Terry Shave
Shave is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. He was educated at Ipswich School of Art, Loughborough College of Art and the Slade School, London and has an extensive track-record as an artist and arts educator. He has initiated and developed a significant range of arts projects both nationally and abroad, and was a founder member of UK Young Artists, a young artists support agency based in the East Midlands. www.terryshave.com
My practice is and always has been, unashamedly eclectic; an emotive rationalising of anomalous and often incongruous ideas, images and working methods. This relationship between content/idea and process/manufacture has always fascinated me. The dilemma of 'high' fine art versus the decorative and crafted; the tussle between an interest in the traditions of modernist painting, a cerebral and logical minimalist ideology and a contemporary, mediated world with a plethora of image disconnects and meanings. My concerns are not in the resolution of these dilemmas, more the way I can elucidate the schism through painting.
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I continue my fascination with the process of painting, partly through the physical act of the manipulation of paint and resin and also as seen through photography. The photographic images I use in my work often appear like paintings, and have a number of the attributes of painting, at the same time they don't function in the way we are used to reading photographs. These dilemmas and contradictions in picturing intrigue me. Ultimately I am making pictures of and about other pictures. I am not interested in making a painting/photograph that describes the world we live in but I am interested in how the conventions of picturing allow us to 'read' an image and decode its meaning in terms of our relationship to a notion of 'place' and it's edges and the categoric or the 'real'. I want the work to function on two levels, to elicit the sense of familiarity of looking at an image that has the structures and conventions and a history of painting embedded in it, to make you aware of that, and at the same time to shift your attention to the very act of looking and thinking about the act of painting itself.