Toni Cogdell Artist Biography
Toni Cogdell was born in Bristol, England, in 1979. While exhibiting her work across the UK as well as selling internationally, she has honed her process and techniques combining acrylic, spray paint, collage and oil paint to give voice to her expression; a personal style seeking to connect with the world around her.
Painting intuitively, in the space between figuration and abstraction Toni finds a freedom which allows her to go deeper into the intangible substance of the psyche and human condition without restricting or enforcing definitive ideas. Pulling recognisable truths into the work while opening to the unknown, her paintings are looking for a balance, a coming together of moments, a kind of imperfect beauty.
Having graduated from Bath Spa University, 2002 with a BA Hons in Fine Art, Bristol based artist, Toni ultimately paints portraits of unsaid moments and unseen thoughts, poetry which resides in daily life and in transitory moments. Her figures stand in ambiguous settings emphasising an intent focus on the cerebral. Every piece is painted with a carefully balanced palette and distinctive, contemplative composition.
As flickers of starlight in a constellation of living bodies, the figures in my paintings are solitary, but not alone. The inward moment they are captured in; their form fusing with paint marks, words and textures, acts as a portal to spaces behind knowledge, a sensory sea of feeling, a self beneath our belief of the self. Us, simultaneously set in consciousness and clay.
Symbolised in paint are the comforting and familiar objects which reveal themselves through the haze of daily life. A repetition of natural reminders cutting through a technology-driven Age. The horizon in your periphery as you travel. The tree you see every morning unrewardingly standing as the backbone to your inner monologue. City lights floating on water at night, flowers scattered like fallen stars on the land, silhouettes of hills behind buildings, birds, branches, pathways, our own personal talismans of nature and living. Motifs and markers that guide us subliminally. Hand-scrawled words mark the surface of the paintings, obscured and revealed as our voices are, becoming remnants of thought and expression, of the tools we use to seek meaning.
And like the movement of migrating birds we connect. Our dreams and designs seeing light and travelling towards a truth we recognise, leaving invisible threads with which to weave a life.
These themes are the crux of my work, meandering across the territory of the Human Condition, exploring the constant dialogue, contrasts and tensions between the lives we lead and the lives we feel, our outer and inner worlds, the spaces between the parts. Exploring our individuation as well as our innate connections to nature, time and ultimately to each other. Telling the story of us from the inside out, through painting. Somewhere between a wish and a call to arms.
“I am on a pursuit to make contemporary portraits that dig beneath the skin to swim in our consciousness, to reveal our stories and the marks we make on ours and others’ lifelines, the traces of ourselves we give, revisit and leave behind.”
– Toni Cogdell
Toni’s figurative portraits have captured the eyes of many, including British Musician, Goldie who connected so deeply with Toni’s works that he added a piece of hers to his growing collection. She has received a number awards, including the RWA 'Emerging Artist' award. The Royal West of England Academy (RWA) is one of only five Royal Academies of Art in the UK. Toni was also short listed for Channel Five TV's, 'The Big Art Challenge', and was a Finalist in 'Not the Turner Prize', The Daily Mail, 2003.