Tom Loffill

Alberta with Frida

Bankside Gallery: Rising Artists, Jackson's Painting Prize 2023
Oil
Canvas
91 x 61 cm

£3,200

“Tom Loffill is a figurative artist whose primary interest is portraiture.

Through his oil paintings he explores the connection between the human and the spiritual.

In his portraits, clues to the personality and interests of the sitter, as well as their relationship with the artist, can be found in the painting’s “set dressing” and in background details.

The subjects in Loffill’s pictures do not appear in identifiable spaces, but usually against solid colour, the greater to accentuate the individual: their form, and the force of their personality.

He also has a personal iconography, presented without explanation. For example, in his ‘Self-Portrait with Striped Shirt and Illustrations’ the illustrations in the background are of a parakeet feather, a butterfly, and a grasshopper. It is left to the viewer to determine how these items may relate to each other, and how they inform the self-portrait.

Variations and elaborations of these motifs appear throughout his work, referring obliquely to his own experiences, his connections to his subjects, and the interrelation between the mundane and spiritual in everyday life.”