NewBloodArt: Conversations with artists Sarah Ryan

In this week's podcast Sarah visits Laura Menzies in her Cornwall studio. Based in Falmouth Laura reflects on environments that surround her as a painter: whether that's solitude, or the amazing light of the Cornish coast - its mythic serenity that makes its way into her paintings. People often tell Menzies they find her work calming; some of her works hang in major buildings in London, with countless professionals passing them by each day. 

Before she was a painter, Laura was a dancer, which she connects to her method of making paint move across the canvas: visceral and dynamic. Laura speaks about this, her recent career highlights, and more..

Sax Impey’s parallel careers as artist and sailor merge in his work, which brings the experience of the open ocean back to land through the medium of paint. Awe defines them: our perceptual and emotional response to the momentous. In this interview Sax talks about the importance of working on a scale larger than the span of arms outstretched, and his current impetus to work on a bigger scale. His exquisite descriptions of far-flung seas, and journeys through storm-ridden seas transfigured by maelstroms, evoke a crystallized relation between human consciousness and the natural world. The result is seascapes both fascinating and magnificent to behold, of this realm “we can’t live in… only survive”. Listen to the full podcast to hear more about Sax’s studio overlooking Porthmeor beach in St Ives, traversing the globe by boat, and his process creating works that have consistently captured the imaginations of viewers, collectors and gallerists across the world.

Here’s an extract, with more to follow soon, of our recent interview with Sax Impey, who shares with us a life and work intertwined with an environment that “we can’t live in… only survive.” The sound of the surf intersperses the conversation between Sarah and Sax in his studio: the constant rush of water flattened into an even tempo, rhythmic and soothing. This will be utterly transfigured when the next gale blows: Sax describes how in such conditions the floor of his beachside studio moves up and down, the windows in and out – like being on a ship. Hearing Sax speak about his experience out on the open ocean is revelatory. He tells us what it is to catch the welcome sight of a bird after days on the water: “you engage with it with your whole being.” Of a friend who spent his life as a sailor he speaks of the “effortless quality to his understanding of how to sail a vessel”. Listen to this short extract now ahead of the full interview in the coming days..

‘History Revision’ is the name of a new series of portraits by Keith Robinson, featuring the same exquisite colour choices and compassionate treatment that won him second prize in last year’s BP Scottish Portrait Awards. Looking back over his own history in this conversation with Sarah, Keith reflects on the importance of competitions for his unconventional path as an artist. Leaving school early, he travelled around the UK with friends, working various jobs. His intended A-level studies in maths, art, and physics – with an eye to pursuing architecture – would later, like his work in offices, come to bear on the subject that has made his career.

It was, he says, a time of action, not over-thinking; a perseverance paralleled in the search for the perfect artistic subject. This proved to be the paintings of tower and office blocks that Keith has become known for, in addition to his portraiture. Buildings such as the old Birds Eye HQ on the Thames and Hannibal House of Elephant and Castle, those that populate this country – visible from motorways and inner cities alike. It clicked for him that such buildings can “sit like a canvas on the landscape; literally sit on the horizon” and the result is a unique aesthetic, between representation and abstraction. Listen to the podcast to hear more on how the formalism of Keith’s subject offers him liberation as an artist, and how in life, as in art, he has always trusted the process.

Sarah visits Toni Cogdell in her home studio in Bristol

Sarah visits Steve Burden in his home studio in Somerset.