Binny Mathews

When successful portrait painter Binny Mathews had the idea of painting another artist at work, observing their most private creative moments and recreating the atmosphere of absolute concentration within the studio, she approached her friend the sculptor Clare Trenchard. Clare agreed for one month on condition there would be no talking and no lunching (they are both tremendous talkers and lunchers.) The arrangement continued for four transformational years.

Perhaps Binny invented the project to give herself room to work experimentally without trying to please an audience. As a portrait painter she works largely to commission and as a recently divorced woman, whose two adult sons are also both artists, she has felt the pressure to pay the bills. Encountering day after day the utterly unselfconscious, steady seriousness with which Clare works has given Binny the key to unlock the dedication with which she painted in her gifted twenties as she rose to great acclaim.

Binny’s journey has been a freeing, a renewal and a reconnecting to the clarity of her voice. Allowing the way she lays on paint and her sense of colour, light and form to take over has produced paintings with a new energy and lightness. By treating the seemingly chaotic environment of the sculptor’s studio as an abstracted landscape, Binny’s paintings reveal the quiet beauty of the creative space.

Binny Mathews writes:

“Lately, my practice has shifted toward a more intuitive, almost childlike process. I begin by working on the floor, building an underpainting with the canvas laid flat. This liberating method allows for happenstance—inviting unexpected marks and gestures that disrupt predictability. These painterly events feel beyond my control, but I’ve learned to accept them and use them to serve the painting as a whole. I approach my work as if I was an abstract painter – celebrating with paint abstract elements of figurative reality. It’s a balancing act. I reduce the information until I find the ‘sweet spot’; a place where information has been sufficiently abstracted but not to the point of oblivion. Moments of resolution across the canvas allow the spectator to journey through the painting.”