A Different View - Abstract and Still Life Painting

Chris Illsley 

A degree in Printed textiles at Leicester College of Art and visits to the Far East during my early twenties, have given me a lasting interest in colour, pattern and texture.
Most of my paintings are of still life using decorative ceramics, fabrics and flowers as my subject matter.
I work mainly in mixed media on card or thick watercolourpaper applying collage and torn tissue paper to the surface first. I then spray and diffuse acrylic inks and apply opaque acrylic using rollers and materials that will leave a printed pattern.
The next stage is to establish my design with water soluble pencils and thin layers of acrylic – slowly building up to more intense areas of colour. Often I finish a piece with oil paints to achieve fine detail and stronger colours.
Other paintings are oil on canvas or board. Some are very stylised graphic images others are simple still life studies done for the pure enjoyment of using the oil paints.

Will Illsley

It’s taken over 40 years for me to return to where it all started.I went to art college in Loughborough in the late sixties, drawing painting and sculpting – after which I followed a course in design at Leicester College of Art. Several years of teaching was followed by starting a pottery in 1978. In 1987 Chris and I moved to Stamford with the family and set up a gallery selling the work of over forty other artists alongside our own.  We wound up the gallery in 2005 after almost twenty years in business, and I stopped making pots two years later and returned to sculpture, and now painting working with acrylics and mixed media. To a greater or lesser extent the work is abstract – most of it starts from specific subject matter, landscape, boats, figures etc. - it then evolves through an intuitive process of change and development. 

If the work manages to resonate with a few people who perceive and share my world of colour and forms, that is reward enough.

Exhibition Live: 21/11/2022 to 08/01/2023
Preview to be held: 26/11/2022