ABOUT PETER HOLLINGHURST

I am an artist and illustrator living in the South of England near Brighton, Sussex. As a child I enjoyed playing in the 'in between spaces' - the undeveloped little bits of waste ground near my home which at the time seemed to be huge-almost worlds in themselves-but on reflection were actually very small. Those half-forgotten spaces still appeal to me and perhaps that is why a sense of the neglected or overlooked often feature in my art somewhere. I developed a love of drawing and reading very young, so its probably no surprise that I think of my art as expressions of words, stories and dialogues. For me, a piece of art is not fully 'alive' until it becomes part of some wider story or someone viewing it responds to it by having their imagination wake up and encourage them to participate in a dialogue with it.

My influences include the Pre-Raphaelites and Surrealists, but like most artists I am also influenced by my environment. The places I love, people I have met and books that I have read pervade my way of seeing and of creating. The challenge for me is always to bring together these influences and the essential nature of the subject in the artwork - to use the first as a point of view that enables me to unlock the character and qualities of the second.

I originally trained in film and drama at university (with a bit of history thrown in) and have also studied multimedia computing. Rather than specialising in any one particular subject, I have always preferred to bring divergent ones together, to synthesize thoughts and expressions of multiple possibilities. It is no coincidence that I work with montage in my art as it actually expresses perfectly my approach to life, knowledge and experience. I also have never fully left those 'in-between spaces' of my childhood - if they have taught me one thing it is a love of overlooked details and a knowledge that if everyone is looking one way at something, it is sometimes my job to turn around and look at what is behind them that they have missed. As well as reading masses of fiction, I also devour reference books and enjoy reading about history, philosophy, mythology, film, art - almost everything in fact. I also write a little and design my own role-playing games and worlds for them.

My early paintings were mostly done in acrylic or gouache, and then I moved onto using oils. I spent several years painting with traditional media and doing a variety of work on commission. Occasionally I dipped my toe into some design work - I created the logo for Herbie Flower's band 'Cloud 9' (he is most famous for playing bass on 'Walk on the Wildside' and Bowie's 'Space Oddity') and did illustrations for a role-playing game.

More recent experimentation in Adobe Photoshop led me to creating art digitally, and I now find myself creating most of my artwork this way. Sometimes I mix traditional media and techniques with my digital work.

In 2008 I was 1st Place winner in the Dulwich Picture Gallery 'Age of Enchantment' fairytale illustration competition. Judged by the curator of the exhibition the competition accompanied of classic fairytale illustrations, author and art dealer Rodney Engen, who had the following to say about 'Memory and Muchness', the winning image:

"Imbued with the dense, brooding atmosphere of lost innocence and the remembered childish delights of nursery and playground, there is a haunting sophistication to its composition which lifts the subject beyond the obvious. Even the melancholic title suggests a bitter sweetness and makes this a quite remarkable work by any standards."