Acclaimed for his extraordinary collages, PATRICK BREMER tells Niki Browes how a new piece can be sparked by finding just one image in a magazine
BORN IN BRIGHTON in 1982, Patrick Bremer went to Wimbledon School of Art. In 2007, he won the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ DeLazlo Award for best portraiture by an artist under 35. Having taught art in secondary schools for a few years, he went to Berlin and became a full-time artist. On his return to the UK, he set up a studio in Exmoor. He has taught collage workshops here and abroad and will be running one in November at East Quay Watchet, a gallery and artist’s hub and studio in West Somerset.
As well as commissions, he has done commercial work for Google, the BBC and Cadillac, and his pieces have been used to illustrate articles in Der Spiegel and The New Yorker.
Being an artist was always my first plan; I simply didn’t know how to do anything else.
But fresh out of art school, it’s easier said than done, so I just wandered for a while. I hopped around different jobs, but always kept a studio and would get in there between shifts working at a pub. l also worked as a framer, which was great as I could save a lot of money framing my own work and also learn’t about presenting it.
My dad was my supporter – and often my harshest critic.
He trained at the Royal Academy and painted landscapes in watercolour and oil. My childhood was surrounded by art, and he drew all the time, on anything and everything. While we were on holiday, he’d be sketching on paper tablecloths to pay for the meals. He passed away this year from pulmonary fibrosis, and I have his work hanging all around the house and in the studio. We did an exhibition together a few years ago in Devon which I’ll always cherish. I think I was paralysed when he died and struggled to make new artwork. But slowly getting back to the easel, has been a great aid in the grieving process.
I won the DeLazlo Award when I was fresh out of art school before I was experimenting with collage.
The winning painting was an oil of one of the locals at the pub where I worked in Brighton. I used to do these big wet impasto oils, with wide decorator brushes and plastic cups full of various paint colours and mediums. I was working a shift behind the bar when someone from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters called to tell me I’d been accepted to the annual show and had won one of the awards. In my early twenties, it was a big deal for me to see my work in the Mall Galleries and it gave me the confidence to keep hammering away at it.
A rough drawing acts as the template for
