Michael Jarvis: Marks and Fragments
14th February to 26th March 2018
Open evening 15th February 7-9pm
Please ring to view 020 8464 5816
Michael Jarvis is an artist and writer working at the Breeze Creatives studio complex in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is a painter who has had several one man exhibitions, for example at The Everyman Gallery in Manchester in 2012, at the Newcastle Arts Centre in 2013 and Holy Biscuit Gallery in 2016. He has made a series of commissioned works in Newcastle and Edinburgh and has work in a number of private collections locally, nationally, and in Europe.
Michael Jarvis gained an MA (Fine Art) in 2001 at Northumbria University and followed this up with a PhD at Lancaster University. His doctoral research was focussed upon the practice of painting, notably ideas about the continued ‘deaths’ and resurrections of painting that surround painting from the 19th century to the present day.
Previous exhibitions have been held at The Holy Biscuit Gallery in Newcastle in 2015,The Everyman Gallery in Didsbury, Manchester in 2012 and at the Newcastle Arts Centre in 2013. Michael has made a series of commissioned works in Newcastle and Edinburgh and has work in a number of private collections locally, nationally, and in Europe. Michael has written about painting and has published articles about painting practice in the Journal of Visual Art Practice and about art education in the International Journal of Art & Design Education.
Michael’s work is concerned to explore the nature of various painting practices and their commonalities and differences. Central to this is a concern to reiterate the importance of painting’s material presence, and, in particular, questions to do with maintaining the physical character of painting in the context of a predominantly digitally mediated visual culture.
In recent years he has made work connected to explorations of Berlin and Copenhagen as well as the cityscapes of the North East of England. Though the paintings are nominally ‘abstract’ they all tend to derive from the experiences of travelling to particular places and through specific landscapes. These basic experiences are annotated through drawings and photographs made en situ.
A central aspect of Michael’s practice, and one which is highlighted in the current exhibition at Bromley Arts Centre, is to use a combination of drawing and photographic material to make small collages consisting of different fragments of marks, lines, colours and images which enable me to arrive at a more individual and idiosyncratic impression of the painterly process. I then use these collaged fragments as a means to develop a series of larger paintings which are more freely composed and improvised.
Another key aspect is to begin a series of paintings with different and random marks. For example oil-stick on tracing paper is used to inscribe and transfer marks onto a surface. These improvised traces suggest various ways into the further development of the painting. Michael likes to work on several pieces at once, so that ideas from one painting feed into the others.
Michael Jarvis
January 2018