Painting practice

My painting practice explores memory as a physical experience encoded in surface and gesture rather than a fixed narrative. Figures emerge, falter, and are partially erased through repeated working of the canvas, allowing presence and absence to remain in tension. I am less interested in describing events than in holding moments of hesitation, vulnerability, and emotional residue.

I work across canvas and paper, developing images through layering, abrasion, and revision. Earlier work incorporated fragments of text and graphic marks as a way of testing how memory leaves traces. More recent paintings have reduced this scaffolding, placing greater weight on the figure itself and on surface as a site of accumulation and loss. Meaning is carried less by symbolic devices and more by posture, touch, and the physical pressure of paint. Across both approaches, the work remains concerned with how remembered experience registers materially rather than illustratively.

Process and materials

My process is slow and iterative. Paintings often begin with staining or drawing and are developed through successive layers of paint that are scraped back, disrupted, and reworked. Decisions are rarely final, and traces of earlier states are allowed to remain visible. The surface holds evidence of revision, where marks function less as signs and more as records of time, resistance, and return.

While the balance between abstraction and figuration has shifted over time, the underlying method remains consistent. I am interested in how reduction and restraint can heighten the emotional charge of an image, and how the figure can sustain uncertainty without reliance on explanatory narrative.

Background

Thomas Martin Conway is a London-based painter working primarily in figurative painting and drawing. His practice is studio-based and centred on surface-led processes. An earlier background in performance and movement informs an attentiveness to gesture and physical presence, though the work is grounded in painting as a material and spatial discipline. He began exhibiting his visual work publicly in 2023 and continues to develop a cohesive body of paintings through ongoing studio production.

Selected activity

Aparatus, Art Hub Group Show, Deptford X, London, July 2025
Publication feature, Collect Art, Vol. 35 (Autumn Issue), October 2023
Solo presentation, Jeannie Avent Gallery, London, 2023
Studio, Art Hub Studios, London