SHAUN FERGUSON
Shaun Ferguson artist information:
Shaun Ferguson is a graduate from the Royal Academy Schools. A previous outright winner of the Discerning Eye, ‘New Discovery Award’ (at the time the largest financial award bestowed on any artists in an open competition in the UK). Shaun’s work has been praised by critics and held in major private and public collections around the world, including Dublin’s Museum of Modern Art, Ulster Museum and the Durban Museum in South Africa.
Other awards include the Henry Wyndham Prize, the Elizabeth Greenshields Award and the David Murray Award for landscape painting and a finalist in 2011 Discerning Eye Awards.
“Capturing people in a quiet moment of reverie and achieving a balance between paint and subject matter are my aims with the paintings. To both represent and give some inner life to a figure is a compelling and often elusive challenge.” – Shaun Ferguson, Artist
For enquiries and availability please email info@fairfaxgallery.com
Shaun Ferguson says of his paintings :
Standing in a shallow bath of rainwater, trousers now soaked above the water line – capillary action. Imagine him taking up this water through his body, a conduit for nature maybe- if holding a plant. On another occasion, nature is to be protected from and he might wear water wings, bright orange, to ward-off the incoming weather. A phantom threat.
A genuinely life-threatening experience, however, was that endured by Lizzie Siddal, after lying in a bath for hours on end so that Millais could paint ‘Ophelia’. A true story that inspired humble redress.
A less earth-bound narrative is the one of Persephone emerging from the underworld to announce nature’s rebirth. A short Disney animation became the seed for new growth, a painting called ‘Spring’. This ‘Goddess’ however is neither prancing nor particularly happy but indignant at her annual re- awakening and the cacophonous sound of insects and mating calls. The pollen count was particularly bad this year!
Draw a circle on a pane of glass creating a portal-now pass-through.
If only he could get those circles perfectly round, he might!
At the lake a figure is similarly mesmerised, by their own reflection and the gloomy blue moon, but we all know they’re just mirror tiles and a party balloon. The props are Inert, like the chair that can never be gifted life through dance but for a while we are connected to them, and they allow us to travel elsewhere. – Shaun Ferguson 2022
