I am a painter, not a writer. It seems a contradiction to provide the viewer with words as well as images.

However, a little explanation may be useful in helping a viewer find his or her way around my work.

The painted image is a magical place. It is the place where
imagination attains reality and life. It is a place where the artist links his inner world with the inner world of his audience. It is a crossroads where experiences meet.
Colour and mood has always been an important factor in my work, whether it be landscape, figure or abstract. The way that colours evoke mood and feeling has always fascinated me and features strongly in all of my images.


The content of my work concerns people and landscapes, sometimes separately, sometimes together. Each landscape is a set, ready for actors to begin an un-named play. Thus, the narrative has always been a crucial element in all of my work, even in the figureless paintings.
To each unresolved scene, the viewer is asked to bring his or her own experience, completing and extending it. Most are concerned with fragments of time and ask the viewer to pose the questions: What has happened? What is happening? What is likely to happen next?

I see my paintings as keys which enable the viewer to unlock elements of his or her own experience and to live them anew, rather like viewing familiar landscapes of time and space from fresh vantage points: a well-known hillside seen from an unfamiliar outcrop of rock, a well-walked woodland path viewed from a distant bridge.

The French writer Marcel Proust spent a lifetime absorbed with the concept of involuntary memory - those occasions when a certain activity or viewed object seems, involuntarily, to unlock a myriad of past experiences which are more vivid and real than would have been obtained had the viewer consciously tried to recollect the event.

I would like to think that my paintings might unlock experiences in a similar way. Although the pictures tell my story, I'd like to think that they could tell your story, too.

Background :

Art teaching and art education is my background. It has been, and still is, the main focus of my working career. I have been an Art and Design teacher/specialist for 31 years and I am at present Head of Art and Design Studies at a High School in Norfolk, England.

My expertise and experience in this field has enabled me to initiate and develop a wide variety of very successful Art and Design teaching programs both at my own school and at other establishments, involving students of all ages from 6 to 60 +.
I am a very active and successful artist; a second career that I have successfully developed alongside my teaching career. I am also a writer and have had articles printed in several art publications. I also write poetry and prose fiction.

Details of my work and exhibitions together with an artist statement can be found on my website :

www.phillipbissell.co.uk

See my website for information about past exhibitions.