Nick Bodimeade: Tracks, Trails and Tarmac

About

Nick Bodimeade is an internationally collected painter whose work is poised between the figurative and the abstract. He further explores the sensation of movement through landscape. The strain and dash of pumping road and mountain bike around provides for a rapid, direct and energetic engagement with the landscape, somewhat at odds with the cliché of the artist tethered to an easel before the subject. But this slalom, through the changing aspect of the view, furnishes an abundant source of glancing images ‐ a well spring of ideas for paintings. So, Bodimeade is driven equally by a voracious visual consumption (the accumulation of glimpse after glimpse) and a powerful appetite for knowing the world bodily (a kind of muscular landscape choreography). And the excitement of this energised, first‐hand interrogation of what the land can offer the painter is rendered through a commensurate panache in painterly methodology. Bodimeade’s wealth of knowledge of the art of painting, its history and more especially the critical contemporary embrace of lens‐based imagery as source material, is crucial, as is his fencer’s attack of mark making. He has a sure instinct for processing the raw data of photographic ‘snaps’ into dynamic abstractions that construct two‐dimensional armatures for holding the space of the canvas open, making an arena for the daring performance in paint – poised, breathy, committed, exhilarating.