The Weight of Paint: On Impasto

There is nothing subtle about impasto. It’s paint applied thickly, directly, with conviction, building a surface you don't just see but feel. In an age of digital reproduction and frictionless images, that physical presence carries a particular kind of weight. Impasto has a long history, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, but in the hands of contemporary painters it remains one of the most expressive mediums a painter can apply, and certainly one of the most immediate.

Colin Pennock came to painting from unlikely beginnings , he began sketching whilst on duty as a Police Constable during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it was these sketches that eventually earned him a scholarship to St Martins in London. That history lives on in his surfaces. His abstract landscapes treat impasto as an act of immersion: paint applied with urgency, built up and scraped back, and the canvas becoming a record of time spent inside a landscape rather than observing it from a distance. The impasto is turbulent and resolved in equal measure, carrying the kind of earned stillness that only comes from consistent and dedicated time in his studio.

Erin Chaplin applies impasto differently. Controlled and deliberate, she builds impasto methodically across the entire surface, layer by layer, until the oil painting achieves a density that is as much heard as seen. In her floral still-life paintings, that accumulated surface carries emotional weight; her vulnerability and quiet intensity is held in the very thickness of the paint. For an emerging artist, the psychological depth is remarkable.

What connects these artist is an understanding that in impasto painting, the surface is a record of every decision made; nothing is hidden, nothing smoothed over. For those collecting original art, that emotional directness is precisely what gives art a lasting resonance.