Chris Sims, Chesham-based artist, is one of the most significant abstract painters in Britain today. His work can be found in collections throughout the UK and overseas.
Article adapted with permission from The Chesham Society
A hugely versatile artist, Chris began his an Art Foundation Course at Buckinghamshire College Art, before going on to a BA Hons Degree in Visual Communication at Wolverhampton involving illustration, photography and typography. Though the course would normally have set students off on a commercial design trajectory, this was not the preferred direction of travel for Chris: ‘I left not knowing what I wanted to do though the natural progression would be into graphic design or commercial art’ he says. This, however, is initially what he ended up doing for a while, which included a spell at Chandos Records designing and artworking covers for classical music titles.
Finding commercial art unfulfilling Chris enrolled at Amersham College for a day a week to study printmaking, where he found collagraphy particularly rewarding — ‘it really set me off in working in a very textural way and my work became much more abstract as a result of it’. Moving on to working in oil paint, from 2004 he began exhibiting his work which has included both local shows, and Affordable Art Fairs in, among other venues, Battersea, Hampstead, New York and Hamburg.
‘Winston Churchowl’, one of Chris’s ‘Crazy Critters’
In many ways Chris Sims is a traditional artist. His work is about juxtapositions — light and dark, progression and recession, space and volume, solidity and weightlessness, mass and line. ‘I create works using colour, instinctive mark-making, complimented with an arrangement of abstracted elements to evoke or capture a moment in time’ he says. Working in mixed media — oil, charcoal and pastels — he creates beautifully balanced compositions that, he says, ‘hopefully add a little beauty to the world’.
Although not directly relating to a scene or place, much of Chris Sims’ work is rooted in the landscape, be it rural or urban. His palette of colours are the colours of nature and the natural world. The attraction to the physical nature of his viewpoint inspires dynamic compositions, utilising mark-making and abstracted shapes, evoking an emotive place. He uses this working process with a view to reaching a point where a balanced composition emerges.
Each of his paintings has a character of its own or, as Chris himself says ‘each painting takes on its own journey. You make a mark and then have to react to it somewhere else, so you’re working your way through it. Even when I work from a sketch, something else happens and it changes’.
Painting by Chris Sims
Ycan find more of Chris’s work at Penn Street Gallery, Penn; Hayden Gallery, Marlow; The Brian Sinfield Gallery, Burford and Cricket Fine Art, Chelsea.
You will also often find his work in The Good Earth Gallery, in Lacey’s Yard on Chesham High Street.
Bucks Art Weeks runs for two weeks every June, and Chris is a regular exhibitor opening up his home studio and garden full of sculptures to the public. Bucks Art Weeks visitor information
Article and interview with Chris provided by The Chesham Society
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