Ben Singleton studied BA fine art at West Surrey College of art (1987 – 88) and an MA at he the Salde School of Art, London (1889 – 90)

He works with two separate methods; large format oil on canvas works in the studio, with a figurative, narrative approach, and small formal oil on gesso primed paper urban works, mostly done on site, and completed in the studio.

He lives and works in Tuscany, central Italy, which has been home sonce 1990, while his drawing influences stem from travels in urban settings both in Italy and Asia

I started working with oils when I was 13 and have always drawn. My father and grandfather both worked in the paper producing industries, and I believe that flat drawing surfaces were always around me as a child. I have tried to work in other media but have an incredible bond with pencil drawing and oil painting.

For the last few years, a serendipitous discovery of priming paper with gesso has allowed me to unite paper-based sketching and oil painting, and this has rekindled the flame of urban sketching.

The larger paintings have a more narrative quality – I have always been fascinated by the stillness, modernity and archetypical sense of place in the works of Piero della Francesca – and when I paint, I like for the sensation to be the action, the moment of decision or disaster or drama is elsewhere and in another time. I love the sensation that the actual time taken to paint and represent a figure on a canvas is somehow reflected in the weight and stillness of that figure.

Living and working in the last part of the last millennium and the first part of this one, it is impossible not to be influence by, and have a need to paint about the time we have been given, and the social implications of the choices we have made, and how they influence those who are left to follow us.