ARTWORKS | chris-foster

Paintings and drawings

A bit of background

From 1967 to 1972, I spent 5 years studying visual arts at arts schools in England. Ever since leaving art school, I have always worked with visual arts alongside music. For many years I worked as a community artist and played an active role in developing the UK's community arts movement. Among a whole range of projects, I worked on large scale murals, both painted and mosaic, made photographic exhibitions developed and used portable photo-silkscreen equipment with a big variety of community groups, and I also worked in multi-disciplinary teams with drama workers, dancers, story tellers, textile artists and so on.

My recent exhibition of paintings 'Sjónarmið / Perspectives', which was on show through the month of November 2021 at the SÍM salnum, the Gallery of Samband íslenskra myndlistarmanna / The Association of Icelandic Visual Artists) in Reykjavík, was well received by the people who attended it. Now the paintings are packed away again and I am planning what comes next. It was very useful to see the work outside the studio setting and I certainly gained new insights through seeing it in an exhibition context and talking with the people who visited the show. Here is a little video that gives an idea of how the exhibition looked.

Comment from the exhibition catalogue:

"The paintings in the exhibition explore the ambiguities and connections between the works as physical objects, the rhythms and shapes on the paintings' surfaces, and the ways that the interplay of colour and tone affect our perception of these features." "It is my intention to make subtle paintings that cannot be 'taken in' or fully 'understood' quickly. They take a long time to execute, and seek to reward extended contemplation by the viewer."

Here are some examples of work from the exhibition and previous years