THANKS TO TOMMY LYDON

FOR A GREAT SHOW

'CUT OUT ARTISTS' 

CURRENT WORK IN MIXED MEDIA.

Shown in September 2015, a long-awaited solo show, 'Cut Out Artists'  references our cultural climate as well as current and historic art practice and practitioners.  Lydon has produced a phenomenal range of powerful work specifically for this show.    

Some work still available.

Artist's statement:

At the beginning of the twentieth century visual artists began to gravitate towards ever more extreme and diverse philosophical approaches to the ongoing problem of how best to represent the perceived world. This led to a complex pantheon of individual, even idiosyncratic, visions allied to influential groups in turn bound together by a kind of ideological reasoning.

By the middle of the century the plethora of “isms” thus generated could roughly be divided into two camps; those still working in an illusionistic or figurative manner and those brave avant-guardists pushing the boundaries of abstraction. Individual artists could graduate from one to the other, waverers were generally dismissed in a climate of virtual religious intolerance. Strict adherence was the order of the day, not really a healthy climate for those engaged in free thinking.

Like a number of my contemporaries I’ve always thought this dichotomy to be spurious; after all most image making is intrinsically artifice.

Therefore the images in this show self consciously explore aspects of the painters here represented, their cut out profiles containing playful explorations of their practice, the broad range of collaged materials is intended to be liberating, illustrating the fact that the creative process can be very direct and need not always involve expensive materials, indeed its most valuable asset is imagination.