Welcome!
Welcome to colinpovey.com. Here you will find a selection of works by Colin and news on upcoming exhibitions. Please contact the artist for commissions, further information or to find out more about his work.
My work and vision
My work represents the evolution of a personal visual language. My paintings are informed by a wide range of artists, encompassing influences as far apart as 18th Century English landscape and portrait painter, Thomas Gainsborough, and neo-expressionist Cecily Brown.
I do not follow any strict rules when I paint but feel my way until I find the right balance, harmony and poetry in the paint. My paintbrush searches and explores the world that it is experiencing, discovering its rhythms and producing a dynamic, coherent surface of paint. I strive for a lyrical flow, that carries calm, considered brushstrokes alongside active, spontaneous passages of paint.
I am never concerned with how ‘realistic’ something looks. Instead I instinctively select the defining features of the place or person I am painting, and enhance them to bring out the mood or character of the subject.
Fundamentally my work is an ongoing quest to discover all the complexities of paint.
Here is a passage from E.H.Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’, which may give you an insight into the mind of an artist and some of the problems he faces:
"When it is a matter of matching forms or arranging colours an artist must always be 'fussy' or rather fastidious to the extreme. He may see differences in shades and texture which we should hardly notice... He has, on his canvas, perhaps hundreds of shades and forms which he must balance till they look 'right'. A patch of green may suddenly look too yellow because it was brought into too close proximity with a strong blue - he may feel that all is spoiled, that there is a jarring note in the picture and that he must begin it all over again. He may suffer agonies over this problem. He may ponder about it in sleepless nights; he may stand in front of his picture all day trying to add a touch of colour here or there and rubbing it out again, though you and I might not have noticed the difference either way. But once he has succeeded we all feel that he has achieved something to which nothing could be added, something which is right - an example of perfection in our very imperfect world."