ARVON WELLEN is a contemporary artist who has an interest in medieval and renaissance art. This includes sculpture as well as painting, manuscripts and early printed books.

In addition to this he has worked as a photographer and film maker as well as having been involved with the production of limited edition books.

ARVON WELLEN: dream - fragment, sa Conca:
acrylic on wood; 60cm x 36cm; Cadaqués 2010

ARVON WELLEN: dream - fragment:
acrylic on canvas and wood; 92cm x 61cm; 2010

ARVON WELLEN is a contemporary artist who works with photography for research and as a means of integrating images into his paintings and prints. He is also a printmaker who makes books using digital and photographic techniques as well as more traditional methods.

He is particularly interested in how we imagine ourselves, whether it is through magazine photographs or the cinema. Painting is for him a way of examining both the surface features of life but also life that exists beneath the surface. He is prepared to accept his own inability to understand a world of chaos and is inspired by the way that we create notional appearances. As part of this process he is interested in the psychological effects of colour.

An eclectic artist he has been influenced particularly by African art; Mughal painting; Medieval book illustration and sculpture; Catalan Romanesque art; Early Renaissance painting and sculpture. He is also interested in the theatre and dance and in the way these art forms present ideas.

The idea of the "multi-layered print was to attempt to use aspects of traditional lithographic printmaking. The print was produced by an Epson or Mutoh ink jet printer but instead of printing all the colours in one printing as is normal with digital printing, selected colours were printed separately. This gave more depth and more vibrancy to the colour. The paper was Arches Aquarelle.

ARVON WELLEN: Lips; multi-layered digital print 2001; paper size 56 x 76 cm

ARVON WELLEN: Youth Dance England; photographed at the Peacock Theatre, London 2008

Images on this page copyright © Arvon Wellen 2010

Polychrome sculpture

Our view of classical and medieval sculpture is of purity of form and the surfaces are unpainted. Renaissance sculptors such as Michelangelo, who looked to ancient Roman ideas in architecture and sculpture, saw examples where the colouring had weathered or worn away. This was also true of the studies undertaken by the eighteenth century antiquarians. However, in Spain the tradition of polychrome sculpture remained alive and thrived throughout the 17th century.

ARVON WELLEN: meeting of broken desires: polychrome wood and metal; March 2011; 30 cm x 30

ARVON WELLEN: Room; multi-layered digital print 2001;

paper size 56 x 76 cm; there is also a smaller version of this print that was shown at the Mini Print de Cadaqués in 1998.

ARVON WELLEN: Door; colour photograph; Cadaqués 2009;

This photograph was the starting point for a group of art works identified as "Shadows and Fragments". This project is being developed with Alessandra Wellen and, at this point, contains sculpture, painting, photographs and video. We aim to exhibit this collection in 2012 in both the UK and Spain.