Elvira Rose Oddy is an artist working in West Wales, she studied History of Art with Philosophy at UCL and Painting at Winchester School of Art. She completed her post graduate studies on The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School in 2015 where she was awarded the Felix Robson Prize and taught on the Young Artist Programme. Shows include Critic’s Secret’s A Centenary Exhibition (chosen by the art critic Laura Gascoigne), Best of The Drawing Year at Christie’s King Street, The Lyn Painter Stainer Prize, The Contemporary Watercolour Prize, Beep Painting Prize and the Summer Exhibition at The Royal Academy London and The Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. In the last few years along side her own practice she co-founded Walden Arts, a community art space and print studio in Cardigan where she runs regular classes for adults, children and teenagers.
Elvira’s practice encompasses drawing, painting and printmaking and her subject is broadly Landscape. Through her personal experience of wild places, gardens and edgelands she uses drawing to evoke a feeling about a place. She is interested in capturing a sense of the vitality of nature and a certain exhilaration of seeing and feeling through her handling of materials, working intuitively, exploring where painting and drawing meet. Concerns of weather, light and space recur in her work. She is drawn to juxtaposition and contrast. She hunts for subjects that resonate with her and somehow suggest a microcosm of our experience, and hint at the mysterious. Elvira’s recent work explores the dreamy in-between creative space that monoprinting provides where mark making, painting and printing collide in a play of intuition and surprise. This way of working allows for her interest in capturing light, atmosphere and energy on the sensitive surface of the plate.