Cherry Pickles

The artist Cherry Pickles was born in Bridgend, Wales. After a detour in the form of a mathematics degree, Pickles studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art where she was awarded a scholarship to study quattrocento art in Italy. A groundbreaking moment for Pickles was when she visited the Zeitgeist exhibition, in the ruins of the Reichstag. With new purpose, she moved to Wales and began teaching at Cardiff Art School, continuing on to Como, Italy to hone her drawing skills with Gerard Richter and Eric Fischl.

Invited to the International Artists Residency at Omi, an international non-profit arts centre, Pickles admired the carefree manner in which Americans painted. With that attitude, Pickles was awarded several Greek government scholarships to paint and exhibit her portraits, self-portraits and landscapes around the country. She then taught in Cardiff, followed by a residency at Altos de Chavón, a top art school in the Dominican Republic, where she created huge works in acrylic influenced by the wide-open spaces of the Caribbean. Next, Pickles was invited to the Guston McKim residency in Yaddo, one of the oldest artists’ and writers’ colonies in the U.S. Past residents include Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Some of these characters were later used in Pickles’ large self-portraits in oil.

Primarily a figurative painter, Pickles aims to discover and translate the excitement and vitality she feels in a space or scene. Using her background in mathematics, she works from complexity toward simplicity, preferring to use quick strokes of colour to create shadows, rather than pick out details. Pickles’ preferred subjects are people, as her impressionistic, expressive brushstrokes viscerally portray the human condition, eliciting a primeval response in the viewer. Self-Portrait as Dylan Thomas almost caricaturizes Thomas’s drinking, his glazed-over eyes succinctly rendered with two dabs of white and black paint each, and his pose comically angled. Pickles’ “windscreen paintings”, created while riding in cars, are a response to a landscape that can never be perfectly perceived – they effortlessly combine dramatically contrasting open and closed spaces; the view, whizzing by while looking out of a speeding cars’ windscreen, gives a virile sense of movement to the piece, while the serene and quiet environment of being inside the car lends a relaxing, mundane counterpoint.

“The paintings are about my experience of Pembrokeshire which is about the sea, sky, weather, cars and a hedonistic lifestyle. I like the distortions of water and glass. I want the work to be luminous against the calmness of the cool grey walls.

A lot of my recent work is self portraits as other people such as Dylan Thomas. I took his visit to St Davids with his American friends, where he hung upside down from the ramparts in his determination to act out the fun, whiskey-drinking character he had invented for himself, as the starting point for the emotional atmosphere of the paintings.

These hedonistic characters are set in the big movements of sea and sky, and sudden brilliant sunshine that you get in Pembrokeshire. The cars give a sense of movement and freedom. Also they reflect the sky and make interesting compositions.”