Mark Dunford

Cornish-based artist, Mark Dunford is joining us to lead on the four-day course Drawing with Colour: Flora.

‘My pictures are about visual appearances and ideas related to seeing and observing. 

They are painted usually in front of the motif, where anything can happen.

Painting directly from life, for me, is about trying to secure a pictorial whole, from a series of glimpsed abstract responses.

My primary concerns are looking by drawing and using colour in a specific way. I try to understand how ‘things’ appear by building relationships of colour, scale and shape that connect with intangible and ever-changing circumstances. Colour may be used in different ways; it might be copied or adjusted to work. I am usually driven by how beautiful something looks, continuously trying to balance observation, invention, and imagination’. 

Mark Dunford is among the most respected artists who are proponents of the dedicated observational approach taught by those who studied at the Slade School of Fine Art where Mark studied in the early eighties, learning directly from influential artists such as Euan Uglow and Patrick George, who had in turn been inspired by the approach of William Coldstream before them.

An elected member of the London Group since 2001. Represented by Tregony Contemporary, Cornwall and Browse and Darby, London. Mark lives and works in Cornwall and exhibits regularly in the UK, including the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Mall, Barbican and Whitechapel Art Galleries, London, Southampton City Art Gallery, the Thelma Hubert Gallery, and has exhibited in Europe and America, and has work in collections in the UK, USA, Australia, and Europe.

Mark has extensive teaching experience of over 30 years in the UK, Europe and the USA.