Joel Onyems

At school I was never a great art student, in fact I recall in my very first school report my art master chose one word to describe my efforts that Christmas term, “lazy”. To a certain degree he was right as I could never quite get the point of replicating 3D space, but fortunately, his low regard of my work was never quite enough for me to loose complete interest in the subject.

In 2015 I took up a weekly art classes in watercolour with a local artist, Bridgette Tompkins. Bridget’s class however quickly clashed with the demands of my day job and l stopped after a year. Nevertheless, Bridget’s teaching  enabled me to see paint as a less formalised, structured way of representing ideas and before long I began to experiment at home by mixing the rigid structures of photography with the pliable effects of paint.

By taking a mixed media approach, I have been able to do more than just recreate objects in 3 dimensional space, but offer a complete reinterpretation of that space. Here the various shapes and colours generated by the process of abstraction and adaptation become constituent parts of a visual language which replaces the function of words and sentences. This is not simply an attempt to narrate a particular situation or event, but one that seeks to elicit a response from one’s emotions and draw out sensations or experiences deeply lodged within the psyche.