M i c h a e l     S a n g s t e r

Michael Sangster trained at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. He lives and works in London with a studio at Kensal Green. He has always worked from observation. Still Life and the study of the effects of light and shade on objects and their surroundings has become his principal concern, but portraiture and landscape also feature. The following is an attempt at a personal introduction to the work.

‘The particular temperamental, psychological or formal qualities that are prized and loved in painters throughout the history of art are real and true and justly celebrated, but I am unable to make any comment on the sort of qualities my own work may have because, in truth I do not know what they are. Sometimes I sense things in the work but I am never able to put what I have sensed into words, in part because the experience is too fleeting – it has moved on before I am able to grasp it; and in part because the experience seems to live in a different element to that of verbal understanding – it eludes words just as fish in a swift-flowing stream elude hands. I am able to perceive but am not able to tell of or explain the experience. The nearest I can get to it is to say that paintings, including my own, have a life of their own. A life that, although it came into being through the activity of the artist, is nevertheless independent of the artist and to a certain extent ‘beyond’ him, even though he brought it into being. But then it is not just ‘he’ that is involved. The artist may work alone in the studio but in a way the whole of tradition, if he is alive to it, works with him; and just as Charles Dickens was portrayed surrounded by the characters from his novels, so it would not be too far-fetched to imagine the painter with his illustrious predecessors keeping him company in the studio. Far from wishing to ‘challenge’ tradition, it is tradition that challenges me to try and approach its high and unrepeatable achievements.’

Michael Sangster 25th March 2009