Tony Heath, fresh & lively life paintings

Tony is an invigorating contemporary artist based in Gloucestershire. His work celebrates the pleasure of movement and colour through an original and vibrant style. He creates work which is ambitious, unrestrained, determined and exciting.

Painting is essentially a two dimensional art and a fascination for me is to create the impression of depth through the use of colour over colour, line over line. Hans Hoffman viewed mass and space as being capable of being created by the push and pull of interacting planes producing a sense of movement. Movement is the expression of life. The human face and body, with their infinite permutation of movements, have the ability to communicate, or to hide, their feelings, sometimes intentionally and, at others, inadvertently. I enjoy examining these perceived feelings and my reaction to them, expressing them with much more than representation.”

The Abstract Expressionists (Motherwell, Kline and De Kooning in particular) Modigliani, Schiele, Cecily Brown, Goya, Matisse, Rembrandt and Auerbach are some of many influences.

My earlier abstractions of Titian’s large mythological works such as The Andrians and Daphne and Actaeon emphasise multiple nakedness making perfect subjects for exploring their sensuous movement, both overt and hidden, in a different context. Social and political exploratory works such as Blind Leading the Blind and Artists at the Bar are composed of extracts from famous artists, celebrating their virtuosity in unusual combinations. My In Denial series such as Havana, depicting student flamenco dancers learning in a crumbling physical/political setting, and Haven, a claustrophobic Cornish port painted just before the actual flood at nearby Boscastle, examine our tendency to focus on small problems while ignoring potential disaster; Asteroid being a more obvious example.

I use a limited palette with strong colours in unusual combinations. I find acrylic, painted straight from the pot to avoid the dulling effect of mixing with water, to be most suited to my present work with its quick drying quality enabling greatest fluidity of stroke and dragging of colours. I also love the wide range of tone which can be produced from compressed charcoal. Both features are shown in my current Body Language works.
Tony Heath
Jan 1, 2020

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