We welcomed Nneka Uzoigwe as our 24th Artist in Residence in Summer 2021.

Nneka's residency happened during the run of of our exhibition Henry Scott Tuke (7 June - 12 September 2021). We interviewed Nneka ahead of her residency and discussed her painting practice and interest in Henry Scott Tuke as an artist.

Born in 1990, Uzoigwe is an Irish-Nigerian painter now living and working in London. Like Henry Scott Tuke, she was taught in the traditional atelier method, working directly from life models, studying Greek and Roman plaster casts and learning from master painters. She received the De Laszlo Foundation Scholarship in 2016 and 2017 to continue her studies.

During her residency, Nneka worked from our purpose-built residency studio where she responded to the works of Henry Scott Tuke, which were on display in our gallery.

Can you describe your artistic practice?

I am first and foremost an oil painter. I love to paint from life and create surreal dreamlike works, using portraiture and landscapes as principal tools, but also bring in other elements that might be available to me in my studio. This might include shells, a birdcage, thrown fabrics, historic frames, mirrors, dried flowers or fruit. A lot of my paintings start from an idea, a dream or memories that I have. I’ll take this idea and try and recreate the feeling or mood in my studio to allow me to recreate this in paint.

What interests you about the work of Henry Scott Tuke?

I love the poetic nature of Tuke’s paintings and during this residency, I want to better understand how he used and layered paint. I’m interested in how he titles paintings - for example, Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902), which is a study of nude boys playing on a boat, but Tuke has named it after the tones of
paint. That tells you something about how he prioritised what he was painting. I also really love the colour harmonies in his work and the richness of his palette. Everything is jewellike, something I try to achieve in my own paintings. There is an incredible quality to his paint as well. He uses thin glazes and scumbles, particularly in his sea paintings. You can really feel the twinkle of light on the water. This is combined with thick impastos, sometimes used on the bodies of his figures. I think this is a really beautiful use of his artistic tools. To be able to take all these aspects of his work and take them into conversation about men’s
relationship with the sea is something I’m really looking forward to exploring.

Can you tell us about your painting The Marine Room (Which will be displayed in the Henry Scott Tuke exhibition)?

This is painting about a recurring dream I’ve had since childhood, where the sea comes right up to the window. Every time I dream about this marine room, the room
changes. Sometimes it’s a dark room with round windows, sometimes it’s an elongated house with lots of staircases. It’s a very calm dream. I realise that this dream comes from early childhood and memories of being at my grandmother’s house on the Irish coast. When you sit down in the living room and look out
of the window in her house, the sea level and window ledge meet. I painted this scene mainly from life. I painted my studio dark blue and arranged all the objects to create a feel of this magical event about to take place. I also went down to Brighton, made studies of the sea and brought them back and painted them into the work.

What do you hope to create during the residency?

I am going to approach my time on the residency as an opportunity to be in dialogue with the works of Henry Scott Tuke. It’s a rare chance for me to revisit his works over and over again. I will be doing master copies of Tuke’s work and studying elements of his painting style from the exhibition itself, before taking my ideas into the studio. I will be working up ideas between the Watts Gallery’s residency studio and my own studio in London, but also working plein air by the sea. Not many people know that Tuke was interested in mythology and I want to bring this element of his practice to life. Taking the figurative forms of his paintings, I will explore ideas of mythology and dream to explore the connection of man with the sea. The final paintings will be a series of large-scale and hopefully very beautiful portraits of male nudes in imagined landscapes. Like Tuke, I’m very interested in the way light reflects and reacts differently to different skin tones, particularly on darker skin - you can often get colours from the sky, reflections of blues and greens that you wouldn’t necessarily see on Caucasian skin. I want to showcase these different skin tones and explore different body types in my final paintings. I’m excited about how this residency will further my practice and give me a better understanding of an artist who has inspired me throughout my career.