Emerging artist James Matthew O’Connell graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2015, in 2014 he won the Hans Brinker Painting Prize and in 2015 he exhibited alongside Louise Bourgeois and Bridget Riley in the show ‘Repetition and Variation’. He uses the passage of time as a subject matter for his work. The repetitive mixing of colour, loading of the brush and application of paint is a response to today’s acceleration of culture and images and a way to dislodge visual conventions, thus demanding greater space, time and attention. “I often think about Cezanne’s comment, ‘one must see nature as no one has seen it before’, in response to post-industrialism and the changes in our visual experiences, especially now in the digital age.” The intention is to create an object that is both immersive and romantic in terms of contemporary escapism.
