Spotlight on Nick Bodimeade and Charlotte Snook, Spring 2020
Two painters talk about their different approaches to painting figures
Nick Bodimeade and Charlotte Snook are exhibiting small, luminous figurative paintings in the 2020 Spring Collection. Both artists explore abstraction and the possibilities of oil paint. However, their immediate sources are quite different. Nick begins by photographing contemporary life, often those who share his life. On the other hand, Charlotte heads for the deep back catalogue of art history as a starting point...
Nick explains: ‘Photographs enable the fleeting to be scrutinised. Wild swimmers, sea and sun bathers - their bodies embedded in the surrounding landscape providing an opportunity to exploit the fluid, immersive, qualities of paint where a figure can dissolve into tone, colour and gesture and merge camouflage-like with its surroundings. This, combined with my interest in the relationship between photographic realism and process based abstraction, give the paintings a sense of flipping back and forth between the visually and physically experienced.'
‘Photographs enable the fleeting to be scrutinised. Wild swimmers, sea and sun bathers - their bodies embedded in the surrounding landscape providing an opportunity to exploit the fluid, immersive, qualities of paint where a figure can dissolve into tone, colour and gesture and merge camouflage-like with its surroundings. This, combined with my interest in the relationship between photographic realism and process based abstraction, give the paintings a sense of flipping back and forth between the visually and physically experienced.'Representation slides into abstraction, and bodies dissolve into landscape. "The swimmer enters the water and merges with the landscape. Figure and ground become one. 'This becoming one with the surrounding landscape or what painters refer to as the Figure/Ground relationship perhaps partially explains the need we seem to have to expose ourselves to the elements.
“ I guess we all have our own theories as to what is going on here, but I feel our current contested relationship with nature gives a fresh perspective on this timeless subject.”
Charlotte writes of working in her studio: 'I am surrounded by books about painters: Goya, Van Dyck, Rubens, Joseph Wright of Derby, Velasquez... I know the paintings in these books fairly intimately and use them as starting points for - often - a fairly playful and speculative painting of my own.
'But they are heavy to prop against my easel so I now use my phone to work from. It sits next to my board and I can search the internet for, say Poussin or obscure Italian Rococo painters. I can be led down wonderful, hitherto unknown, paths.
'I love painting the nude, I love silk and satin fabrics and at the moment am fascinated by Putti. Yellow Satin, after Van Dyck is one of a recent series of small paintings based very loosely on the allegorical painting by Van Dyck of Lady Venetia Stanley, a painting commissioned by her husband after his wife’s premature death. It is full of symbolic references. The origin of my painting Woman Embracing a Cloud is, I’m afraid, obscure. I failed to make a record of it at the time and have been unable to locate it since.
“ At the end of my day in the studio, I take a photo of the work in progress on my phone and later edit and analyze the image to see if it begins to work on its own terms without reference to the original.”
FEATURED PAINTINGS BY NICK BODIMEADE: J & J 23 x 26cm; Willow Shade 23 x 18cm; B Swimming 1 23 x 18cm, all oil on board.
FEATURED PAINTINGS BY CHARLOTTE SNOOK: Yellow Satin after Van Dyck 16 x 21cm; Woman Embracing a Cloud 16 x 21cm, both oil on board