Conversations in Absentia - Christopher Broadhurst 

Conversations In Absentia

" ...As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated , with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment..."

T S Eliot from East Coker

I think of the works in this exhibition , and this is true of all my current work , as a kind of time travel . They are a drawing out , from memory , of the threads of sensations , people , places ,fragrances , objects , ideas and relationships.....things from an ever expanding past.....and a melding of them with their equivalents in an increasingly changeable present . My hope is to create something that is more than mere reflection paired with observation of momentary experience . I am searching for something that also carries with it an emotional weight that is both familiar and new .... something personal that celebrates and mourns and rejoices in the act of being .

I came to still life painting more than thirty years ago .I had expected it to be a brief liason , a way to work myself out of a creative block that was keeping me from what seemed at the time to be more honourable, purely abstract pursuits .

Instead still life became ‘ a habit that liked me and stayed ‘.It has had the advantage of being considered by many to be an old fashioned and unfashionable pursuit .This has given me the freedom to develop a personal language without the concerns and the dogma of any current trend and has allowed me an unencumbered exploration of my own interior landscape.

Christopher Broadhurst, September, 2010

The image above is a painting in progress at Christopher's studio.