About
Mike Fenton

About Mike Fenton

For a more in-depth look at my work please see my website: www.gallerymikefenton.co.uk

Our experience of the world is fragmented, and reality is only revealed to us in partial glimpses. We often try to elucidate, or analyse aspects of our experience, but this, most often than not, ends up obscuring and confusing the bigger picture.

I'm not interested in portraying beautiful panoramas, or scenic views, I'm interested in the landscape we walk past every day and don't give a second thought to. I want to capture the deep wonder and mystery of nature, but also at the same time, its banality, its ordinariness. These ideas of beauty and banality, of the commonplace and the mystical, which exist at the same time in everything, may account for the fascination landscape and nature holds over us.

I want to duplicate this sense of mystery and confuse the viewer initially, to create an uncertainty in the their mind as to what they’re looking at, e.g., a photo, a drawing, a page from a book, a reproduction of a 19th century painting, etc. This uncertainty reflects my own when faced with the landscape and my knowledge of previous landscape painting, and my need to respond to it somehow but unsure how to proceed.

I'm working on a series of landscape drawings taken from photographs of my local area. Some of the drawings are masquerading as illustrations from a book, and have white space around them and a false ‘plate no.’ and ‘title’ added below. This is because I want to contrast them to 'plein air' painting as exemplified by the impressionists and make a landscape picture that seems far removed from that way of working, i.e., something done indoors and without the actual view in front of me. This is not because I don't like the impressionists or painting outdoors but because I don't believe there is any one correct way of working from reality, there's just different ways.

Exhibitions:

Various group and individual exhibitions including:

Sept 17-19 2010 Brighton Art Fair, Corn Exchange, Church Street Brighton. www.brightonartfair.co.uk
Aug 2010 Ludlow Summer Exhibition, Palmers Hall, Ludlow
2010 At the 2 Fish Gallery, Bridge Green Farm, Gissing Road, Burston, Norfolk, IP22 Tel: 01379 740 528
July 2009 'All Mixed Up' at the Eyestorm Gallery in Ipswich.
May 2009 Norfolk Open Studios at the Arts Factory in Hall Road Norwich
Mar 2009 Eastern Open exhibition at Kings Lynn Arts Centre Nov 2008 Group exhibition at the Art Factory, Norwich
June 2007 Group exhibition with InPrint at the Welborne Arts Festival, Norfolk.
Aug 2006 Two person show in The Hobart Gallery at Blickling Hall, Norfolk. Sept 2005 Fringe Festival, Bally Shoe Factory, Norwich.
June 2005 Two person show at The Harleston Gallery, Norfolk.
2005 InPrint at Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester and The Cut, Halesworth.
Sept 2004 Fringe Festival, Bally Shoe Factory, Norwich.
Jan 2004 Target Follow Wembley Point Corporate Headquarters 1983-94

1982-1994 various group shows including:
The Whitechapel Open; The Royal Overseas League; The Cleveland Drawing Biennale; South London Gallery Open; The Guardian sponsored Art for Sale at Whiteleys.