our environment as anywhere else. By painting them I challenge the comfortable and clichéd images of this environment and society.
Bold shapes, colours and line appeal to me and I like to extract from a chaotic scene some sense of order. I fight with colour, form and texture to achieve a balance between the solid and the delicate and my limited palette allows me to concentrate on expressive mark making.
I have recently turned to my home city of Oxford for my subject matter, a city renowned for its architecture and famous scenes. I have taken these famous scenes, (Magdalen Bridge, The Botanical Gardens, Punts, The Bridge of Sighs, The Radcliffe Camera, The Oxford Skyline) and dispensed with the romantic view of them. Instead I
Artists Statement
I am an urban landscape painter capturing scenes of modern life.
I am interested in sites that are tucked away or hidden from us or places we pass every day but fail to notice or choose to ignore.
I began examining the urban landscape after a visit to Coventry, where I used to live and work as a solicitor. I became interested in what constitutes a person’s surroundings and daily visual experience. For some this is a pleasant thing whilst for others it is arguably not.
I like to find the locations we would rather ignore and present them in a new light. I enjoy the challenge of making something visually appealing and exciting from the bland and ugly areas of a city. Whether we like it or not, industrial wastelands and concrete structures are as much a part of
have painted them as a passer by might glimpse them on their way to work.
The street lamp, the bollard and the barrier are as much a part of the scene as the classic building itself. The Oxford skyline doesn’t always appear in perfect sunlight, it is still there on a cold, stormy winter’s day. In winter the punts are all moored on the river, redundant. The Bridge of Sighs which teems with tourists through the summer months is a solitary and ignored sight in the winter months.
I hope my paintings make the viewer look at a familiar scene in a new light and in turn appreciate their own surroundings all the more.
Sarah Moncrieff