Art on a cliff edge

11:01am Wednesday 19th March 2008

CHRIS Smith from Thrupp is one of 20 artists chosen for the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Exhibition 2008 at the Jerwood Space, London in April.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to emerging artists who fall between student and recognised artist status. The 20 selected artists each exhibit one piece of work and receive £1,500, not as a prize, but as a participation fee.

Chris gained a first class honours degree in fine art at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham in 2004.

"As a youngster, I once crawled to the edge of Malham Cove, and looked over its 300 foot cliff and wondered what it would be like to fall," said Chris.

"lfgang Tillman's photograph, End of Land 1, shows a woman overlooking the edge of a huge chalk cliff, probably Beachy Head in East Sussex, a well-known suicide venue.

"In 2003 I made a colour sketch of Tillman's image and then made this painting from that sketch in 2007, the idea of the image was present in my memory and refreshed when the TV historian Nicholas Crane lay prone at the top of Beachy Head during an episode of the BBC's popular series Coast. The sketch was sufficient to revisit the idea and the removal of any of the empirical certainties of the original image cleared the way for a re-evaluation of the idea of being on an edge."