Peter Flanagan, Self Portrait

In my work I try to balance strong draughtsmanship with a wide vocabulary of mark-making, looking for a poetic realism. I usually start a painting from life and then develop the work in the studio where I try to find a more imaginative, intense and distilled interpretation of the subject, to ‘move the senses by an intensification of reality’, as Lucien Freud puts it.

In an era where visual art can take so many forms, figurative painting seems stubbornly tenacious. When asked by the conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan why he made paintings, the New York painter Verne Dawson replied,

Painting is a primary activity, somewhere between whistling and scratching. It’s an extremely efficacious and enduring method of communicating simple as well as complex ideas. For me, it’s also a means of expressing love of life and love of creation. And, given that humans inhabit interiors with walls, paintings still function extraordinarily well.

I would be very happy to show you more examples of my work either at my studio or I could arrange to visit you. I am available for portrait and other painting commissions.

Biography

I was born in 1957 and I spent my first nineteen years living in various outposts of the retreating British Empire with my military family before settling in the Northeast of England in 1978.

After working as a graphic designer for a number of years in Newcastle I studied visual arts at the University of Northumbria, graduating with a BA(hons) in Creative and Performing Arts in 1984. For the next twenty one years I worked as an artist and part-time lecturer, much of it at Newcastle College, where I ran the HNC course in Fine Art until 2005. I have been a full-time artist since then.

I have exhibited widely and often work to commission with work in many collections including that of Lord Dearing, Sir John Hall, Cherie and Tony Blair, the Royal Family, and in many corporate and private collections in Britain and abroad.

I am married with five children and live in Northumberland.