About Philip Maltman

Philip Maltman has worked as a painter for 25 years. In that time he has produced paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and written work. His early career was inspired by meetings with Don Van Vliet, Alan Davie, Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys. An interest in James Joyce led to correspondence with Robert Motherwell in the 1980's.

A major exhibition at Battersea Art Centre in 1978 travelled to Glasgow and Jarrow. Its theme was Loch Ness and its attendant mysteries although it was essentially an exhibition of landscape paintings but with a twist towards abstraction utilising grids, water disturbances, and diagrammatic markings relating to the various investigators and their work. During the 1980's Philip Maltman's work took a somewhat Homeric journey (in parallel to his study of, and work on Joyce's "Ulysses") through abstraction and "New Primitivism" ,as described by Art Monthly. During the journey Jeffrey Solomons at Fischer Fine Art championed his work and Charles Saatchi also saw his work and recommended it to Bernard Jacobson with whom he had a brief association. Philip Maitman reached both literally and metaphorically his home shore in the early 1990's.

A visit to Scotland at this time brought him home to the ribbon of South Ayrshire beaches from Turnberry, through Maidens and Culzean to Croy where his childhood rambles were recalled instantly due to little or no change in the environment. The ever present view of Ailsa Craig provided the most stunning reunion.

"Ailsa Craig is without doubt the object in the landscape which most impressed me then and now both as a physical site and as a metaphysical phenomenon. I had carried the image of Ailsa Craig with me since I left Scotland as a teenager and despite various visits in the late sixties and early seventies it is the only object which, on returning, seems to grow with the years whereas all man-made features seem to diminish. Stones on the beaches have their individual power echoing that of the island."

This is the starting point for Philip Maltman's current and, one might say, mature work. Recent paintings reconcile abstraction and figuration in a fundamental combination of observed reality and interior response employing both conventional and unconventional media.

Over the last three years Philip Maltman has shown with sculptor Katy English who is also a neighbour. The genesis of their collaboration was in the discovery that as well as having studios which were either side of a garden fence, their work was based upon shores which faced each other on either side of the stretch of water between Katy English's Antrim coast and Philip Maltman's Ayrshire coast with Ailsa Craig in between. Each shore can be distantly seen from the other and their ongoing joint exhibition is entitled "My Shore - Your Horizon".

Philip Mailman would welcome enquiries about exhibiting his work. Further information including slides can be obtained from the artist at his home or studio address or visit www.philipmaltman.com