Born in London but now living in Wiltshire, Barry
Toms is a largely self-taught artist, being an electrical
engineer in a former life. He started painting watercolours
then moved to oils and acrylic and recently has been
producing pastel portraits. While working at the Tyne
shipyards he painted watercolours of the Northumberland
coast and exhibited at Newcastle and Wallsend. After
moving to Bath he took early retirement and studied
life painting and portraiture at Bath college. He
has exhibited at the Hotbath gallery in Bath and throughout
Wiltshire and Somerset. He spends a lot of time on
portrait commissions but also produces landscapes
and interiors usually with a figurative content.
Barry's paintings attempt to capture
a moment in time and invite the viewer to consider
the frozen moment. The viewer is invited to explore
the world of the painting and in a two-way transaction
his visual and emotional responses to the subject
will react with the viewers' perceptions and experiences
and thus the spectator will form their own unique
impressions and meanings.
The ideas and references for a painting
originate from many forms; the memory of something
seen, pictures cut out from magazines, his own photographs
and sketches. He paints using a fairly traditional
method, building up the layers of paint to give a
depth of colour and although working in a representational
way does not try to achieve "super realism"
but hopes that the use of the brush and palette knife
(and sometimes fingers) gives the painting a life
of its own.
