Introducing Ashley Hold

Opening tonight we have an exhibition of the work of five artists, showing for the first time at Beside the Wave.  These  artists are all well established on the contemporary art scene  and we are very pleased to be able to include their work in the gallery. 

I shall attempt a blog introduction to each of them over the next few posts.  The first to cooperate with my nosy questioning is Ashley Hold.  He  is an academician of the Royal West of England academy, has had work accepted for the BP portrait award, exhibited in the Hunting Arts Prize, the discerning eye among others.  He is also a lecturer at university college Falmouth.

His paintings are simply beautiful, quietly melancholic with an enormous sense of place.  Often painting in the evening or at night he describes the search for some mental space as being very important. 

The paintings have the nature of a daydream, a moment when one gets lost between two worlds, awake in  the middle of the night, caught staring both at and through your reflection in a window.  They have a meditative quality and seem to be perfectly resolved.  

    

Paintings, like the parked cars at night can take up to a year, slowly evolving into the final conclusion. 

Imbibed with a  filmic atmosphere, I can almost hear music as I look at them.  A musician, Ashley says that he often switches between painting and playing the piano, so perhaps the music is trapped within the paint.

His teaching seems to aid his painting and he says that this informs his work, influences come from constant study talking about and focusing on new and different disciplines.  Although his style is very consistent there is an openness present in the paintings.  Sometimes, he says, he can search for days for a subject, walking and climbing until it is found then producing many paintings of the same subject as an example the trapped boulder series.

 His studio is a bedroom, easel next to a piano, his bike and computer, it is unassuming and unpretentious.

His paintings are unassuming and unpretentious and absolutely out of this world and very much a part of it, all at once, I am sure that you will enjoy them as much as I have... now to pin down the other artists!