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Bernard Charnley

Frome, Somerset, Southwest England
Bernard Charnley works primarily in oil paint, emphasizing color and materiality. His current imagery engages with ideas of crisis, impermanence and change through a reinterpretation of the scenic tradition.
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The oil paintings in this series explore landscape and seascape traditions through the elemental interactions of air, land, and sea, creating a visual dialogue on change, transition, and crisis. Balancing abstraction and figuration, the work engages with spatial tensions between geometry, surface, and illusion.

Using an intuitive and gestural process, embracing ongoing technical and conceptual development, the paintings presently feature accumulated paint layers, selective use of oil bars, and canvas insertions. Through scraping, scoring, and reworking, an unsettled surface results. Titles drawn from chance phrases further disrupt meaning, inviting multiple interpretations.

An original motivation lies in ongoing collective societal and ecological perceptions. Metaphor and ambiguity troubling the scenic form is the resulting method of approach.

 

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