Drawing 18

Originally from Lancashire, Tony Aldrich grew up in the South West. Following a career working as an architect in London, Cambridge and Bath, he returned to Devon in 2001 to take up a lectureship in Architecture at the University of Plymouth. He also taught design and developed a postgraduate programme concerned with enlivening students’ spiritual and personal creativity. Throughout this time he returned to the process of painting and drawing that had for him always been ‘at the heart of things’.

 

In his work Tony Aldrich continues the tradition that regards painting as a meditation upon sensory and emotional experience, an empirical endeavour as much as an intellectual one. He sees art not so much as an antidote to the ceaseless clamour of contemporary life but rather as a conduit for re-engaging within the calm centre that is always there within it, believing that the creation of a painting or drawing is a distillation seeking to capture the ‘essence of being’ rather than the ‘anecdote of description’. Working mostly with acrylic and charcoal, his ability to use space, colour texture and light, produces exciting images. He is not afraid to show his emotion on canvas. In 2013 he committed full-time to his art practice and enjoys the creative development and the opportunities that this affords. He has exhibited his work widely throughout the South West.​

A piece from the 'Floating Bridges' series.

A group of paintings that explore the repeated journeying back and forth on the ferries between Plymouth and Torpoint. When I saw them described as ‘floating bridges’ on the Ordnance Survey map I knew their role was poetic as much as functional.

 

In parallel to their external reality – their steel, rust, machinery and rhythmic repetitions – there is a correlation to our inner emotional and more abstract world. For we too have our own mechanisms and plans, and we also have our oscillating rhythms, repeatedly transforming foreign shores into home soil. We and the ferries are therefore facsimiles of each other. Our lives are the accumulation of our shuttling between opposites, knitting back together what was separate. We are all floating bridges.

 

As with all of my work, these paintings and drawings aim to engage with how our material reality is linked with our poetic reality - The way that each conjures the other.

 

Graphite on Myler

43x35cm

Framed in an open frame