Ed Brooke-Lawrenson is a painter and portrait artist based in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
Ed has worked under artists including Damien Hirst and Mitch Griffiths and was a semi finalist in Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2023.
For his own work, Ed is currently working on his first love of portraiture, creating studies snatched from daily family life. Whether studying the figure, a landscape or a still life, the representation of light remains the essential narrative aim of the his painting.
His biggest influences in modern painting are John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, Antonio Mancini, Anders Zorn, Ramon Casas and Giovanni Boldini.
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Read more about Ed’s way of working and influences in the short interview below
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What medium do you reach for in your work?
I have been fascinated by every medium I have tried; watercolour, graphite, charcoal, clay, photography, etching… but I always return to oil.
There is something about the dual nature of oil paint that I find very seductive. In its essence, it remains a viscous, greasy seemingly unremarkable material. However, it has an ability to mimic three-dimensional space - to create the illusion of light and texture.
The process of transferring something mundane into an image that can affect someone’s emotions, or say something about human life has always seemed to me like some kind of magic or an alchemical process we don’t quite understand.
Why painting rather than other artistic forms?
My favourite medium to consume might be music, then film perhaps, but as a maker I like to make paintings. There is a broad opportunity of interpretation in a painting that owes to its muteness.
What sets it apart further from music and film, is that it can hold narrative, but not in a linear sense. A painting can utilise various tools including composition, colour and symbolism to represent a theme at different layers of resolution. The viewer can pan between seeing the whole picture and the details in isolation - like a branch of a fir tree represents a form reminiscent of the whole tree. The painter can freely move along the spectrum - from symbolic story telling to photographic reportage - and in theory hide one within the other.
Who or what inspires your style as an artist?
My favourite modern painters (mentioned above) painted in a way that was very realistic and naturalistic, with a simplification of form that was inspired partly by the speed of photography and modern life.
This style of painting, seeing the whole canvas as an impression, vs. individual objects in space, was greatly influenced by the innovations of Diego Velasquez.
I think what my favourite painters all had in common was an impressionistic handling of paint, reinforced with a substructure of classical drawing ability; a simplified and decorative line and edge quality. They worked hard to make their paintings appear effortless. In truth it takes many layers and remodelling to make an image that looks inevitable and ‘dashed off’ (as well as obsessive and tireless practice).
Not everything they produced was a masterpiece, but you have to be working all the time for a masterpiece to occur.
I am trying to work in that spirit, rendering the natural appearance of things whilst leaving the image clearly constructed of oil paint; to play with that tension of illusionism.
EDUCATION:
CAMBRIDGE REGIONAL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, UK
WINCHESTER SCHOOL OF ART, HAMPSHIRE, UK
ÉCOLE NATIONALE SUPERIÉRE DES BEAUX-ARTS, PARIS, FRANCE
SCIENCE LTD, GLOS, UK
MITCH GRIFFITHS LTD WILTS, UK