Walter Sedriks is a self-taught artist working in London and Palo Alto, California. With a life-long interest in art, he had dabbled occasionally with pastels and screen printing of realistic subjects. Then, late in life two things happened which changed his perspective. He went to Burning Man in 2014 and was blown away by the amazing surreal art pieces in the desert, particularly with their interaction with the dust storms and sunsets. Shortly after, he was lucky to encounter a group of younger free-spirited and somewhat unconventional artists, in particular Eugene Wood, one of the rare truly original contemporary artists working in London, who acted as his teacher and mentor, and Sara Le Roy, his muse.

That led him to look at things in a different way: He became fascinated by every-day things that we rarely notice - random textures, patterns, shapes and colours that surround us, in torn-down posters, crumbling walls, reflections on water, close-cropped sections of his photographs and even butt-shots taken with his iPhone – identifying closely and following his mentor’s artistic philosophy, who has summarised it poetically in the words of Aldous Huxley as seeing “the strange and infernal otherness that hides in familiar things.” It underpins much of Eugene’s work and emboldened Walter to think that he could start painting again, late in the day, along similar lines, creating pieces in oil, acrylic and mixed media.

Walter thus often starts the process of making his work with a photograph and the intention of replicating all or a section of it in mixed media or paint, and generally lets the process proceed somewhat at random until it assumes some coherence and/or atmosphere that he likes, but which remains very much open to interpretation. His work to date has been experimental on a relatively small-scale, but feeling a new lease of life, he’s now at the point of starting on larger pieces for which he thinks his approach will be well suited.