Harry Rudham
I caught up recently with Harry Rudham who is one of the 5 artists in the group show called The Colour of Abstraction at Grove Square Galleries, London.
What is your background , where did you train?
I trained at City and Guilds in Kennington and followed that at Central St Martins and had a placement on the Erasmus program in Germany before graduating in 2019.
Prior to heading to Germany I was producing portraiture and cityscapes. Edvard Munch was a big influence and I would say that my work was looking at darker themes than it does these days. .
What was your experience of Berlin and how has that come to inform your development as an artist?
My time in Germany was hugely influential from the 30C weather for the 6 months I was there, the culture of lakeside and city sun bathing, and the Bauhaus - my accommodation was across the road from the archives and so I spent much time there reading about the work of the design school..
The heat of that summer was a huge impact. it presents itself in my work through colour, and vibrancy. This became my experience of the city.
While i was in Germany i was not producing canvasses but mostly oil pastels which gives an immediate colour. And we were doing a lot of life drawing in the courtyard at the place I was studying. Life drawing was something I hadn’t done since my Foundation course and I really loved doing that again.
‘I LIke to Take my clothes off for you” was a painting I finished when i returned to London and used the life drawing studies. It also references the difference in German and British culture after having watched a city worker in a suit come down to the park and take all his clothes off to sun bathe in a public space. Sunbathing in public and fully nude is totally normal and accepted in German society. This was quite a culture shock to me and that enters my art work and I have taken it as a motif.
Can you talk about artist influences on your work?
I was looking at a lot of Otto Dix, Neo Rausch and Weimar artists. Artists like Seurat and paintings like Bathers at Asnieres.
Spending time in the Bauhaus archives was a great time and has had a huge influence on my work and I was able to also visit the school in Dessau.
How has your work evolved from the figurative that you have talked about to the abstract work you make now? There is mark making with space in your work which makes it both busy but has a quietness like white noise.
My time in Germany and the influence of my girlfriend on my work has meant I havent returned to the darker themes that appear in my earlier work. I feel i have to let the light in. This presents itself as abstraction & colour. The current paintings are oil and acrylic on canvas.
Before lockdown I wanted to show isolation in my work through the separateness of each of the marks in the painting. After lockdown the marks became busy and layered and on top of each other. It makes me think of those images we saw in the news where people headed to the beaches as soon as they were allowed to back in early summer. My marks became crowded in the frame like the crowds at beauty spots in Dorset!
I also have a series of cloud paintings where I have replaced cherubs in the sky with flat marks
What are you working on now?
I am currently working on new paintings, one called Icarus - an abstract analogy of Icarus flying into the sun, it’s quite labour intensive as I have layers of tape masking and revealing different colours and shapes. It’s only part done.
I am also exploring paper making to create more texture in my work, I read that David Hockney has also done this and It got me interested.
See more at https://www.instagram.com/harryrudham/
https://www.grovesquaregalleries.com/
Follow me at https://www.instagram.com/thegitajoshi/