Robert Sedgley
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My work although figurative always has a strong underlying concern for abstract composition and colour. I am strongly influenced by the shapes of architecture and the built environment, the patterns of light and shade breaking up a surface, which forms the basis of much of my ‘landscape’ work.

At junior art school my favourite lessons were lettering and architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright was one of my boyhood heroes.) It is to this early training in design and lettering, further developed in my early professional practice as a silk screen printer and poster writer, with its concern for precision in spacing and proportion, that I attribute the strong sense of construction which, I believe, has informed my visual awareness. 

My main preoccupation has been figure paintings, sometimes set on the beach with its effect of brilliant light, and more recently in restaurants. Although having a storytelling element they also demonstrate an underlying concern for the construction of the work, a deliberate sense of the ‘architecture’ which holds the work together.

Following a journey by bus through Northern Spain I began work on a landscape series, called the Road and Bridge series. The intention in these paintings is to convey a sense of movement through a landscape that is colourful and ‘natural’ in its rounded forms, but is contrasted, maybe ‘violated’ by the harsher forms and blacks and greys of the roads, bridges and signs.

Recently, and following my experience as visiting lecturer to holiday courses in France and Spain, I have made more use of watercolour, particularly for the depiction of buildings and the effects of light and shade that make dramatic patterns on the walls of Spanish villages. 
Frequent visits to Sri Lanka has resulted in several exhibitions of watercolours depicting buildings ranging from temples to shops and humble wayside stalls.


In parallel to my practice as a painter I also work in ceramic sculpture. These pieces are based on the human form but usually  ‘abstracted’ and distorted to explore ideas of space and shape.


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