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 observation, filtered through my own experience and moment in time. 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.

What do people do during periods of upheaval? I'm working on capturing that. My subjects are family, friends and strangers, anyone near me. What is happening while I paint is integral to my practice, whether or not it is the direct subject of the painting.

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. My paintings have been exhibited at the Society of Women Artists 165th Annual Show (2026) and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Summer Show (2026). TheLeeds Summer Show (2025), Bath Open (2025), Cambridge Art Benches (2025), Halifax Colours (2026) and Fox Yard Studios, Stowmarket.

All works on this website are © Virginia Crompton. All rights reserved.