Will Teather (b.1980)

British artist Will Teather is well-known for creating artworks that combine an unusual imagination with a mastery of traditional skills.  Having studied at Central St Martins and Chelsea College of Art & Design,  his studio is currently based in Norfolk, where he holds the post of Artist-in-Residence at the Anteros Arts Foundation. In 2012, as a recipient of the Ruth Katzman Scholarship, he will travel to the USA  to join The Vytlacil Campus Artist-in-Residence Program, hosted by The Art Students League of New York. His paintings and drawings have featured in venues including London's Colomb Art Gallery, The Mall Galleries, Gallery No 9 in Marciac, Norwich's Art 18/21, Edinburgh's Open Eye Gallery and Oxfordshire's Modern Artists Gallery. He has thrice been a finalist in Mayfair's "Cork Street Open Exhibition" and was shortlisted for the international "Celeste Prize" 2009.   His artwork has been widely showcased in publications including The International Drawing Annual, Artists and Illustrators, The Artist Magazine and The Antiques Trade Gazette. He has also written art criticism and articles on technique for award-winning books and magazines. 

Teather's work is held in a number of notable collections in the UK and overseas. Work has been acquired/commissioned by Matthew Bourne (choreographer/ director), Peter Stephen (Lord Provost of Aberdeen), Ana Silvera (singer), the Aude Gotto Collection, The Wolterton & Mannington Estate, The Modern Artist's Gallery and the City of Aberdeen (under curatorial care of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums).

In Spring 2007 he was selected from international applications to spearhead the new artist-in-residence programme at Aberdeen Arts Centre. The research undertaken during this period helped to nurture the narrative concepts which underpin his current body of work:

"In the spirit of magical-realist fiction, the storytelling explores the indefinite space between reality and fiction, horror and humour, fantasy and fact. Vaudevillian characters inhabit a play without beginning or end, where carnival and folk traditions are pastiched together into simulacrum and spectacle. As with Angela Carter's novels, the carnivalesque elements of transgression and excess allow illusion to work and the improbable to become possible."

The artist's paintings and drawings have featured many real performers. Guest appearances have been made by theatre groups such as Les Enfants Terrible, Hocus Pocus Theatre, plus the singers Ana Silvera and Andrew Plummer. The visual artist and performer Dot Howard is also a recurrent muse within the works. In 2010, Teather collaborated with members of the art collective Other Other Other to create a show themed around gallery etiquette, performed at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

The artist has lectured on drawing courses at The University of Arts London, Leeds College of Art & Design and more recently Norwich University College of the Arts. His workshops have featured in the Times Educational Supplement and, in 2008, he was awarded a college staff award, in recognition of his contribution as a demonstrator for the college's Drawing Workshop.

He is currently co-founding The Chelsea Collective, an international art group made up of postgraduate alumni of Chelsea College of Art and Design.

"Teather's work is arresting, heart-stopping and exquisitely executed. "
Laura Williams, Art historian, East Publishing

"A leading UK artist." Press and Journal, Scotland

"It is theatre, storytelling and art, woven into a single painting." Green Pebble Publishing