Artist Focus - Week 4

Jonathan Barber graduated from the School of Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 2008.
Based in Edinburgh, he creates atmospheric abstracted work based around light, darkness, shape, movement and presence.
His recent work consists of large scale abstract landscapes on canvas and board alongside smaller more intricate studies on paper. His developed aesthetic is made up of dark weighty tones bringing depth and distance to the canvas. Accents of colour are skilfully used as compositional tools to entice the viewer to weave through layers and perspective

Liz Douglas lives and work in the Scottish Borders. She studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, completing her postgraduate Masters in Fine Art, Painting in 1993.
 
Her work, which is influenced by specific landscapes, memory, poetry, and music has developed from direct painting of the landscape to a more sensory approach, creating visual environments using pigments, line, print and contemporary media.
Her work reflects her dialogue with the natural world and the element of unpredictability that exists. She also has a wish to explore these contradictions, using the visible and invisible element in the landscape as metaphor.
 
The research processes she uses involves collaborating with scientists and environmentalists which deepens her knowledge of the natural world, and its contradictions. She investigates microscopic elements using a scanning electron microscope to reveal structures and forms from graptolite fossils, alpine plants, tree and plant pollen material. 

Jai Llewellyn‘s paintings are about the process of mark making, the history of a line seen through an abstract picture of the future. Llewellyn works between painting and printmaking with no hierarchy, each discipline informs the other, both focusing on the relationships and juxtapositions of old and new, growth and decay, construction and deconstruction.
Llewellyn works intuitively and often begins by recycling or re-appropriating existing images – drawings, etchings and prints from old books – on which he layers his compositions with marks, lines, giving us, the viewer, a peek into the history of his process, the space to see the artist in action. As a result of the interaction between print and paint Llewellyn‘s work is a wonderfully graphic abstract expression that is both pensive and evocative. 

JFK Turner’s work is concerned with the unnoticed ephemeral elements of everyday life; found objects, marks, stains and the natural effect of time. The objects Turner collects from the street form the basis of the work.
The paintings are not abstract – they are based on something from the real world – for example a rubber band, a screwed-up piece of paper, or a flap on a cardboard box. These are non-objects, just the remnants of life.
The works are closer to objects than traditional paintings. If paint is used it is house hold paint that is poured, smeared and allowed to congeal and crack – like spilt paint on a pavement. In addition to paint Turner uses found materials – wax, plaster, photographs, paper, discarded books and clothes. Working on wood allows the surface to be attacked by scratching, sanding and stabbing. This adds to the works physical quality – like a collagraph printing plate or a religious icon.
Turner takes objects and elements from the real world, combines them together to create another object. The ordinary becomes unusual and other.