Marek Tobolewski
For nearly 40 years I have created non-representational work across a wide range of scales from 10cm to 10 metres and across painting, print and drawing. The process of drawing underpins my practice. For several years, my focus has been on composing symmetrical structures that contain central voids. I attempt to find stillness in a free-flowing line.
My drawings and paintings are freehand; rigour is required. I don’t entertain the use of masking, either in tape or fluid; and so, there is jeopardy throughout the journey of making. I set boundaries, only to skirt close to, and break them.
I return to completed works to inform and inspire a fresh approach to new work.
The physical making of a work may take months, my solid graphite drawings for example, involve several processes until the final burnishing with an eraser. This is slow art. After nearly forty years, I refer to the linage of my own practice and use an established process to find it but where it is going remains unknowable.
My heritage: I was born in 1964, in Bishop Stortford, Hertfordshire, the youngest of six
to Polish Parents. My father was a sergeant in the 3rd Carpathian Division of the Free Polish Army in WWII and demobilised in Italy, where he met and married my mother in 1947. She had escaped with five other young women, with the aid of the Polish resistance, from a labour-farm in the Southeast of Germany. They walked to safety after three days, over the Alps into Italy. Two years later after The Polish Re-settlement Act, they travelled to UK to Kelvedon, Essex Displacement Camp. There, they began a new life and started a family. After eleven years living in a Nissen Hut, they moved to a new home and town my father helped to construct in Harlow New Town. Where I was raised a safer, more settled life, which gave me the freedom to become an artist and an art lecturer. I have nurtured a generation of artists and architects through art education and now, live with my family in Nottingham.
Westley-Clarke
Current Exhibition
