Exile and the Kingdom Drawing

Finn Campbell-Notman M.A. R.C.A British, London 1970, Finn grew up in rural England, principally Norfolk and Somerset. Over the years he has lived and worked in Cornwall, London, UK, San Francisco, USA, Brussels, Belgium and Andalusia and Barcelona, Spain. • An artist is essentially a lens through which the universe is refracted. Each lens however is unique. The ongoing aim is to make my particular lens as clear, focused, personal and distinctive as it can be. For me this means being continuously vigilant to life’s mutability, to have an open and receptive fragility in regard to this flux and from a position of attentive awareness and inquisitiveness attempt to communicate my experience of it through the work, thereby to arrive at some small amount of reciprocal wisdom about both myself and the world. The artwork as such is the result of that which has been projected by the universe through me and thus the imagery is an attempt to create both photographs - in the sense that my work focuses this ‘light’, and to create images in the sense that they are an expression of the distillation that happens within, sometimes over the course of extended periods of time. It is to be an instrument to record and express the tension and play between intra-mission and extra-mission, the meeting of the brush or pencil being the focal point. The artworks are thus microcosms, simultaneously process and practice. When I achieve this there is a stillness and poise, a subtle sense of the uncanny or perhaps, in Han’s Belting’s terms; the ‘aura’; a kind of calm vivacity to my work. My principal wish is always to improve my ability to communicate more eloquently through my work and for the work to speak with honesty and clarity. I think we respond to an artwork in a variety of ways but we especially respond to those that 'feel true' irrespective of whether they are representational or not. That response to 'trueness' or perhaps ’rightness’ I think derives from the tangibility felt by the viewer of the experience shown i.e what has been distilled within the work is transmitted and apparent to the receiver. Art is to me thus also an ethical/moral activity; the personal, socio-cultural, political and natural are inseparable and I try to reconcile all this within and through my work.