Exhibitions

Mike Waldron

I paint to tell stories. There are always narrative strands running through my work. Sometimes they are clear, more often just hinted at and occasionally hidden in plain sight.  I was born and raised in East Manchester, trained as a painter in Liverpool in the 80s and settled in South Manchester, before moving to more rural settings, by way of the French countryside. The tension between city and country, urban and wild, populated and depopulating, historic and regenerated, often dictates the rhythm and composition of my work. As an expressionist painter, I am driven by a desire not to create the same piece over and over, rather I am motivated by the constant challenge of finding something new to say and of provoking an emotional response from the viewer. I have no interest in producing work that is purely decorative, but to provoke an emotional response, to subvert, and to challenge orthodoxies. I try to paint what I feel, not only what I see and in doing so, I want to leave traces of how the work was made. 

Each drawing or painting begins as a dialogue between me and a blank canvas- that can be an exciting, but also a daunting place to stand. I invariably endeavour for that dialogue to continue, when the work is viewed and I am not there. I am interested in what the viewer sees, thinks and feels.  Ideally, I would like my work to act in the same way as a long familiar smell, to go directly to the limbic system, and trigger memory and emotion. I therefore do not embrace a concrete distinction between abstract and realist work, and consequently I try to inject elements of abstraction, expressionist colourism and adapted perspective into my figurative and landscape painting. Similarly I aim to introduce from time to time the ghosts of a human presence or environment built into my less representative work.

Manchester has often served as an inspiration for my work. In the sense that every painting is to some extent a self-portrait, for me every painting is a product of my relationship with the city, in reality or memory. I am fascinated with how the past brushes up against the present, and how this informs the future.

This exhibition ‘Manchester Impressions’, of new and never before exhibited work,  is divided into six strands, each governed by the theme of the city and influenced by my experience of being born and raised in Manchester; the memories I have, the inspiration I have taken, the changes I have seen and the people I have met. Using a diversity of media, I have tried to hold up a magnifying lens to the way I see my home city.