Roy Oxlade
| Roy Oxlade | |
|---|---|
| Born |
13 January 1929 Tottenham, England |
| Died | 15 February 2014 (aged 85) |
| Occupation | English painter |
Roy Oxlade (13 January 1929 – 15 February 2014) was an English painter, writer on art, and an art educator.
Roy Oxlade was born in Tottenham, England to Emily and William Oxlade. He was educated at the Bromley School of Art and Goldsmiths in London, and was a student of David Bomberg for two years at the Borough Polytechnic. He received his PhD from the Royal College of Art. His PhD thesis was on David Bomberg and titled, Bomberg and the Borough: An Approach to Drawing.
While studying at Goldsmiths, Oxlade met the painter, Rose Wylie, a fellow student, and they married in 1957.
Since 1985, Oxlade has had major solo exhibitions at the Odette Gilbert Gallery, Reed's Wharf Gallery, and the Art Space Gallery; all in the London area.
Oxlade is quoted in a 2013 exhibition review:
"Painting to me is like a room of the imagination. It’s up to me what I do with it. I choose its size and its materials – usually canvas and oil paint. At the beginning its relationships don’t amount to much – it’s a rectangle in a jumble of art history I relate to. There would not be much fun in leaving the room empty, a passive – one colour field – a blank canvas. And entirely abstract forms place too many restrictions on dialogue. So I have put in some other stuff, some characters, some actors – tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles, figures and faces to interact with each other. I adjust the temperature, open the windows, shut the windows, throw things out, change the lighting."
In a written dialogue with the painter Marcus Reichert (November 2003) Oxlade said:
"Like poetry, painting’s got its own language of metaphor: I think of van Gogh’s The Night Café, a bowl of flowers by Rousseau, many Matisses: the aubergines still life in Grenoble, Music, the Red Dessert. Matisse sometimes managed to achieve wonderfully direct drawing within his painting like he does with the box of pencils in the Red Studio. Aren’t these paintings modernism? A rich vein, you could call it metaphorical modernism; it makes the rest of painting, ancient and modern, so much framed tedium. They’re a hundred years old, but that’s not so long in the scale of things. Do they mark the end of what’s possible? Spengler? Gombrich? We don’t need them to remind us; it’s obvious that ‘we’ve lost faith in our own culture’. The rush to abstraction was a diversion, the dismantling too fast; the dialogue dried up – in abstraction there were no metaphors to make. Philip Guston made a defiant counter-attack but just now the language of painting seems to be foreign. But when cat-walk art has finally imploded perhaps there can be a fresh and essentially evaluative look at metaphorical modernism. That could initiate a continuation of representational painting."
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