Ben Brotherton

I like the tension between what is seen with the eye and what is traced by the hand. The difference is sometimes enormous. The struggle to nail down a contour leads to fluctuations on the paper between subject and ground. These vestiges of former ideas of colour, shape and tone are the physical accumulation of the thought process of painting; a process that flows between bouts of energetic instinctive response and a slower detached analysis. I like the idea that a painting is a distillation of the ebb and flow of a permanently changing experience.

David Bomberg, Paul Cezanne, Richard Diebenkorn and Sargy Mann are among the many artists who inspire me. What impresses me in their work is their use of paint, colour, space and light. Bomberg’s notion of “the spirit in the mass”, though I’ve doubtlessly misinterpreted it, has become important for me. I take it to partly mean the sense of energy and urgency that is felt when painting from the motif.