Poodle Parlour

Tim Fawcett’s paintings point towards the legacy of Art Brut, establishing a midpoint between abstraction and representation by combining weathered surfaces, scrawled text, raw, gestural marks, and hints of childlike figuration. Rooted in realistic painting, his practice evolved to its current position following a transformative experience teaching adults with learning disabilities. The natural freedom his students embodied in their approach challenged Fawcett’s own relationship with order and chaos. A visual paradox emerges in Fawcett’s mature work, as something seemingly simple and haphazard gradually reveals itself to be layered and complex—a glimpse of the metaphysical within the mundane. His idiosyncratic yet harmonious compositions evoke both the failure of logical systems to solve modern problems, and the inherent optimism embedded within intuition and spontaneity. Fawcett is based in Isle of Wight, and his work has been exhibited extensively throughout the UK.