Nick Bodimeade lives and has his studio on a small holding on a meander core island on the River Ouse as it cuts through the South Downs north of Lewes. Born in London in 1957, he grew up in Arundel alongside the River Arun, another Downland river. He studied at Worthing and Wolverhampton art schools in the 70s and was strongly influenced by the painters Vic Willing and John Walker who were visiting lecturers. For many years Nick worked as an abstract painter with a strong side interest in site specific, landscape based, sculpture, all the while trying to reconcile his passion for representational drawing with the process based abstraction he was intellectually drawn to. In early 2000 with the availability of digital photography he turned this around, putting photographically based representation at the foreground of his practice, whilst still holding onto his passion for abstraction.
His fascinated engagement with landscape both professional and recreational, goes back to his early days as a student when he began working on farms in Sussex and mid Wales and he has at various times been a shepherd, coarse fisherman, rock climber, farmworker, hill walker, small holder and mountain biker. He says ‘The sense of a physical engagement with the world is something I seek in my paintings and which I hope is manifest in the evidence of their facture. The experience of landscape seems often to be a visceral, sensational one, and I aim for the viewers’ experience of my paintings to mirror this.’
Teaching has also been an important element of Nick’s practice , ‘Teaching keeps you on your toes‘ he explains ‘the clarity of the thought and articulation required helps in what otherwise might be an unexamined, muddled, not to mention, lonely studio practice’. He has taught at all levels from Foundation to MA and for some years was course leader in Fine Art at BCUC.
Nick’s work is widely collected and held in private, corporate and public collections. He has had recent solo exhibitions at galleries in Sussex, Cornwall and Kent.