Totem No. 2 Painting

I'm Stuart Hyde, painter and fine art photographer, born in the UK's West Midlands in 1960, but now lucky enough to live and work in the Altiplano badlands of Granada province in Southern Spain. In addition to formal training, I studied with both the renowned British Post War artist Paul Rudall, 'Modern' to the core, and the markedly more traditional but no less successful English landscape painter W.R. Jennings. Even now, years later, my work still seems to veer between their respective, often polarising influences. Maybe more importantly, I still have the same daily joy in painting that these vastly different painters both had, and instilled in me. I consider myself primarily a painter/photographer of my environment, but one who occasionally flips out on the corner to find myself in a field of photographic or painted abstraction. It might be considered a somewhat schizophrenic approach, but I've learned to accept it and embrace the aberrations as they appear. Representative or abstracted, the outer landscape or an inner landscape, both my painted and photographic work is as concerned with subliminal impressions and memory, real or imagined, as it is with sketches and scribbled notes made painting plein air. Photos are interpretive, carefully and consciously avoiding any nods to documentation, while paintings use texture, form, and conscious line balanced against the randomness of intuitive mark making, and the emotional, expressive response to evolving surface and space.