Clive Walley

I was brought up on a small farm in Cheshire and moved to North Wales in my twenties. My original training is scientific and has left me with a deep interest in the systems of nature; the weather, the light and the ecologies of landscape/of the living order.

Through my painting I want to explore the deeper structures of nature such as the way the world is made visible by electro-magnetic radiation, the neuro-science and philosophy of perception and the interconnectedness of the living order.

The impulse to move to North Wales was a romantic one. I could sense the freedom I might find there to make art that reflected these interests and celebrate the glory of the rugged place itself. The layers in my paintings reflect the complexity we are all involved in by merely looking and seeing.

In the early eighties, while exhibiting paintings in Wales in galleries like Oriel Bangor, Theatr Clwyd and Oriel Mostyn, I developed a parallel career as an artist film-maker .I was trying to find a way to make paintings which could move. My interest in how painting worked with space was extending to how painting might work with time. My films began to be commissioned by various TV companies and one of the first, “Prelude”, won the Rank Award for Best Production on Film in 1988. Other films over the over the next few years won international awards and the camera rig I invented to make films work won an award for “Innovation in Industry”. This is now in the Royal College of Art for the use of its students. One of my film pieces was featured in the art exhibition at the opening of the Millenium Centre in Cardiff.

In 2004 I moved to Frome in Somerset and have continued to develop my interest in layered meanings in painting. I have had a successful one man show of my Birches in Mist series in the Black Swan Arts centre, and have curated three exhibitions of international artists in the venue, as well as exhibiting regularly in Somerset Arts Weeks.