Tony Hunt
Biography
Born in Winchester in 1943, Tony Hunt studied at Southern College of Art and Liverpool Polytechnic. He held teaching and senior academic posts at Southampton College of Art, Southampton Institute and Salisbury College of Art, including Head of Department of Fine Art & Graphics and Head of Division Fine Art & Graphics.
His work has been exhibited extensively in Britain and internationally, including exhibitions in France, Germany, the USA, Canada, China and Greece. His awards include three Southern Arts awards and the Winsor & Newton / RI Award in 1999. His work is held in the HM Government Art Collection, the collection of HM The Sultan of Oman and the Royal Navy, among others.
Artist Statement
Tony Hunt RI’s work explores the paradoxes that emerge between observation and ideas, reality and illusion, and the structures of form and content. Landscape painting is his principal vehicle, particularly the landscape of the South Downs, where he lives. He is interested in the ambiguities between unbridled nature and nature contained within an increasingly built and industrialised landscape.
His paintings consider how we read visual clues to identify things and give them meaning, and how these clues can themselves be ambiguous, leading to different interpretations. He works from drawings made on location, usually accompanied by photographs as aide-memoires, developing ideas further in the studio. Paintings generally evolve from thumbnails and small colour studies, allowing an initial observation to develop through an open-ended process in which creative decisions continually modify the original idea.