About

I have produced this website to share my creative work. I welcome feedback and suggestions for future work. My paintings are available to purchase as limited edition high quality Giclée Prints — see the ‘Shop’ tab for details. Enjoy your visit! 

About me

I’ve been a serious artist since the late 1970s. During a philosophy degree and a career in public administration I supported my practice through study, performances or occasional exhibitions in York, London, Brighton and Bristol. Since 2016 I’ve spent a lot of time on community art, painting, writing and film-making. My practice includes solo work and collaborations and I support the Bristol Refugee Artists Collective.

About my work

Themes: when we encounter new experience and choose to familiarise ourselves with the newness, it ceases to be strange. It’s a pity to lose the surprise and excitement which drew us in. Better to rediscover the strange in the familiar — ambiguous, uncanny.

Artworks happen in various ways. ‘Memories of the Food Chain’ is a painting which grew slowly and came to seem, mainly, a metaphor about the ecosphere, my professional concern for many years. ‘Strange Masquerade’ is a music video made by BÜG about our situation during Lockdown. ‘Sign Painting’ is an image-text experiment about actual and imagined holiday travels.

The process of thinking with/about a place or material directly through its colours, sounds and textures brings our awareness directly into the present setting, producing new sensations of memory and time. A fluid traffic of imagination between different senses and different kinds of signifiers — likenesses, symbols, harmonics and other modes of representation. It can be like a text unfolding or a history or memory-scape, its singular network a knotty rhizome or a river’s smoothed transit.

 Ben Glatt, July 2022