“Storks are both the national bird of Ukraine and Lithuania, deeply intertwined with folklore, tradition, and cultural beliefs. They embody concepts of peace, family, home, birth and prosperity.”

“These flocks appearing in twinned cities across both countries seems, to my mind at least, an apt way of symbolizing hope and transnational solidarity in a challenging time for Ukraine and Europe.”

“Flock” or Pulkas as it is titled in Lithuanian, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the Lithuanian city of Marijampole. It depicts a flock of white doves on the side of a passport office.

“Planned Mistakes” – Painted as part of Malonny 11, Marijampole, Lithuania, 2024

Halcyon Days 

Will Teather’s latest collection of paintings, Halycon Days, finds the artist shifting direction in terms of both subject matter and palette.  These day-glo compositions reflect themes of the sublime and childhood wonderment.  Teather’s models are often drawn from independent circus and theatre communities, but in many of these latest paintings the models are the artist’s own family and friends   

Night scene – oil on canvas – 45.5 x 56cm

Will Teather’s latest collection of paintings, Monkey Business, has it’s origins in the winter lockdown of early 2021.  With society closed down, the artist found himself in playful but reflective mood,  reworking elements of previous compositions to create uncanny crops of legs and contorted figures.  The artist has long enjoyed painting curious characters set within surprising scenarios, and this new adventure sees the artist focusing upon the communicative power of the body and the clothes that we adorn ourselves with. The collection has spread to include depictions of performers in a range of unexpected scenarios. The artist explains:

“I enjoy how a narrative can be told with just our body language.  I am always interested ways of pushing figurative painting forward and these crops and forced perspectives are a means of reinvigorating the genre.”

“I enjoy how a narrative can be told with even a just our body language.  I am always interested ways of pushing figurative painting forward and these crops and forced perspectives are a means of reinvigorating the genre.”

“I created a series of paintings which extensively incorporated observational drawing of live models and props over an extended period. As an artist exploring realist painting, this is a departure from my previous reliance on photography and collage as source material.

I developed props and costumes to work from, to create magical realist narratives that explore contemporary ideas of the uncanny. This has led to a growing body of surreal compositions, informed bu this process.”

18th June 2023 – 18th January 2024

“The trail was a fantastic addition to the city centre in 2023, a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking reflection on the historic fabric of Colchester that intrigued visitors and those more familiar with the settings alike.” 

Claire Taylor, Visit Colchester

“Blurring the boundaries of painting and sculpture.“

The Guardian

Explore a series of radical and beautiful artworks depicting some of Colchester’s most memorable landmarks.  Discover Will Teather’s panoramic spheres spread across the city’s cultural quarter, on a journey that will take you through everywhere from the Castle Museum to a Georgian Townhouse and the iconic Lion Walk in the city centre. 

Locations are FREE to visit.

Globes can be found at Red Lion Yard in Lion Walk Shopping Centre, The Castle Museum and Hollytrees Museum in Colchester Park. For details of associated talks/workshops please email: Museums@colchester.gov.uk

“I hope that they present a unique visual spectacle and turn the viewer’s world inside-out for a moment.  When developing the original idea of the globes I wanted to find somewhere different to take realist painting; a new adventure. Each globe contains a few surprises on closer inspection which I think will add further interest for viewers as they compare them to their surroundings.  I hope the city of Colchester enjoys the installations.” Will Teather

The trail is supported by Arts Council England, Colchester City Council and Colchester Museums.

Very clever… and beautiful.

BBC News

“I came away with the abiding sensation that I had just been teleported into and out of a place of magic and illusion.”

Neil Powell, Wall Street International

“We were inspired by Will’s sphere as a transportive tool: imaginatively moving housebound care home residents beyond their bedrooms to a museum miles away. Together we made collages adapting the doorways and window space in their home: creating portals into other ficticious worlds created by master painters. People gazed with exceptional interest while we turned the sphere slowly and talked about where it would be going next and how the artist had wanted them to see it first.“

Eyebrow Arts, May 2023

As if out to set himself ever-greater challenges, the artist has now embarked on Infinite Perspectives – researching, creating and presenting three-dimensional paintings on globes and unusually formed canvases. 

