Roy Winstanley`s work is finely balanced between the representational and the abstract. In recent years his approach to landscape composition has changed with his large watercolours having a less complex structure, with large flat expansive washes contrasting with smaller areas of carefully crafted textures. Experimental and traditional techniques are used to convey the many moods of his subjects, often exploring the linear rhythms to be found in ancient landscape. The wide range of his interests include experimental acrylics, in which the actual painted surface helps to determine the final outcome as much as the initial idea. His use of deep colour and an exciting approach to composition give his work a strongly distinctive quality. Roy Winstanley has been painting in Dorset since moving from his native Yorkshire in 1986 and is now one of the county`s well established artists. Educated at Westminster College, the university of Leeds, and Goldsmiths College, he exhibits locally and nationally, with his work to be found in many collections both public and private at home and abroad. One particularly notable commission was for a large group of paintings both acrylic and watercolour, to hang in a villa in Rabat for a member of the Morroccan royal family. He lives by the sea in the gently rolling fields of Dorset. His home and studio are set in beautiful landscape, close to the world heritage coastline, please call to arrange a visit or to discuss a commission.
	Roy Winstanley is a watercolour wizard, who takes the often understated traditions of this medium to an altogether more virile, animated plane. His work has a vibrancy and energy which transcends mere landscape painting and suggests that it is more landscape portraiture. Typically he selects wide vistas and undulating countryside, which give opportunity for grandeur of form and vast sweeps of dramatic colour, preferably displaying startling contrasts. purple skies over golden cornfields ,crimson skies invest towering escarpments with flesh tones apparently emanating from beneath the surface green. His textures are painstakingly worked in a careful technique of layering, achieved by applying new paint onto existing colour, and then removing sections to reveal the original layers beneath. This gives luminosity to his subject and produces the effect of superficial light upon a stronger, darker background. Why is his work so eye catching? maybe, because despite its strength and the direct force of its statements, it also exhibits a beauty and grace. It is not avant gard, yet has an appealing quality of contemporaneity.There is furthermore a delightful accessibility to his paintings. Hovering between the abstract and the representational they afford the viewer the joy of recognition; a hillfort, a castle, a lane -all are known and recognized. Roy Winstanley`s greatest and most idiosyncratic gift is that through the media of light and movement he allows his landscapes to become living, breathing creatures with an anthropomorphic vigour all their own. Hilary Kenway.