Artists Name

Nigel Robert Pugh

Statement -

I graduated from Cardiff College of Art in 1978 and worked as an Industrial and Architectural Designer and Illustrator until the early 1990s when I moved to West Wales to become a full-time painter. I have taken part in solo and group shows and have work in private collections worldwide.

My work includes large scale semi-abstract paintings, watercolours, monoprints and drawings, sculpture, b&w landscape photographs and more recently, aerial photography.

My sources are drawn from a very wide range of interests but are fundamentally from landscape and environmentally based physical and mental structures. I have long been fascinated with maps and have been trying to develop and visualize a subjective mapped view that has, at its centre, the concept of the un-positioned viewer and the plausibility of a ‘view from nowhere’. Dispensing with the positioned viewer allows for a pluralism which can transform the mapped view into a variety of modes and narratives and allows for the geography of the mind to enter the geography of the landscape.

I began to explore these ideas some time ago in a conscious effort to break with my own legacy of linear representative work.

Recent flying adventures have reinforced the ideas with easily accessible concrete examples of how perspectives and scales can warp, overlap, and contradict themselves.

The mental process that results in an image is, for me, the most important part of any artwork. The ‘final’ image itself is secondary, it represents the result of an exploration of ideas which will then lead on to the next work - consequently the outcome is often a series rather than a single work.

I very rarely pre-conceptualise a ‘finished’ work – there are usually a few components and elements that I wish to include, but when first confronted by a canvas, I have little pre-conception of where they are eventually going to lead me.

This is perhaps an unfashionably modernist approach but I see no reason why the strictures of artistic autonomy associated with modernism cannot be combined with post-structuralist and conceptual ideas bearing on the ‘uses’ of Art and its dual role in both the artist’s and viewer’s experience of the work.

Within each series I try to develop a broad conceptual framework that evolves, and often crumbles as the work progresses – it is often ambiguous, illogical and unfinished, but it serves its purpose, which is to give a visual structure to a mental process.

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The following quotes are something of touchstones for me…….

Jean-Paul Sartre observed,

"…may I ask whether anyone has ever accused an artist who has painted a picture of not having drawn his inspiration from rules set up a priori? Has anyone ever asked, "What painting ought he to make?" It is clearly understood that there is no definite painting to be made, that the artist is engaged in the making of his painting, and that the painting to be made is precisely the painting he will have made. It is clearly understood that there are no a priori aesthetic values, but that there are values which appear subsequently in the coherence of the painting, in the correspondence between what the artist intended and the result …”

And a painter’s quote from Francis Bacon ….

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery”.

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Current work and exhibitions –

‘Lines and Strata 2 – Contemporary Welsh Drawing’ Touring group show throughout 2010 – Opening at Denbigh Library Gallery March

Custom House Gallery, Cardigan – Aerial Photographs

No 8 Gallery, New Quay – Small works/local topographical, prints.

2009 and preceding - Waunifor ‘End of Summer’ annual exhibition of leading West Wales artists.

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