The compositions employ experimental forms of perspective to create immersive 360-degree realistic images – with both the perspective and the representation slyly shifting depending on which point you look at them.

A hemisphere containing a flock of doves hangs on the wall like one half of an opened giant egg. And now the artist-adventurer is on to the Norwich planets suite – with images of city sites cast on suspended globes. Spinning first is a world of books as reflected in Elm Hill’s Dormouse Bookshop.

Ian Collins, art critic and curator

The title of Mr Teather’s 2018 exhibition, Maximalist Banquet, referred to the painter’s interest in excess and overloading his images with both subject matter, colour and symbolism. This is evident in a new collection: the painter’s luminous and gestural reinterpretations of historical portraits, centered around the Tudor Era. These are a sort of psychotropic pop-art take on European court painting, that includes scenes of hell coming out of Henry 8th’s head.

The show is about every thing all at once, in glorious technicolour; a cornucopic banquet for the senses. A long-standing reference for me is Aldous Huxley’s 1954 essay, The Doors of Perception, that explored a variety of concepts, including the idea that the brain eliminates unessential information from the totality of the “mind at large.” This exhibition is, perhaps, about trying to reveal those things that may otherwise go unnoticed as we filter our everyday life. 

The Age of Panic is a collection of paintings by Will Teather, exploring consumerist hysteria. These modern reimagings of baroque imagery depict modern day dramas such as panic-buying. The works are intended to explore the emotional attachment and passions surrounding objects of desire within late-capitalism, from loo roll to Adidas, and the way shopping acts as a gateway to our wider emotions.

These artworks are placed within their natural habitat of shopping arcades and boutiques.

Behind the painting process…

Magical-realist painter, Will Teather, explains his technique:

I often try to create compositions that convey a sense of otherworldliness through the subtle distortion of perspective, yet also evokes a sense of nostalgia through their old-world painting techniques. This painting of the singer Ana Silvera uses similar techniques to my recent works for the Age of Panic.

1 The Source Material

Whilst I always like to do studies from life to familiarise myself with a sitter’s features, a very detailed painting like this tends, for convenience, to be developed with the aid of reference photographs.  I took a series of shots of Ana, both in the studio and around my home city of Norwich, where we visited a curiosity shop tucked up a side alley of the historic Elm Hill. 

The painting was created with the aid of about a hundred photographs, most of which were taken in situ at Elm Hill Antiques and Curios, both on the day that Ana came and during some later visits which I made as my ideas developed.  Some of these photos were turned into a collage which formed the basis of the final composition. This gives the painting a nice higgledy piggledy sort of feeling: the more you study it the less that things seem quite right: the curve of the paving stones, the way the table tips off the edge of the frame, or the fact that the beams of the ceiling are almost facing you.  It combines countless perspectives much in the way that an eye does as it travels around a room.  I’ve subsequently found out that this kind of technique was pioneered by David Hockney in his photo-collage works, although I would prefer to align it with the work of a group of earlier German painters that originated the magical-realist mode of painting.  Their work was described by the critic Franz Roh as presenting a “mildly transfigured reality,”  and a key feature of this was a disregard for traditional and realistic perspective. This is particularly evident in the 1920s paintings of Otto Dix, where floors are upturned and shadows fall at unusual angles bringing a sense of the uncanny to the works.

2. The Underpainting

Once the initial collage was completed, and Ana had given it the go ahead, I prepared a primed panel with a mid-tone ground of grey/green acrylic and drew the picture out in as much detail as possible.  I then completed an under-painting using thin layers of acrylic. The only colours used in this stage were a creamy white for highlights and a black mixed with turquoise for the shadows, with the grey/green ground forming the middle tones.  Under-paintings are useful for giving a general tint to a final image and I chose this palette to imbue the portrait with a calmness and sense of nostalgia.  I worked with acrylic diluted to the consistency of milk for most of this stage, using broad washes for larger areas, whilst using a fine brush to hatch some of the gradations within the skin tones. 

