Tomo Campbell

Tomo Campbell produces large-scale oil paintings, which he sees as akin to free jazz: intuitive, unexpected and using free-form marks to interrupt our normal flow of vision, he creates rich surfaces that rhythmically move the viewer’s eye across the canvas. The artist describes how he tries to make “the paint vibrate... to make it look light and delicate and on the cusp of shifting”.

Campbell’s signature work Thereanachronistically combines elements from antiques vases, medieval tapestries, and Renaissance and Victorian paintings, to express movement and human activity. The paint itself seems mobile in this work, as colour leans in one direction and then quickly changes, creating a feeling of speed and flexibility. This piece came from his first solo appearance at Cob Gallery in April 2018, where he produced his largest works to date, made up of two canvases stitched together.