Ben Taffinder (Ongoing.)

From a young age Ben has lived on the Roseland Peninsula. After training at Falmouth College of Art, his initial creative life was making sculptures and installations, working internationally and spanning as far afield as Iceland and Taiwan. However, his connection to Cornwall, the influence of growing up on his family’s coastal farm and working from its shoreline as a fisherman and diver continued. What developed was a growing need to explore his homeland as an artist, to seek to understand it through drawing and painting.

For Ben painting is a very physical and disciplined process. He speaks of his aim of “trying to see things in a simplified way, to pare back to essentials to understand it”. Using colour and pattern, compositions with strong contrasts, opposing light and dark and working decisively with impasto pigment and a palette knife his paintings are insightful and intense. They reveal a great depth of understanding and a powerful passion for, as Ben puts it, “knowing the land around you”.