About

My practice is immediate and spontaneous, a direct connection with life as it is experienced, and as engaged with time as with space, people and place.

I paint experience rather than appearance and I try to be honest about what I see and feel, and about how the painting is made. Brushstrokes and grounds are exposed, the process visible. Vivid, clashing colours disrupt and energise the surface, pushing through into the everyday scene.

Every painting is rooted in close  observation, filtered through my own experience and moment in time. The story is always there, sometimes easy to access, sometimes concealed. I am looking for the cracks in the everyday, moments of strangeness or beauty, humour and sadness, the surreal, the sinister.  The full range of what it feels like to be alive.

I paint everyday and everywhere: outside, inside, on the go in a car, on a train, on a plane, on the beach, by the river. I paint with acrylics on stone paper, which I find completely smooth, welcoming the paint and allowing texture, no resistance.

I am an emerging artist and I divide my time between the UK and Canada.

All rights reserved. Copyright Virginia Crompton.