Sleepless Painting

Artist Statement: Fawcett’s painting practice explores visual dichotomies - concrete versus abstract, discipline versus freedom, and order versus chaos. Having successfully carved a niche earlier in his career as a figurative painter, a turning point came when teaching adults with learning disabilities. The profound joy that his students showed in their approach to painting, was life affirming and hugely inspirational. ​Tension is created by conflicting renderings of the spontaneous and the deliberate, the conscious and the unconscious, or the strange and familiar. The resulting image is one that appears familiar but resists recognition. At first glance, his paintings introduce new forms of communication between irregular lines, naive marks offset by regular forms. His work is characterised by immediacy of a painting process, working with the urgency of decision making along with more considered composition.