Original painting ‘Top Table’ by artist Chris Bruce

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas

Dimensions: 77 x 77cm

‘I habitually work in series but the common and grounding preoccupation is with narrative — albeit loosely defined as a concern with the forward progress of time.

In my early career (having studied in Cheltenham) I painted horse racing. My locus of concern was transience: the breakdown of material presence, caused by movement through space. A later series of paintings and drawings was concerned with scenes of empty yet iconic places in Europe. By definition, such places have a temporal multivalency: they are both ‘timeless’, and simultaneously current.

I find that Cornwall poses such questions repeatedly. The rocks strewn on land perforated by past generations of men suggest permanence, yet the passage of light across the terrain asserts that time is fugitive. Irrespective of, and in addition to all other concerns, I frequently draw, photograph and paint the land.

My current work acknowledges and is influenced by my feelings about the moment we are living through: one surfeited with stories — movies on demand, box sets, games, the curation of personal narratives on social media; one in which we see the triumph of story over empirical discourse.

I make drawings — graphite on paper, the subject matter of which is found through a process of mark-making; these are in a sense ‘psychic documents’, comparable perhaps to Surrealist automatic drawing, although the action of subconscious engagement frequently yields a relationship with the real world context.

Meanwhile my paintings — made with acrylics and/or oils — are concerned with the resonances between traditional story telling and populist tropes of the current political conversation. The paintings are usually built from a highly fluid sequence of ‘accidental’ manoeuvres.’

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