Nick Bodimeade

Nick Bodimeade’s paintings combine his fascination with the transformative possibilities of painting and its practical processes, with his interest in landscape as a work place, a place of pleasure and leisure and a place of ever increasing environmental and social concern.

He describes the experience of space as having for him a central role in both the experience of painting and of landscape. Perhaps you have stood on a hill top and felt a desire to throw yourself into space, to consume and be consumed by it and maybe to have felt this desire to be located somewhere deep within.

What is it in our animal nature, our evolutionary history and our cultural field of reference that causes us to respond in particular and personal ways to such stimuli? Some finding evidence for god and ideas of the Sublime, and for others, more fundamental drives like the desire for food, shelter and procreation. For whatever reasons and in what proportions, how landscape and its representations engage with this atavistic stew of powerful feelings is a key interest.

In his paintings, evocative colour, illusionary space, tactile handling and formally articulate composition are applied to the photographic source material, reconnecting it to the mind/body experience of being in the outdoors.

He changes how he paints according to subject matter and how he wants the work to be experienced, sometimes working with intensely coloured, slippery, creamy paint and fluid, sensual gestures, at others, with thin, rainy, slurry colour and a more tentative drawing where the image feels as if it is just emerging from the material. The ‘how’ of the painting as important as the ‘what’. Nick describes wanting his paintings to meet the viewer half way, engaging with shared experiences and ideas of our relationship to landscape and the flora and fauna that inhabit it.

Nick Bodimeade has extensive teaching and advisory experience at a number of UK art colleges at Foundation, HND, BA and MA levels: Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College; University College Chichester; Canterbury Christchurch University College; Amersham & Wycombe College; Northbrook College, Worthing & North Oxfordshire College of Art and Design, Banbury.