Jamie Strachan

Jamie Strachan is a multi-media artist living and working between the UK and Ibiza, Spain. 
 
After graduating from the Weston Art College in 1995, Strachan's practice has evolved to incorporate painting, works on paper, sculpture, and digital media. 
 
Stemming from an earlier life as a professional skier and product designer for major brands, Strachan's work is meticulously rendered across all mediums he works with. The act of mark-making, a signal of a person caught in time, is intuitive and free of formal restraint. Instead, Strachan emphasises the humanity at play in creating artworks, particularly in relation to the artists' lifestyle and meditative practice.
 
Strachan is an avid meditator in the Buddhist and Daoist traditions. Taking inspiration from this process, Strachan harnesses ideals of balance, life, death, and humanity's sometimes unfathomable relationship to nature and the universe. 
 
Rather than a platform to promote spirituality, Strachan's paintings and works on paper are influenced by the 'primitive' creations of early African and Indigenous art. The immediacy of the mark, unlearning traditional techniques and forms, a heady lean into intuition, and away from preordained formalities. 
 
During the various Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, Strachan began to consider how access to materials could become far more complicated, so he turned to his surroundings. A' balanced duality' is formed by incorporating sand and soil from local beaches and hills into pigment mixtures. The rough and earthy soils and sands against the quiet tondo of painted light at the centre of the artists' 'Sunyata' series perfectly evoke all aspects of Strachan's practice. 
 
These paintings' visual push/pull is immense, a depth created physically and emotionally. The rough surface of sand and soil pushes the central rings of colour away from our perception, alluding to an infinite. The influence of colourists such as Joseph Albers, Ben Nicholson, and Patrick Heron is evident; colour is material here.
 
Jamie Strachan's 'Sunyata' series of paintings will form the basis of Open House Arts Club's first exhibition project in April 2023.