye puts it:

To me an artist’s studio is a kind of sacred space and I’ve felt this way since visiting my grandfather’s studio as a boy. It was a place of wonder and intensely interesting, where I experienced a sense of belonging. I would sneak in whenever we visited my grandparents’ house.

Ed’s move from London to Winchester heralds a turning point in his career. His new studio is bigger, allowing him to work on several canvases at once. And Ed has just been awarded an artist support pledge. We are planning on bringing Ed Saye’s work together for a show soon in his new creative centre of Winchester, Hampshire.

The ARTIST SUPPORT PLEDGE Open Studios 2022 holds the intention of “celebrating studios, accessing knowledge, and supporting practice”. Ed’s been selected for #studioinview and will join the international mentoring programme run by We, The Muse.

Ed shares how he likes “to work in an ordered but stimulating environment with books, postcards, sketches etc around me while I work.” We think this NewBlood Art Master’s latest work showcases his strongest qualities, those the gallery has seen him develop over his career. These multi-layered paintings need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated, which is why we’re in talks to get them on show soon. As a reviewer of his 2017 exhibition wrote:

The distinctive feature of Ed Saye’s paintings lies in what he does and doesn’t contrast. On the one hand, human constructions are set against nature, modernity against decay, and mainstream culture against alternative society.

You can read our previous feature on his monumental work ‘Happy Hippy Home’ in full here. In this work:

The creaturely and the mystical, the alien and the terrestrial co-exist in a medley palette distinctive to Saye’s works. From a distance, the composition thrums, muted by the harmonising of the colours; up close, the vividness of certain tones are apparent, a brighter note.

The painting isn’t busy, but rather, inhabits a quiescence drawn from the balanced forces of expectation and retrospection. Ed Saye describes his works as “contemporary visions of paradise lost”.