Bernard Charnley
Bernard Charnley is an English painter born in 1948 in Reading and is now based in Frome, Somerset. Charnley trained in graphics and painting at Leeds College of Art. His interest and study in philosophy led to graduating from the Open University with his MA. This informs his body of work which, through distinct series and ranging across the figurative and abstract, reflects with imaginative renderings on the nature of social fracture.
Current selection
These oil paintings address land and seascape traditions through which Charnley assembles a critical visual dialogue on the zeitgeist of contemporary crises. Balancing abstraction and figuration, the work engages with spatial tensions between geometry, surface, and illusion. Using an intuitive and gestural process, accumulated paint layers increase complexity. Through scraping, scoring, and reworking, an unsettled suggestive surface results. Titles drawn from chance phrases further disrupt meaning, inviting multiple interpretations.
The conceptual underlay to this series lies in ongoing collective societal and ecological perceptions. Metaphor and ambiguity troubling the scenic form is the resulting method of approach.
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