Nicholas Marsh
I mostly make paintings; often oil paint on wooden panels and acrylic on paper currently on a small and intimate scale, sometimes a liitle larger and sometimes I make work employing drawing, works on paper or cardboard and printmaking.
I make art as both an emotive response to, and an attempt to understand - or make some sort of sense of - what it means to be 'here'. Having been doing that for some time the work has evolved through an engagement with both process and language.
I might have a head full of ideas, notions or subjects that inform me – but I now paint quite instinctively and intuitively which allows images to be discovered or found rather than ideas being described or illustrated. I want to explore material fact and yet the ineffable and unfathomable. I want to talk about history; the past, the present, of what is here and of the ghosts that flood in. Painting is the language that I choose to do this with.
Outside of painting itself I have become increasingly concerned with helping a wider community engage with both making and looking at art.
ART EDUCATION
1997 M.A. Fine Art printmaking, Wimbledon School of Art
1986 B.A.(Hons.) Fine Art, Brighton Polytechnic
1983 Art foundation course, Wolverhampton Polytechnic
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2018 'Under One Roof' Two person show at Lewes House
2018 Sussex Open Towner Gallery, Eastbourne
2009 ‘Wonderland’ Paintings and work on paper with Helen Turner and Gary Goodman at The Foundry Gallery, Artemis Arts, Lewes
2002, 2000, 1999 National Print Exhibitions Mall Galleries, London
1998 Box Prints Hardware Gallery, London
1997 Art Awards KPMG, London
1997 Survey, London postgraduates Clifford Chance, London
1997 Open to Print Reg Vardy Arts Foundation, University of Sunderland
1996 ‘Journeys’ Sussex Open Brighton Museum & Art Gallery
1995 ‘Young British Abstraction’ Paintings with Marek Tobolewski and Jez Noond at Silverstein Gallery, New York
1995 ‘Handling Bach’ Paintings with Richard Granville-Smith at Greenwich Theatre Art Gallery
1992 ‘Art for Sale’ in conjunction with The Guardian at Whiteleys of Bayswater
1992 ‘Gang of Four’ Smiths Gallery, Covent Garden
1990 ‘Work from the North Store’ 3 person show, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
1986 New Contemporaries I.C.A. London and touring
WORK IN COLLECTIONS of KPMG, London and Eversheds Contemporary Art Collection, Nottingham
TEACHING & Professional
2018 - Co-creator and organiser of Newhaven Projects and Newhaven Open Call
1997-2001 Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at De Montfort University, Leicester and Lincoln
1988-1997 Teacher of Art and Design in further and secondary education