Robert Sherratt

Artist Statement

I am an artist based in England.  My paintings result from a continual orchestration of fragments. All my works are made of paint, however my working process owes a lot to the practice and philosophy of collage.

In current works large areas of the paintings are constructed from sheets of dried paint.  I keep an archive of hundreds of samples of manipulated paint; the final compositions are the result of sifting through these fragments and their possibilities; curating the fragments into a new whole.

I like to be surprised by the worlds that emerge from this process, so my subject matter is often very open and eclectic.  The register of the pictorial language can change from almost photographic to an insistently material surface presence.

I am often trying to trap a sense of light and space in the works to establish some kind of beauty, and to push against the essential flatness of painting.

What I intend in these paintings is a freeze-frame of an ongoing process of construction and deconstruction; a process that sometimes overspills the boundaries of a single visual language.

In a sense I am not painting landscapes, but images of temporary sculptural installations.  In some of the paintings the paint fragments become props assembled to create an imagined landscape ... something more like a stage or film set, sometimes populated by puppet or toy-like figures.

I often think of painting as being a kind of intelligence in its own right: a sentient force that has its own ideas about what forms and images it wants to make, and how it wants to influence and channel itself through individual artists.  My process is calibrated to let me respond to suggestions from the material.  To escape myself as much as express myself. 

If you would like to contact me you are welcome to use the following randomly generated email

[email protected]