Surrealist Dreams Print

Originally from Leicester, Geoff Litchfield has been an artist and teacher for over forty years. Much of Litchfield’s artwork explores the relationships formed by accidental and deliberate juxtapositions of images and the subsequent creation of a new narrative arising from them. He is captivated by the role of chance in creativity and devises strategies to enhance the effectiveness of the intervention of the random within his process. The relationship between text and image is a recurring theme, stretching back to conceptual work in the late seventies and early eighties where Wittgensteinian approaches to language were explored in works addressing the tensions between object, function and nomenclature. A Duchampian and Lear-like love of word play and absurdity can frequently be seen. Humour remains an important device and is evidenced in recent collage works exploring formal and conceptual relationships between shapes and their semiology. Recently, Litchfield’s work has largely been in the field of collage, allowing him to explore ideas quickly whilst still allowing themes, often political or autobiographical in content, to develop. Fascinated with the book as an art-form and with linear and non-linear narratives, he works in both analogue and digital formats, frequently combining the two forms into a mixed media outcome. He often works on several pieces at a time, not wishing to be tied to any particular style and preferring them to develop organically at their own rate. Consequently, some pieces can be completed in under two hours whilst others have been spread over two years!