The artist’s studio is a complex place, developing historically from primarily a place of industry into a portrait of the artist themselves, a theatre for the creative psyche.  A place that is at once one of isolation and personal exploration and also a meeting-place for ideas and people.  In all instances the studio frames and reframes the artists contribution with contexts and paradox.

The work of Dion Salvador Lloyd is rooted in the natural world, not just a world of appearances but of imagination.  Microcosms and macrocosms of paint and emotion, brought to life in the studio, that map his wonder with the world around him and investigate his place (and ours) within it.  His new largescale studio space on the South Coast gives a constant panorama across a wall of windows, where the changing weather, seasons and moments in time are continuously reflected in a juxtaposition between the man-made, the South Downs and an overarching sky. This ever-changing environment is a constant inspiration for him, not as a source of imagery but more as an emotional state; heightening sensitivity to light, colour and an ever long reminder of the passage of time.  

Well-established and celebrated as a contemporary landscape and seascape painter, Dions work has developed over the last few years to include what he refers to as his “botanical” and “green works”; more intimate painted studies of delicacy and fragility in nature, where flora and fauna become evocative of shared time and memory.  His preoccupation with landscape has also developed; alongside sweeping paintings of the energy and power of “earth-meeting-sky”, there are also now smaller and contemplative explorations on paper with a slower pace, a stillness and a definite ‘sense of place’.  As with all his work, they are driven by the magic felt within the painted act itself and also the mystery and rhythms sensed in the world around him.

Everything he makes is held together by Dions “handwriting”, his undeniable mark, his presence. But they are also threaded together by his belief that paint is more powerful than picture; a picture is something we look at, but a painting is an experience we feel.

Sam Lock