Studio Holder Spotlight - Ed Saye

Describe your work in three sentences.

Each painting is a different version of a fading idyll, a lament for the utopian ideals of some other age. The paintings represent shadowy people, places and things as fragments of fictions and memories. Idyllic scenes are rendered uncanny by unnatural light emanating from layers of under-painting and a colour palette that makes reference to the faded hues of old photographs and postcards.

What’s your favourite piece of your own work and why?

There’s always something to be dissatisfied with in a finished painting so it has to be the painting I’m currently working on, because it represents the current challenge and the hope and potential to make something better than the last piece.

What do you listen to when you’re working in the studios?

Radiohead, Steve Reich, Daft Punk, Aphex Twin, Nico Muhly, Grimes…but quite often whatever sounds are drifting through the walls.

What are you going to be showing off during Open Studios?

Recent work made for an event at UCL in response to conversations with research scientists in the Neurology department working on Alzheimer’s.

Who else in the studios should people go and see, aside from you?

The beautiful and talented Dina Varpahovsky, of course.