Aidan Potts
Biography
Aidan Potts is an English artist based in London. Self-taught as a painter, he has a degree in Art History from UCL and has worked as a freelance cartoonist, illustrator, children’s book author, app and game developer. For the past six years, he has concentrated exclusively on painting in watercolours for exhibition and commissions.
His exhibitions include the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, Royal Watercolour Society, Royal Society of British Artists and Sunday Times Watercolour Competition, where he was runner-up in 2019. He has also exhibited with Flux, Gemini Art Prize, Hari Art Prize, Gallery at Green & Stone and TALP.
Artist Statement
Aidan Potts honed his watercolour skills over years as a professional illustrator for the national press, where the medium’s speedy technique, including the use of a hairdryer, suited tight deadlines. Its pellucidity, which creates wonderful gradients and, when layered, can imitate random abstract textures, has made watercolour a medium he cannot be without.
He is currently working on a series of portraits of rogue flowers in man-made environments, following William Blake’s exhortation in “Auguries of Innocence” to “see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” These paintings are portraits of urban tenacity, with indomitable nature set against concrete, brick, tarmac and gritted paint. By focusing on a reduced scale, he admires life on a small stage and remains alert to the random acts of kindness nature gives us despite ourselves. He alternates themes between every two pictures, often moving between portraiture and city surrealism, such as a balled-up piece of aluminium foil placed in a hedge.