OLLIE MARR

Ollie grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, before moving to the UK to complete a Master's degree at the University of Cambridge (2019). Their research focused on the complexities and interconnectivity between human society and natural systems, a subject Ollie continues to explore. 

Ollie now lives and paints in the Oxfordshire countryside where they work under British artist, David Williams-Ellis. 

Inspired by the romanticism of Constable and Turner; and the more recent (post)impressionists including Monet, Cezanne, and Bonnard and the way they deal with capturing light, transience, and the immediacy of experience; Ollie works en plein air and is particularly drawn to the fleeting moments in which things have not yet decided what they are going to be. Weather permitting, Ollie works in situ but in the colder, darker months they rely on smaller drawings and paintings to inform larger pieces. 

Relying on an emotive use of colour and an urgency in mark-making, Ollie's work looks at space and landscapes, both external and internal. Rejecting the idea that the natural world is divine proof of many accepted normative concepts, Ollie explores how these spaces rather validate the many different ways of being human.  

Timothy Morton writes about beauty as an experience that provides a fantastic, ‘impossible’ access to the inaccessible, withdrawn quality of things — their mysterious reality. Many describe the experience of beauty as a feeling of ungraspability, which tells us something unexplainable about the nature of reality.

“My work draws from this ‘beauty experience’," Ollie says. "I see a hint of purple in trees silhouetted against a sky that is suddenly very orange and I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I understand the world — and my place in it — a little bit better than I did before. These moments often occur with changing light, when the edges of things become blurred and a space or an object no longer seems to want to exist in the way we have defined it. Instead, it becomes a mass of colour and light, a representation of an internal landscape that is both glorious and wild — a validation of who we are. To paint the landscape therefore becomes a radical act of humanness; a gut response to reality.”