Making studio visits to our artists and seeing how their practice is developing is a treat. From visiting Ed Saye’s studio recently, it was clear that his practice has reached a pivotal point, a stage where he has found a subject and established a way of working that he can momentously build upon. This follows on from a period of rigorous practice – of technical exercises, including traditional drawing from the figure and making representational images to achieve a firm foundation with strong skills before working on more ambiguous and abstracted images – he is an artist with great integrity.
Saye is working from a range of sources, notably found postcards and family photographs from the 1950’s – 70’s. Fascinated by the post war period, he taps into the idea of the modernist dream and its utopian ideals – capturing something of the spirit of those times, when there was an atmosphere of hope (in the latter half of the 20th century) making painted images of this subject from a contemporary perspective, referencing these utopian ideals as a now faded dream, through a filter of how we may now collectively view that period of history in retrospect: “..with a less hopeful and utopian sense of the world and more compromised ideals, influenced by the reality of today’s global politics – the decline of the west and rise of the east and middle east with more cynicism and less naivety and idealism in general.” – Ed Saye
Nostalgia is an essential quality of the work – a sense of the hope that may have existed in that time, a combination of personal and collective memory. Saye loves the colours and quality of light in the vintage images he works from, though his intention is not to recreate a photographic image but to make paintings with a sense of their atmospheric quality – merging and blending to create composite images – building up layers in transparent paint in a slow and subtle process that takes ever longer to complete.. in some cases months, as the work becomes more ambitious, ambiguous and intriguing. Complex and successful work is underway in his studio – these are exciting times for Ed Saye, who is building great momentum and focus with his practice.
It’s a good time to invest in his work, with opportunities to buy a range of original pieces, ranging in price from £100 to £2,000.
– Sarah
