William Bickerstaff

In my work I try to recast moments from my experience. Being open to the bleak power and scale of the landscapes around Cambridge and East Anglia helped me develop and find what I wanted to explore and express. More recently the work includes figures from more intimate moments, all intended to explore an inscape of emotions from anxiety and disconnection to euphoria and rapture.

In January 2020, I did my first small drawing in over 30 years. Since then, I have developed the scale and ambition of my work, exploring different approaches, but all rooted in an immersive, spiritual and personal response. I have actively pursued the idea of multiple ways of working, each feeding the other. Some pieces are strongly monochrome: black ink – fine pen, sprayed, or dead matt printing ink applied with roller or finger, and some use expressive colour in gouache. I also continue to work out ideas around flatness and surface, pattern and repetition, and clarity and complexity.