Lionel Playford

Lionel Playford lives and works in the Cumbrian North Pennines. His studio practice is principally a response to the experience of landscape, walking, sketching and occasionally painting outdoors. Working from memory and imagination as a well as from his own reference drawings and photographs, he develops paintings at different scales which explore what it is to be amongst nature as well as an inhabitant of a place.

Landscape art for Playford stems from his awareness of being a creature that lives, for the most part, on the surface alongside and entangled with other living beings from plants to animals. Surface and sky play equally important and reciprocal roles in representations of landscape: you can’t understand land without sky and we live and breathe in the atmosphere with only our feet on the ground (or the deck of a ship). But what lies beneath, the slower changing geological forms, is equally vital. His point of view on landscape is principally from such a grounded perspective but his awareness of landscape as a cultural construct and his emotional response is what transforms it into art.

Lionel Playford grew up in Leeds and first attended art college in Carlisle after ten years working in a Cumbrian shipyard. He then studied fine art at Northumbria University (1987-91) and gained a Masters degree from Newcastle University in 1999 including a scholarship exchange with the Cleveland Institute of Art Ohio in 1998.  Since 1989 he has exhibited all over the UK as well as in the USA, Ireland, Germany, Taiwan and South Africa. His most recent exhibition (2023) was at Hartlepool Art Gallery, titled Revering Ancient Woodland in collaboration with Natural England, Hartlepool Borough Council and Durham County Council.

He has been artist in residence in many settings since his first residency with English Nature in 1992-3, most recently for Westmoreland and Furness Council for a community in Alston Moor, Cumbria and for Durham County Council on various community and landscape-based themes. He was awarded two national Year of the Artist residencies in 2000 studying people working in a factory and then a bank. In 2001-2 he was artist in residence in a largely Asian community in the West End of Newcastle funded by the Northern Rock Foundation and has worked on many visual arts projects with community groups in the West and East Ends of Newcastle and more recently in Ferryhill, County Durham, Hartlepool and the small village of Renwick in Cumbria for the North Pennines National Landscape.

He has been commissioned to paint works by many organisations including English Nature, British Telecom, Gill Airways, The National Trust, Newcastle University, the North Pennines National Landscape, The Bridgewater Hall Manchester, and the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven (in celebration of their 125^th anniversary of marine science on Helgoland in 2017).

He collaborated in art/science research with geographers and ocean scientists between 2013 and 2020 conducting various research projects starting with a Leverhulme Trust residency on peatlands with Northumbria University Department of Geography and later with the AWI including the role of official expedition artist on the RV Polarstern’s Atlantic climate change research mission in 2016 and as part of a multi-disciplinary project on peatbog climate change in northern Finland led by Northumbria University.

Playford has taken part regularly in national art competitions and was a prize winner in Ireland’s first Claremorris International Open. In 2021 he was a contestant in SKY Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition and was shortlisted for the New Light North prize touring exhibition in 2021-22.

He is an experienced tutor in adult education having taught art for 10 years for Newcastle University’s  Centre for Lifelong Learning until its closure in 2008 and is a regular tutor in drawing and painting for Higham Hall College in the Lake District. He is a visiting lecturer on degree programmes in Fine Art and in Wildlife and Media at the University of Cumbria.