Nathan Walsh United Kingdom, b. 1972

Nathan Walsh was born in 1972 in Lincoln, United Kingdom.
He is a contemporary realist painter living and working in Wales, United Kingdom.

While he paints in his studio in Wales, he travels abroad to large cities like New York to research his compositions.

Walsh spends days becoming familiar with the ever-changing city landscape in any major city that he visits. He sketches the basic composition of each painting on a postcard-sized piece of paper. Then, he photographs specific areas of the city that he chooses to paint. When he returns to his studio in Wales, he compiles as many as 1000 images to prepare a verist composition for a new painting. His underpaintings are very intricate and architectural. This results in colossal paintings measuring up to 9 feet in width.

Nathan Walsh is a painter who attempts to present a credible space, which whilst making reference to the visible world, and documentary photography obeys its own distinct logic.

From determining a horizon line at the start of the process to spraying a final glaze of colour, he controls the nature of the world he presents to the viewer. Whether simply changing the size of a building or introducing a structure found on Google Earth, Walsh likes the idea of inventing another reality, familiar in some ways to us but fundamentally of his own making.

This is most evident at the drawing stage of the work, which is the most open-ended and creative part of his process. Working with a box of pencils and an eraser Walsh will draw and redraw buildings, vanishing points will be shifted and materials rearranged. At this point he aims to take ownership of the raw information he is working with and not let it dictate what is happening. Creating an urban landscape within its own perspectival space has more potential than simply duplicating the flatness of a photograph.

Whilst a camera lens or software package can suggest a mechanical space this is at odds with how we actually experience reality. Walsh is interested in creating paintings where the viewer feels they can enter into and move around, and talk of the world we live in.

His work has been exhibited worldwide since 2005.