Revolve Gallery

Ian Norris

Ian is steadily gaining a reputation in the North West for his expressive landscape and seascape paintings which over the past ten years have received many awards.

His more recent successes include being elected as a member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts in 2010, and achieving a first class honours degree in fine art at Blackburn in 2011.

Background

Ian was born in Preston and has been passionate about drawing and painting from a very an early age.

Ian initially established a reputation for painting loose watercolours winning many awards. Following on from this success, and keen to develop is skills further, he enrolled on a City and Guilds in Life drawing class followed by a Fine Art Degree at Blackburn; where he developed his fascination for painting in oils.

Inspiration

“I am inspired by the landscape around me and more recently the local coastline where I am fascinated by the intense light and vast open space. I paint exclusively from observation and feel that painting is a fusion of my subconscious and the outside world. I also draw my inspiration from the famous landscape artists such as Constable, Cézanne and David Bomberg.These artists combined intense observation with a deep intuitive and emotional response to the subject. It is this emotion that I hope to convey in my paintings.”

To Canvas

"I regularly go out into the landscape and usually work on the same motif over a period of weeks or months. I will produce numerous small oil studies and drawings in order to understand and know the subject intimately.

When working on large canvas or board my process will entail returning to the subject at the same time of day in similar weather conditions, working for one or two hours in a session. I am always searching for the right way and painting is a document of these different ways and directions. The picture comes up from my subconscious and the more layers I put on the more the canvas speaks to me.

I want my paintings to be a record of a personal struggle, an exploration that sometimes never reaches a conclusion. The outcome is affected by external elements such as the weather or how I feel. In all of this, drawing from the motif is the key, the image being thus transformed by my experiencing the subject over a period of time."