Tony Aldrich is a contemporary abstract painter, an architect and an educator. Born in Lancashire in 1964 he grew up in the South West, and following periods working as an architect in London, Cambridge, and Bath he returned to Devon and Plymouth with his family in 2002. Since then he has become progressively dedicated to painting with the result that his work is now experiencing a growing reputation.
His ability to use space and colour, texture and light give us very exciting canvases. His body of work shows a painter with a maturity of thought and expression, and one who is not afraid to show his emotion for the landscape on the canvas. Artmill Gallery - 2007
Underlying his work is a concept that Tony refers to as ‘Both & Between’. It is an idea that recognises those moments of everyday life where we are both captured by the emotional force of our direct sensory perceptions and yet are simultaneously involved in the more intellectual activity of interpretation and naming. It is an insight that arises from his long term interests in aesthetics, perception, and philosophy – all of which have been pursued through the contemplative act of painting itself as much as through writing. It is this phenomenologically based endeavour that has resulted in the focus upon the poetics of our everyday existence.
I share the view that painting is a meditation upon existence, and that this activity is spiritual as much as intellectual. I think that the role of painting is to reveal this and other truths. My work therefore engages with these ideas through its considerations of perception, meaning, and the immanence of being.
For most of us, everyday life is something that we take for granted – it is a background - but under examination it reveals itself to be a truly mysterious thing - something that can never really be explained or accounted for. Our ‘knowing it’ is elusive – if we try to catch hold of it too tightly whilst we are immersed in its unfolding then we are not properly present. Similarly, to remain unthinkingly within the experience is to miss the potential of its deeper poetic connotations – we are always held, poised, ‘in-between’ the profane and the poetic.
In the flow of everyday life these moments seem brief and too often remain unnoticed. However, as much Eastern philosophy shows, by becoming more aware of this ‘momentary balancing between’ as a basic condition of our existence, we can develop our capacity to occupy it and to remain within it. Moreover, as a result of doing this our life takes on a greater vitality and significance. Tony’s paintings aim to reveal the truth of these moments and also to celebrate their deeper spiritual value.
My paintings aim to engage with this emotive yet fugitive condition of our existence - a condition which seems to make up our entire waking life. Above all they aim to celebrate and revere our being a part of it all.
As a result, whilst the paintings are on the one hand specific to particular places and experiences, they are also ‘abstract and general’ at the same time – aiming to recreate something of this balanced and immanent condition itself, in-between anticipation and remembering, in-between the immediacy of perception and the filing away of the named, in-between the 2-dimensional organisation of pigment and the rendering of something elsewhere.
Accordingly they engage with those moments in everyday life where the diverse and contradictory perceptual components of experience, such as fields of light, tone, colour, and shape, are reconciled as one through our bodies and memories to evoke immediately spatial, temporal, and above all emotionally meaningful situations.
Painting helps me appreciate the unconscious process whereby we all effortlessly make a synthetic and meaningful whole from the disparate variety of our everyday stimuli.
Currently Tony is exploring this agenda further through working on paintings and drawings connected with places within and around the city of Plymouth.