John Tordoff

           As a painter I feel I am self taught, having worked for most of my adult life  in the professional Theatre.  Any formal training during these years was acquired on various courses at London's City Lit and Morley College. This included a great deal of life drawing, oil painting, watercolour and ceramics.

          In 2004 my partner and I bought a small property in Umbria and it was here that I started to apply myself fully to my painting.    I suppose the thing that I strive for most in my painting would be to express an individual point of view. To try to convey to the viewer, clearly, why I chose to paint the picture in the way that I did. A part of this would be a love of strong tonal contrast, the stripping down of the image to a set of simple shapes, the use of flattened perspective and without losing the representational quality, to push towards abstraction as far as feels appropriate.

          With this present body of work, in collage and mixed media, my aim is to create a dialogue between what is represented and the texture of the picture's painted surface, the one complementing the other.