NICK BODIMEADE

Nick Bodimeade is a painter of everyday life. His subjects in the past have included dogs, trucks, sheds, chairs, lorries and motorways. In this new body of work he concentrates on the beach, a subject with a long term fascination for him.

He says “The beach is like a blank canvas, re-colonised each day, always changing, but with discernible patterns. Its visual structure developing as people respond to terrain, weather, tide and the conventions of personal space.”

This is a subject everyone can relate to - it is a space where we have all done our own looking and thinking. For Nick this is important, he feels the viewer therefore meets the paintings half way, the visual ground work done.

This work is not just about observation, it is as much about the possibilities of painting. Through his confident broad brush strokes and his attention to formal values Nick returns the familiar to us, transformed into a new physical and visual presence.

In 'Red Shorts' the subject matter seems almost secondary to the abstract patterns created by the figures as they sit, stand and walk about, in groups or alone. The eye is carefully led through the painting, always seeming to return to the standing figure whose shorts give the figure its title.

'Beach Geometry' is a large painting where over time figures have been edited out from a crowded scene as the artist searches for structure, finally leaving a single passage of human activity that links fore and background, land, figures and sea.

Nick Bodimeade lives and paints at the foot of the South Downs by the banks of the river Ouse near Lewes and his work is regularly shown in solo and group exhibitions in London and the South. He is currently a senior lecturer in painting at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College.