tera preta Painting

Dermot Punnett was born in 1980 on the island of St. Vincent. He attended university in the UK and received his BFA from Falmouth College of arts in 2004. Punnett went on to receive his MFA from Bath Spa University in 2007. He was longlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize in 2010, and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Charlie Dutton Gallery and A.P.T Gallery in London. Punnett was awarded a Fellowship from The Reed Foundation to attend a residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2013. He has also been featured in Arc magazine, a caribbean contemporary arts publication. Dermot now lives in the U.K with his wife and children and is currently represented by Tarpey Gallery in the UK and Nuedge Gallery in Barbados. "I start my process with source imagery, which I usually find from trawling through the Internet, or personal photographs... They have to be evocative, without any direct meaning, spaces which can be occupied and explored. An important aspect in choosing an image is also the suggestion it gives of translating into the stuff of paint. Digital processes such as pixilation and the printing process suggest forms of mark making for me....There is something very satisfying about copying an image and then pulling and pushing it, moving it in and out of itself. I try to create an oscillation between the illusion of representation and the physicality of paint. I like that sense of the image being barely held together in a state of flux..the geometry within the work functions as a compositional distillation, to extract what I see as a purity of form. It also creates a middle ground between the painted image and the heavy scrapes of paint on the surface, engaging the plasticity of the medium of paint."