3.The Glazes

Once I had established the basic tones, I started over-painting more colours across the image.  These washes were kept translucent with water so that the tones and hues of the under-painting were not lost.  Lying the panel flat,  I varied the consistency of the mix of acrylic to water across the dress to achieve a marbling affect that helps the fabric to shimmer.  For smoother glazes such as those over the arms and face, I added a little acrylic glazing medium to help the paint go on evenly, helping to represent the luminous glow of her skin. The varied tone of the tiles was achieved by mixing a lot of different colours together wet into wet, keeping the paint very dilute and leaving it to dry afterwards overnight. 

4.The Details and Highlights

I then started adding detail to different parts of the image in more opaque colour.  I also continued drawing in additional elements that add interest to the composition, such as the photo of the little girl in the corner who maybe relates to the protagonist’s past.  A gilded frame in the top right of the background contains the doves from an earlier picture of mine, called 11pm to Stonehaven.  I brought almost everything within the image to a similar level of clarity, with objects brought into sharp focus around the protagonist.  There is a distinct crispness that can be achieved when working with acrylic on panel, due to its smooth surface and lack of tooth.

This level of detail across the image relates to another artist identified as exemplifying early magical-realism; Alexander Kanoldt. In Kanoldt’s paintings, all the objects are given equal significance in the composition.  The clarity and lack of emphasis on any one object is often said to provide the distinct magical aspect to his paintings.

5. The Finishing Touches

As the portrait entered its final stages I reworked the tones across the image.  I enhanced the sense of contrast between the light and shade in areas that are foregrounded, whilst letting items that are further away from the viewer sink back more into mid-tones. This principal is known as aerial perspective, and reflects the way nature scatters light across distances, meaning that the further away something is, the less contrast that it possesses. 

I added the skeleton last since I knew that Ana didn’t want it to be too dominant within the painting.  She has a photograph of the painting without the full skeleton for use on her EP.  To make it enter into conversation with the rest of the composition,  I made the skeleton look as if it was somewhat mimicking her posture.  

With thanks to Norwich Arts Centre and Arts Council England for supporting this project.

Strangers’ Hall hosts five new paintings designed by artist Will Teather, that deconstruct the composition of historical artworks within the museum collection.  The artist’s new paintings are hung side by side the originals, helping visitors see the museum collections afresh.

The artist’s fractured reinterpretations reference both pixilation and the long-standing idea of sacred geometry and energy points within historical paintings. 

Will Teather explains: “The Georgian Dining Room of Stranger’s Hall seems like a perfect setting for this project.  The paintings of this period are often very carefully composed, including the examples here in the museum’s collection.  My fractal reinterpretations are intended to explode the geometry implied within these historical compositions around their key energy points.  The results have often been described as somewhat psychedelic and seem like a glitched version of the originals.  I often feel like historic paintings are other worldly, acting as a portal into the past, and these new paintings respond to this in many ways.  The new artworks are intended as both reactionary and revolutionary, celebrating the underlying structures of realist painting yet creating an almost automated response. The painting process is a mixture of careful planning, painting with a restricted pallet appropriate to the artwork and a series of specialist glazing techniques of my own design.”

Supported by Arts Council England, Norfolk Arts Service and Norwich Arts Centre.

The artist would also like to thank his assistants for this project, Sarah Beare and Vicky Khun

New compositions reinterpret principles of sacred geometry within visual art, creating complex patterns based upon the underlying structure of representational images, revealing perhaps a divine form within the natural world. The artist explains:

 “These lattices reference both postmodern pixilation within painting, as influenced by digital culture, and the longstanding idea of an underlying order within both visual art and our wider perception of reality. They are also informed by the obsessive exploration of geometric patterns by the outsider painter Eugene Andolsek and the automated techniques of Sol Lewitt, who would pass instructions onto assistants who then created his drawings.”

There are so many highlights in the work, both literal and metaphorical, that it seems a little petty to single out any particular format, but for me, the recent re-visions of great master portraits and self-portraits are simply exceptional. Squinting, we discern Rembrandt van Rijn, stirred if not shaken by the combined filtration of digital and analogue processing. Other recognisable classics, rendered impressionistic in lozenges of carefully nuanced hues, we recognize but are not specifically cognisant.

Neil Powell writes in Wall Street International