COLIN MERRIN
Originally from East London, Colin has lived and worked on the south coast of England since 2007. He received his degree at Maidstone College of Art and teaching qualifications at Kingston Polytechnic as well as gaining an MA in Psychology and Education for Special Needs at the University of London, Institute of Education.
Colin has exhibited throughout the UK and Europe in many solo and group exhibitions since 1981 and has work in private collections including the royal collection and the British Museum. He was elected as an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 2009 and to full membership in 2013.
The human form has dominated his current body of work for the past few years. He describes his paintings as abstracted figurations. Referencing drawings and studies made from life and memory, he relies largely on a process of painting that employs an intuitive, trial and error approach. He constantly changes the composition, forms and colours until he reaches a visual conclusion that works and subsequently questions the importance of meaning as a fixed idea. Collage is integrated into the paint to add texts and visual references that can either enable or inhibit meaning.
‘My work initially comes from gut instinct that’s constantly changing and refining towards some recognisable relevance linked to the idea of humanness and the world as we are experiencing it. As Philip Guston pointed out, painting is a trialogue between the artist, the viewer and the work itself and therefore meaning can be a single and perfectly valid viewpoint or an agreed perception. It is always fluid and often mysterious.’
Colin Merrin 2020
