Listening Paintings - People in their places

Opening Dates and Times
Exhibition period 26th Jan - 6th Feb 2022
Wed - Fri 13:00 - 18:00
Sat & Sun 12:00 - 18:00
And by appointment ned@nedcampbell.co.uk

These pictures are portraits in the traditional sense – individual sitters at a moment in time; people in their places. The subjects are alone in their familiar space listening to their own private thoughts. They are aware of being looked at, but over the course of a sitting I observe them getting lost in their thoughts, communing with themselves. 

The writer Paul Beatty said that when you listen to yourself listen, it adds some layers between what you’re thinking and what you think you’re thinking. It’s what I watched my sitters do, and what I was conscious of doing myself as I painted them. Together, my pictures examine passages of inner life from a particular milieu at this particular time.

The pictures share certain other qualities that contribute to the sense of a group. They combine flat graphic shapes with splashy, loose marks and fully rendered areas. Some make explicit the underlying geometry of a composition – its artificiality – others find subtle ways to draw it out. It’s a search for a natural organisation, a ‘rightness’, in the feeling of an image. 

This formal investigation tries to make and keep an emotional connection with the subject – the rational, ordered and structured merged with the subjective and imaginative. It’s two ideas at once: knocking Neoclassicism and Romanticism together to see what comes out. 

About me 

I studied at Yale University School of Art. My early career in editorial design and publishing in the United States expanded to my role as a creative director at Wolff Olins in London, and my subsequent work as a brand consultant to arts organisations. I have always been a painter.

ned@nedcampbell.co.uk and Instagram @n_e_d_art