Artist Profile - Pia Dowse
The Drifters
Medium: oil on canvas
Measurements: 95.5 x 95.5 cm framed
Year: 2023
Price: £2,100 plus delivery
Break
Medium: oil on canvas
Measurements: 22 x 17 cm framed
Year: 2020
Price: £375 plus delivery
Intermission
Medium: oil on canvas
Measurements: 22 x 17 cm framed
Year: 2020
Price: £375 plus delivery
Portrait of Margaret Atwood
Medium: oil on canvas
Measurements: 20 cm x 20 cm framed
Year: 2017
Price: £600 plus delivery
Portrait of Ian McEwan
Medium: pencil on paper
Measurements: 50cm x 40cm framed
Year: 2017
Price: £400 plus delivery
The Drifters
Medium: oil on canvas
Measurements: 95.5 x 95.5 cm framed
Year: 2023
Price: £2,100 plus delivery
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Biography
Pia Dowse graduated, with a first, from Falmouth University with BA(Hons) in Fine Art in 2010 and has been exhibiting with Greenstage Gallery since she left school in 2006. She now has a studio in Sheffield where she makes work that is in collections all over the world.
It was while studying at the University of Cambridge, for a masters in painting conservation, that Pia developed her love for the craft of all things painting. What she learnt about painting there informs her own paintings now, transforming them from being executed in a spontaneous wet-in-wet to a more considered layering technique.
Inspired by liminal spaces – areas between one point in time and space and the next –Pia seeks to depict a space where viewers teeter between a public and private sphere, or a public and domestic sphere, between the known and unknown, the familiar and uncanny and comfort and danger. The scenes are often (though not exclusively) caught at dusk or night time which lend the scenes a further sense of eeriness and mystery, feelings often associated with liminal spaces.
Pia works from a wide array of imagery, from photographs she’s taken, to film stills and found imagery. All images have the suggestion of human presence or habitation. Pia largely works with oil paint, forensically examining its material and illusory qualities and using techniques employed by old master painters.
Artist Statement
I became interested in the idea of liminality and how it can be depicted after reading works of the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung, in particular his Liber Novus (The Red Book). In here he noted that all of us stood between two worlds: the world of external perception and the world of the perception of the unconscious. In this sense we are all constantly living in a liminal space, between our own external and internal worlds.