Simon Ogden
Click image to enlarge.
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'the bishops volcano' 800 x 800 mm , mixed media on canvas including 24 K gold leaf and copper leaf.
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Shipping included.
To purchase in a different currency contact us. (NZ$3700)
Click image to enlarge.
-
'the bishops volcano' 800 x 800 mm , mixed media on canvas including 24 K gold leaf and copper leaf.
-
Shipping included.
To purchase in a different currency contact us. (NZ$3700)
Click image to enlarge.
-
'the bishops volcano' 800 x 800 mm , mixed media on canvas including 24 K gold leaf and copper leaf.
-
Shipping included.
To purchase in a different currency contact us. (NZ$3700)
Biography
I was a student during the late 1970s and early 1980s, graduating initially from Birmingham Polytechnic with a BFA in Sculpture and then four years later from the Royal College of Art with a Masters in Painting.
My work draws from a long-held interest in European and American Modernism and Surrealism. In this I interweave my allegiance to the Arts and Crafts tradition, and the long-standing debate about the definition and role of the decorative in the fine arts. Combined together, these forces open the door to a varied dialogue which contains figuration of and symbolic references to the landscape and the body as well as the transformation of materials and the extension of functions.
My studio work moves across painting, object-making, design, printmaking, photography and drawing. Each of these areas of creative activity reinforces and extends the possibilities of my continuing artistic practice. I have always been an avid collector of materials and an obsessive viewer of environments, surfaces, histories and forms. Travel has always been a significant trigger to the expansion of my visual world.
Most of my work is reliant on the gathering of found objects and forms that can suggest a beginning. During the last 15 years I have been building pictures with a variety of materials, for example, by inlaying plywood into plywood, linoleum into linoleum, by pasting canvas onto canvas and building objects out of found materials and forms of all sorts. My work always involves references to the history that these materials had prior to their reprocessing.
See Simon’s Lockdown Interview here -
About this work
“ The bishop’s volcano “
This is a languid and hypnotic narrative where your eye settles onto the horizon where the bishops volcano is simmering in the distance.
I was very taken by an early religious painting that I found in Umbria. In the painting is an image of a bishop’s hat, the volcano. The blue rose growing in the diagonal corner of the picture I discovered on linoleum pillaged from the inside of a duck shooting hut on the banks of Lake Ellesmere Kiatoriti Spit New Zealand and references the Rose in The Little Prince.
