Meta Vita I - Tom Banks
Meta Vita I 2016
Oil on canvas 61cm x 61cm
Tom Banks
Tom is a painter of stories. You will find no tableau depicted on his canvases though. What you will find will probably be a tree or a building, a single object placed centrally, seemingly for us to focus on. Mundane in nature or form, they are lent drama by the apparent spot light picking out our muse against the murky background. But the longer you pause and take in the scene being presented, you will become aware of the potential drama coming from the peripheries and what is being concealed.
Whether a power station or a 1970s suburban house, it is the unknowable interiors behind the facades that is central to our viewing experience. These buildings are containers of secret stories. The walls hold a void. The void is a prompt for the viewers imagination, a zone of limbo, where our ability to conjure up beasties is as important as the beasties terrible appearance.
Bio
Tom graduated from Kingston University in 1996 with a degree in Fine Art. He has exhibited in Spain and throughout the UK. Having solo exhibitions in Wales and around the South Coast. He has been selected for numerous open calls including the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2018, 2015, 2014 and 2012) and 20 Painters at Phoenix Art Gallery, Brighton. He has attended residencies in London and Hastings. In 2016 he won The Beep International Painting Prize. His work is held in private collections in the UK and Spain.
How does your work for this exhibition relate to Uncertain Edges?
The paintings I have included in Uncertain Edges are of power stations, the type you might see while traveling along motorways or glance through hedgerows while navigating country lanes. These large buildings, all cuboids, spheres, and cylinders connected by pipes and walkways, are usually situated away from populated areas. Having the appearance of being plonked in the landscape. In my paintings they are shifted, sitting incongruously on the horizon line.
Tom Banks
Can you explain your artistic process?
My process always starts while getting from here to there, a walk or a drive, a quick snap. Mostly I haven’t set out looking for a subject to paint. It has been a glimpse of something, somewhere I’ll have to return to at a more opportune moment to grab some photos from which I will work. That “something” is usually a building, a tree, a garden that has piqued my interest. The forms and their relationship to their surroundings have offered up some sense of drama to me. Often it will be something I will have passed numerous times, but at that moment the light, the time of day, has altered the appearance. It will resonate in a different way.
In my studio I’ll search through these photos, cropping as I go, searching for an image that speaks to me from which I will paint.
Tom Banks
Can you explain something about the content of your work and the inspiration/impetus behind it?
The impetus for these paintings was a car journey through France that took me pass a number of power stations. But the seed was planted in my childhood. When we moved to Hastings from South London my dad got a job at Dungeness Nuclear Power Station, a set of huge buildings plonked in the landscape, a shingle outcrop on the edge of the English Channel. It will have been around this time that I saw the 1957 horror film Quatermass II. It was filmed at Shell Haven oil refinery in Essex, all cuboids, spheres, and cylinders connected by pipes and walk ways, and occupied by workers possessed by aliens. My subsequent paranoid imaginings were to be expected.
Tom Banks
How and where do you make your work?
I work from images on my phone or tablet due practicalities. My studio is a room at the back of my house in St Leonards on Sea. Stacked paintings along one wall. Separated by a bench with brushes, paints, a broken turntable and unplayed vinyl. Another wall taken up by a cupboard with tools. Leaving one main wall to hang canvases on which to paint.
Tom Banks