TONY BIRCHWOOD

" I was born....I started painting....then it was now."

This is how Anthony Birchwood's website opens. He says he can't remember when he began to paint, he can only remember doing it. "I was brought up in a small village on the eastern shore of Morecambe Bay, looking west towards the Lakeland hills. You have to see that view to understand my lifelong obsession with the pictorial equivalents of light and volume".

Although always the painter, his first flirtations with an arts career came out of his interest in music.

He played with several small time bands in the early 1970s, touring the free festivals of the time.

Certain events brought that chapter to an abrupt end and Birchwood turned exclusively to painting.

After five years at college he settled in Brighton and went straight on to having his first solo exhibition at the Netherbow Gallery in Edinburgh. This was followed the next year by a solo show at the Sundance Studios in London. At the time Anthony's work was figurative in nature, compressing a passage of time (such as an evening at a nightclub or a party) into a single overlapping and continuous image.

In 1983 he moved back north to his beloved Bay. Getting together with several talented artists in the area, they founded the Luneside Studios Artists Co-operative; a successful group-studio still thriving today.

Birchwood had two solo shows and took part in group exhibitions during the next few years. His work was well received and reviewed but sales were limited. He decided that he was probably in the wrong place to sell the kind of work he was producing. So, in 1987 he moved to the USA for the first time, settling in Los Angeles.

 After a small show at The Miranda Gallery on Melrose he was offered an exclusive representation contract by art dealer, Lori Chiswick. This proved a very lucrative and successful association, and turned into the blueprint for how his work would be marketed for the next twenty years. Commissioned, abstract pieces where paint was trapped between substantial plates of glass were one of  Anthony's most valued and sought after works yet the pull of a more varied and natural landscape ultimately resulted in his departure from Los Angeles in 1990.

After selling an entire collection of new work to a single client, Birchwood moved to Spain and a studio in Marbella. Work was now a synthesis of abstraction and landscape and the start of the interest in light and volume began.

The next fifteen years saw a lot of coming and going between studios in Marbella, London and Lancaster (plus a short spell in Sarasota, Florida where Anthony painted vivid representations of the beauty which exists below the surface of the water amongst the reefs ) with occasional exhibitions and a mainstay of private sales generated through representation. It was during this time that the present project of paintings slowly began to evolve.

Expressing the beauty of Morecambe Bay was a venture always intended, but started later than expected. The obsession with the area around the bay remained as strong as it was when Birchwood was a child. His skill and passion has produced a strong body of current work exploring the particulars of  looking over large expanses of water to a distant landscape, locking huge skies to the horizon. The paintings are created out of complex mixed media and oil glazes, spontaneously worked from the memory of place rather than sketches or photographs which Anthony feels can cloud the sensations, blurring the memories that form an integral part of the experience. Colour also tends to be used emotionally, rather than descriptively, drawing closer reference to feelings engendered in the painter and, by extension, the viewers of this talented British artist's work.

anthonybirchwood.yolasite.com