Fresh Art Fair, Cheltenham — April 2025

In April 2025 I exhibited at the Fresh Art Fair in Cheltenham, held at the Centaur Building at Cheltenham Racecourse. The fair is a well-established fixture in the art calendar, drawing a broad and engaged audience over several days and bringing together a wide range of galleries and artists working in contemporary painting, sculpture, and printmaking.

The Work on Show

The selection of paintings I brought to Cheltenham in 2025 drew from my most recent studio work — landscapes in oil and cold wax that continue the exploration of the forest and fenland subjects that have been central to my practice for many years. The works are characterised by their rich, layered surfaces: built up through successive applications of paint and medium, then scraped back, incised, and reworked to reveal depth and texture.

The fair offered an opportunity to show these paintings to a new audience and to engage directly with visitors about the process and materials behind them. The conversations that take place around the work at events like this are always among the most rewarding aspects of exhibiting — they offer a directness of engagement that gallery shows, with their more formal atmosphere, do not always provide.

Live Demonstration

As in previous years, I gave a live painting demonstration at the fair — working in oil and cold wax in front of an audience, and talking through the process as the painting developed. Painting in public introduces a particular kind of pressure and focus that I find genuinely productive: the constraint of working in real time, without the opportunity to leave a passage and return to it the following day, tends to produce work of a directness and energy that is difficult to achieve in the more considered atmosphere of the studio.