Polly Tomlinson is a British artist whose work is rooted in colour, light and feeling. Her practice is intuitive, she does not plan her paintings, but begins each one from a place of stillness and deep attention, drawing from the world both seen and unseen.

Each piece opens with a visceral, energetic first mark, and from there she responds to the canvas as it evolves. Polly works across a wide range of applications, brushing, dragging, scraping, layering, erasing, moving between acrylics, oils and oil sticks as the painting demands. This breadth of action keeps the surface active, energised and present, alive to whatever the next moment calls for rather than settling too soon into a fixed idea.

Underneath the intuition is a sense-making impulse, a corralling of the paint into a conversation between forms, where colour, texture and gesture become a language for emotional states that words cannot hold. The results are abstract, though often carry hints of landscape, figure or place. She is less interested in telling the whole story than in layering and erasing toward something only part-revealed.

Polly’s background as a homeopath and healer of over twenty-five years is inseparable from how she paints. Both practices ask the same of her: to be fully present, to observe without prejudice, to listen before acting, and to dig beneath the surface for what lies underneath. She trusts that the work will emerge on its own terms, rather than imposing an expectation upon it.

She is drawn to what can’t quite be explained, that which can only be felt or intuited. The resulting paintings are gestural and emotionally charged, arrived at rather than designed: things that become their own thing, in the realm of painting.