James Kerr spent his early years as a decorative painter working with many of London’s leading interior designers.
With his wonderful understanding of colour, paint and form he now devotes his energies to his passion for easel painting. In his strong and colourful still life and landscape paintings he freely acknowledges his inspiration of many of the great 20th Century Modernists. Influences of British abstractionist work of William Scott and Paul Feiler are self- evident. More recently he has fallen under the poetic spell of the tragic Russian/French painter Nicolas de Staël, something which is becoming apparent in his newer work.
He starts his paintings with simplified drawings of shapes and blocks of colour based on his subject matter. It then takes a journey towards abstraction by way of vivid colours, mark making and scraping back using both knife and brush. Reworked several times until eventually the painting is resolved.
James has held several successful joint and solo exhibitions and sells in the UK and Worldwide.
To quote the British illustrator and commentator Ralph Steadman:
‘The paint itself is also an object – it is subject to its own motivation, rules and dynamic which the artist must overcome, ignore or amplify’.