James Tebbutt Northamptonshire, United Kingdom
James Tebbutt, an artist based in Northampton, produces vivid, gestural and energetic abstract works on canvas using a multitude of media. He has shown his art throughout the UK and his paintings feature in many private collections all over the world.
James' current work demonstrates his ongoing exploration of the medium of paint. Varying styles of application - the drip, the splatter, the expressionistically painted, the flat, the cartoon like, the smooth, the rough, all created with different types of paint, jostle for position on the finished canvas as if desperate for a place in the ‘final cut’. Areas of paint, objects and various marks are laid down as he works then perhaps painted out, or more recently covered over with pasted on fragments of raw canvas, as the work evolves and the composition develops. Happy accidents are as an integral part of the work as the clean and crisp or the neatly painted, one offsetting the other, the process of painting being equal too if not more significant than the chosen visual references and motifs.
The imagery and references used are drawn from a wide variety of sources including magazines, the internet, photographs, news media and fellow artists. This reflects not only his own wide ranging interests and tastes but also the wide range of visual stimulus in the world around us. It is these visual references, their relationship with each other and their relationship with the more abstract, expressionist, paint marks that interests him.
The resultant paintings are not planned through to completion before they are started but instead develop and evolve with a stream of consciousness which links the eclectic component images together. As a result the paintings can have many narratives and are open to a multitude of possible interpretations.