Featured Artists:Colin Binns

About Colin:My artwork derives from my experience originally as a designer and subsequently as in artist in education and practice. This mix has generated artwork encompassing landscape, abstraction, figure and portraiture.

Currently I centre my work on contemporary ideas of human experience. I am interested in both the individuality and the universality of human character, and also in the way that painting can express something about the subject that is not normally evident from photography or film.

I often avoid literal representation, tending to an approach which can depict visual ideas of people’s body language, moods and energies, and an expression of their inner worlds. My work develops imagery from an intuitive, reactive response in some cases, but also from a disciplined underlying system of form and colour based on Eastern philosophical principles.

My recent work combines autobiographical information and recollected sensations, using imagery from photographs, drawings, and collected memories. These are integrated with elemental forms, colours and keywords connecting with the event or memory I am working with. The resulting works are interpretations of my internal life through gestural marks, colours, forms and symbols.

In making my work, my first responses are made in drawings, mapping out what I see as the essence of an event or sensation. These can develop into abstract or semi abstract ideas, into which I make the first colour fields of the painting. Using a variety of mixed media such as charcoal, chalk, pastel, collage and acrylics, they are then built up in layers of colour, textures and collaged material, over which the final painting is applied with a combination of sponges, rollers, brushes or paint direct from the tube.