Pen Dalton
My art practice over the last 60 years has shifted between the aesthetics of painting and printing, between image and text. Much of this has been drawn from my relationship with my father – he was in the newspaper printing industry and I learned to handle text and printing at an early age, although my real love of colour was expressed in painting.
I look back and see in my work an abiding preoccupation with binary relationships: I explored the relations of gender which saturate my practice: between fathers and daughters, black and white, image and substrate; digital and analogue; mind and body and between formal oppositions – transparent and opaque, gloss and matt, impasto and smooth. I am interested in the social analogies and metaphors that can be inferred from these relationships and at what lies in the vast territory between.
In recent years i have been working solely with paints – acrylic, nail paint, face paint, car paint etc, exploring their technical differences. I imitate the “Different Strokes’ produced by artists in an attempt to reconcile contrasting marks on the plane of the canvas.
Biography
Pen Dalton had a long and successful career in the tertiary education sector, publishing and lecturing on aspects of art whilst maintaining a studio in contemporary printing and painting. Her work can be seen in The Victoria and Albert Museum Print Collection; The Komechak Art Gallery, Chicago; The Prizeman Seabrook Collection of 21st Century British Painting; Swindon Art Gallery; ArtUK, and Home House Collection. She has had solo shows at Westminster Arts Library and The Tokarska Gallery in London and continues to exhibit regularly in group shows – local and international – in Art Fairs; Artist for Hospitals and online presentations. She has shown by invitation with The British Council, in Madrid: in galleries in Milan, Italy; Gdansk Poland; China, Tokyo, New York, Athens and extensively in the UK. She has recently been interviewed as one of 50 women artists whose bio is to be housed in the National Archive.
