Into the Light is Jonathan Purday’s debut presentation of a new body of work. Purday has created a series of paintings in his trademark graphic style interplaying light, colour and perspective through unfolding natural scenes.

The artist presents a new body of work entitled ‘Into the Light’ in which Purday recounts his memoires through the art of travel, time living abroad on a retreat and the overlapping of modern life and the explorer heart. Jonathan Purday takes inspiration from sources such as films by David Lynch and creates almost Hitchcock-like scenes that are warped yet familiar. Seductive paintings unfold exposing the viewer to light-filled landscapes as if a stolen moment between the artist and the landscape. The paintings seem alone and still, they encapsulate the moment at which we all frame our surroundings as an artist might.

These scenes are recounted by the artist, capturing bespoke locations such as the Yves Saint Laurent Majorelle Gardens in Morocco using his trademark Yves Klein blue, which also figures in the architecture. Other scenes depict lone trees that reference from films such as “La ardilla roja” and his own travel photographs. A different sky is often collaged behind these imposing trees, to further skew the scene and build a surreal sense of time and space. Each work is built up from a selection of the artist’s own documentation, carefully selected and built up in layers. Other pieces from Portugal were painted directly from the landscape, capturing the artist’s direct connection with the dramatic surroundings.

This work is important for the artist as it shows the progression of his practice since 2007 to a more mature style, drawing inspiration from natural scenes. Jonathan says of his style of painting that he likes to ‘attack’ the canvas, correcting as he goes, this is definitely evident in the bold, confident canvases such as ‘Jungle Fever’ and ‘Green Healing’ showing at Bearspace in April. In 2004 Purday created the artwork for the Gomez Album “In Our Gun" and other artwork shortlisted for the book cover of Nathan Filer's debut novel "The Shock of the fall." Purday has shown widely in London and is collected internationally. He was educated at Bath School of Art and is now based in South-East London.