An introduction to James Drinkwater

Informality is thrilled to announce ‘A Day By the Sea’, the second showing in the UK of contemporary Australian artist, James Drinkwater. The exhibition introduces a suite of recent paintings reflecting the artists' compassion about intimacy, place and memory and the archive of history, on the Australian coast where he lives and works.

James Drinkwater is an artist whose work reflects personal fragments about history and our emotion relative to experience. Interested in the land of our richly textured world and the found objects attached to an archive of history sensitive to a place, Drinkwater constructs a response working across, poetry, collage, sculpture and painting to draw his own language from love, intimacy and memory.

In the studio, mark-making and assemblage are physical acts in which Drinkwater creates works about the interior of his life. In the landscape itself, he records distinctive personal motifs by, drawing and writing poetry, influenced by the sensation and the experience of emotion whilst participating with what was once there before him, protecting and creating his own diary and history of our land.

“Each painting is a journal entry, a direct transfer from an experience. In a simple day by the sea, I am both participant and witness. Visual documents become compost to draw from and mine via the most magnificent yet unreliable source; human memory. Memory is my preferred point of reference, a reservoir of snapshots correlated daily are sorted and stored. Then comes permission, which allows my memory of the event and the act of painting to compound and galvanise to become whatever it needs to become, walking the tightrope of what to control and what to give over to chaos. This is an exercise in letting go. To give permission to process allows for new pathways to emerge new ways of painting. In this alchemy, I am both an author and a student. As an 'Intimist' I find paintings or ideas for paintings, everywhere in the everyday. A bather juxtaposed by the angle of a beach umbrella with its chameleon canopy underpinned by the patternation of a towel resting on yellow. Things imagined on the ocean floor, revelations at the ocean shore”.

James Drinkwater is an artist who lives and works in Newcastle, Australia. He has held solo exhibitions in Australia, UK, Germany and Singapore, and has been included in major group exhibitions worldwide. In (2019) Newcastle Art Gallery held ‘The Sea calls me by name’ a 10-year retrospect for the artist. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship and has been a finalist in many of Australia's most prestigious awards including the Wynne Prize (2018, 2017, 2015, 2014), Sulman Prize (2016), Paddington Art Prize (2017, 2016, 2014), John Glover Art Prize (2018, 2017) and The Kilgour Art Prize in (2018). Work is held in private collections in USA, UK, Australia, Singapore, Germany. James Drinkwater has undertaken residencies in Germany, Kenya, Paris and Tahiti. Major selected Public Collections include, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Newcastle Art Gallery, ArtBank and Allens Law Firm.