Keith Garrow

'Beautiful Day', Escape Bar and Art Gallery, London

Harborne Gallery, Birmingham

Castle Eden Gallery, Durham

'Crossing Cultures', Cranleigh Arts Centre, Surrey

Cafe Gallery Projects, London

Battersea Contemporary Art Fair 2005

Keith Garrow was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1962. After completing a Foundation Course in Barnsley, he graduated from Nottingham Trent University with an honours degree in Fine Art in 1987. He also won a travel scholarship which took him to Thailand, before setting up a studio in Newcastle.

He has since lived in various parts of the UK including Shropshire and Cornwall, and is now settled in Sussex in the South East of England.

My paintings are somwhere between abstraction and figuration, not specific enough to be only one thing, but able to be different things to different people, like the shapes we see in clouds. What the viewer brings to the work plays an important part in what they see and what they take away with them.

I begin by making random marks on the canvas, without any preconceived ideas at all of what the finished painting is going to look like. Chance and accident are used to provide the starting point. I find that the shapes, structures and relationships created in this way have much more power and resonance than anything I could create by conscious design alone.

The paintings are in a constant state of change. The things I choose to develop, the shapes I leave, the things I paint over, the colours I use - all these things are inevitably a product of my own experience, memories and environment. The paintings are built up in many layers, with fragments of earlier work contributing to the finished painting in a way that could not have been conceived when the paint was first put onto the canvas. The painting is complete when there is nothing more I feel the need to change.

The names of the paintings are intended to hint at an element of what the work suggests to me, but should not be taken as a clue to ‘meaning'. To try to articulate meaning and content has no purpose for me. If I could do that verbally there would be no need for me to paint. The paintings are what they are and what matters to me is the process of creating them.

Margaret Bryan Travel Scholarship (Thailand)

Gulbenkian Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Bede Monastery Museum, Jarrow, Tyneside, UK

Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK