Townscapes: expressive, mixed media art

Service Description

In this workshop you will have an opportunity to work from photographic references, using charcoal, pencils, oil pastels and collage, uncovering and applying techniques to create your own images of urban landscapes. Mike Waldron is a contemporary expressionist painter from Manchester, with a studio based in Macclesfield. With the exception of a few years in the south of France, he has consistently lived and worked in the North of England, which provides a backdrop and inspiration for much of his work. In exploring a diversity of subjects, platforms, materials and approaches, he strives to avoid being restricted to one style or narrow range of media. aiming instead for his style to emerge in his colour palette, brush-work, and subject choices. “I prefer to describe myself as a painter, rather than an artist” is a statement that invokes something of the way he views his practice. “I embrace the craft of it. I like the painterliness to show through and I am always happy to leave the ‘workings out in the margin’, - even if the answer is off the mark. “ Mike Waldron maintains that all painting is about how it is produced, with materials, techniques, layers and changes of direction all forming part of the dialogue that the painter begins with the work. “ I expect that that dialogue will continue when I am out of the frame…. when it’s hanging on the wall. In which case, I like to leave clues, a sense of what was going on in my head when I created the work. But I don’t want to over- explain and remove the responsibility, or even the opportunity for the viewer to take from it whatever it is they see. So there will always be clues, and there are always stories embedded, waiting to be decoded and dug out.”