About

My painting starts from a drawing of a remembered moment, a place, an event, a view or a feeling. What emerges sits somewhere between abstraction and representation. These drawings are coloured, most often in water-soluble wax pastel, and are themselves developed from an observational sketch or a photo I've taken.

I use these drawings as the starting point for new compositions, which I build up intuitively, through successive layers of reworking. Each painting's colour palette is carefully considered, and often limited, to set a mood. The paint itself does further work: mark-making creates contrasts of surface — rough against smooth, opaque against transparent — while edges, left crisp or allowed to soften, hint at structural or organic form. Through this process the subject is pared back — simplified and summarised rather than described — until what's left is as much about shape, rhythm and mood as likeness. It suggests its subject without quite describing it: something glimpsed and half-remembered, left open for the viewer's own interpretation.

What I'm aiming for is a kind of double satisfaction — a composition that works as paint, colour and form, but which also carries the ambience of a real place: a landscape, an interior, a garden, a street.

Bio

James Nairne (born Guildford 1960) completed a Foundation course at Kingston University before studying Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, where he specialised in painting and printmaking and graduated with a BFA in 1981. That year he showed in the New Contemporaries exhibition.

He went on to work as artist in residence at a school in Essex, and took part in a number of group and solo shows before training as a teacher, completing a PGCE in 1988. He then taught in secondary schools for 35 years. In 2018 he attended a summer school in contemporary painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, and since retiring from teaching has had more time to develop his own practice.