Tumble Painting

I have always been interested in moving subjects. In my landscape studies I like everything to be moving, water, foliage and sky. After learning to draw, the moving human body became my central theme firstly In the 1980s in my compositions of pedestrians in city architectures or punk musicians in urban spaces. Eureka moments occurred while watching divers dancing off the cliffs in Nice or viewing the Charles Atlas videos of Merce Cunningham dance pieces and from the 1990s I started directly working with dancers and circus artists attempting to capture the moving body and in particular falling figures in jeopardy. Here I show two aspects of my work with one recent series and an older series painted in the 2000s. The more recent "orbital" series depicts apparently freely moving divers or circus artists spinning or falling in an electric yellow or universal blue space or over the horizon between sea and sky. The figures are organised geometrically like hieroglyphs or randomly recombined to form complex compositions. In the second earlier "Fragments" series, falling figures are painted on canvas on balsa wood fragments in order to break up the background in different ways: they are falling together from or into a broken universe of ordered or chaotic fragments exposing a new or empty space behind. A wider view of my work than presented here can be seen on my two websites www.nicholasstedman.com and www.gouachelandscapes.com. To view click the above small atlas symbol