Beth Holmes (b. 1995, UK) is a painter based in Colchester, UK. She studied Fine Art: Painting at The University of Brighton and graduated in 2018. Her practice is concerned with the language of painting. Within the domain of abstraction, her visual dialogue aims to investigate the importance of gesture and the painted mark. Using an amalgam of mediums and processes, she explores the perpetual question when making her work; what is it about the materiality and aesthetics of paint that is so seductive and gives the viewer an emotive response? She enjoys a sense of push and pull within her paintings through colour, mark-making and glossy tones against matte. The range of vocabulary in her mark-making extends to pooling paint, working wet on wet, and both layering and scraping back elements of the composition, so that space is concertinaed down and across the surface of a painting making the viewer unsure what colour or mark came first. 

 

Making abstract images is Beth’s way of intuitively interpreting and understanding the world of suggestion, where the viewer can perceive their own ideas and feelings about them. As Jonathan Lasker puts it, suggestion, of course, being the only way one sees images in a painting, even if the painting is supposedly realistic. The approach to her art occasionally shifts from completely spontaneous and sometimes unconscious procedures, to being at first at least, a more mechanical and process driven experience. Here, the occurrence of preconceived ideas, prolong the gestation of an image and extends her contemplation around a picture. However, even in her planned works, Beth ultimately enjoys the process to be somewhat of a journey of movement through painterly mark making where gestures reflect the echo of her whole body rather than action of arm and wrist.