Kevin Tharme
ARTIST
LINGER A LITTLE LONGER
DIG A LITTLE DEEPER
My current practice moves between painting, poetry and digital composition. The works are not illustrations of one another.
A poem may begin a painting; a painting may unsettle a poem; sometimes both emerge from the same pressure. Each stands alone, but together they create a wider field of atmosphere, friction, enquiry and reflection.
This direction grew through Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes and has expanded into Still We Wriggle, a wider body of work shaped by repetition, consequence, vulnerability and care.
It is where the work is now: direct, questioning, layered, and still changing.
FOR THOSE WHO
LOVE THE DETAIL
Titles are important. A title can provide a hook without closing down meaning. It can open a door without telling the viewer which direction to walk.
Poetry enters when it is needed. Sometimes it comes before a painting, sometimes after, sometimes alongside it — and sometimes not at all. The poems do not explain the paintings, and the paintings do not illustrate the poems; each can stand independently. When placed together, they question one another and open a wider field of thought. Poetry is still relatively new to me, but it has caught hold of me. It helps me consolidate information, sharpen my attention, strip away excess, and work out what is key.
At the centre of the practice is a concern with how we live, how we treat one another, what we allow, what we avoid, and whether we are willing to look again.
The subjects I return to are serious: climate, mental health, diversity, cruelty, silence, power, complicity and care. But the work is not there to instruct. I want people to look longer, see more, and perhaps recognise their own part and impact in what is being considered.
Research matters to me. I may spend months reading, thinking and testing ideas before a painting begins. But once I reach the canvas, the process becomes instinctive. I rarely plan the final image in detail. I apply paint, move it, interrupt it, remove it, and build through layers until something begins to settle.
Surface is central. Experience is strata: pressure, damage, repair, residue. I use oil, marble dust, impasto, ink and layered marks to create work with physical resistance. Texture makes the work harder to dismiss. Even when hidden, the earlier layers matter; they are part of the foundation and part of the truth of the piece.
My practice begins with enquiry rather than certainty.
Subjects arise from lived experience — sometimes present, sometimes remembered — but also from curiosity, concern, and the simple fact of who I am. I believe knowledge, and the sharing of knowledge, is a vital part of being. Art and culture can raise us beyond the everyday: they can sharpen attention, deepen understanding, and make space for more difficult conversations.
I work between painting, poetry and digital composition because no single medium says enough on its own. Paint carries emotion, pressure and physical memory. Poetry distils thought into rhythm, tension and provocation. Digital work brings light, precision and another way of composing the same enquiry.