OLLIE MARR

Ollie is a South African artist based in London, currently completing the Drawing Year Programme at the Royal Drawing School.

Reinforced by his studies at the Drawing School, observational drawing has become a daily practice and the foundation of Ollie’s work. Ollie draws green spaces in and around London. He also regularly seeks out the wider vistas of Scotland, Cornwall and Cape Town, places that link back to his sense of self and of home, and with which he has cultivated deep relationships through drawing.

Ollie draws with graphite or charcoal in sketchbooks and on loose sheets of paper prepared with a coloured ground. Through looking, Ollie engages directly with his experience of reality, deconstructing that experience by drawing what he sees. 

Through processes of printmaking and working from memory, Ollie then uses his drawings as a basis to develop paintings in his studio. In this part of his practice, rather than engaging with experience directly, Ollie revisits the moments in his drawings, engaging with the feelings they invoke through layers of paint. This lends a remembered quality to his paintings, where the viewer is invited not just to look but to enter into and feel the space

Ollie works from their studio in East London.