Since graduating with a BA in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Art in 2008, Michael Sole has gone on to exhibit in group and solo shows across England, France, Sweden, the US, Singapore and Hong Kong.

In 2009 and 2010 he was awarded ‘Young Artist of the Year’ by the Royal Society of Marine Artists, in 2012 he was in the running for the ‘Threadneedle Prize’ and runner up in ‘Evolver Prize’, in 2013 he won ‘The Arts Club Charitable Trust Award’ at the RSMA and in 2016 one of his paintings won the ‘Lynn Painter-Stainers Award’ and was chosen as the exhibition’s catalogue image.

He is currently a finalist for the following awards: ‘Dorset Landscape Painter of the Year’, the ‘Global Art Award’ and the ‘National Open Art Competition’ in London, where he previously won the ‘One Month Residency Award’.

Sole is interested in nature and the re-evaluation of its painterly tradition. His work explores painting as a process using the great outdoors as subject matter. The concept behind his paintings relies upon the idea of involuntary mark-making, how the materials react with one another and how he goes about applying them to canvas. Sole calls his method ‘Involuntaryism’. Its idea is to allow the paint’s characteristics and gravity to produce marks, creating organic patterns, atmosphere and substantiation, allowing the painting to have a life of its own. With this concept in mind, nature, with its natural geometry, is the perfect subject to experiment from.

For more information go to www.michaelsole.co.uk.