Toni Cogdell
The figures in my paintings are solitary, but not alone.
“I tell the story of us from the inside out, through painting. My work is somewhere between a wish and a call to arms.”
Toni Cogdell was born in Bristol in 1979, graduating from Bath School of Art in 2002 with a BA Hons in Fine Art.
While exhibiting her work across the UK and 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.
Believing that art provides a space for people to pause, question, reconnect and expand their own selves, Toni Cogdell creates thoughtful, sensitive gallery works representing the universal journey of life that we all experience.
An exciting British artist
Painting intuitively, in the space between figuration and abstraction, Toni finds a freedom that enables the Bristol artist to explore more profoundly the intangible substance of the psyche and human condition, without restricting or enforcing definitive ideas.
Pulling recognisable truths into the work while remaining open to the unknown, her paintings are looking for a balance; a coming together of moments in living bodies; a kind of imperfect beauty.
Bath Spa University graduate Toni Cogdell paints portraits of unsaid moments and unseen thoughts: fine art poetry which resides in ordinary, daily life and in transitory moments.
The figures in her gallery paintings stand in ambiguous settings, underscoring an intent focus on the cerebral. Every piece is painted with a carefully balanced palette and distinctive, contemplative composition.
“Pulsing through paint on canvas is an action to bend chaos into beauty, the kind of beauty that tilts on the curve of a wing as it swoops into water and then sky; below, above. A broken beauty: ceaseless in its search for renewal and self knowledge, perfect in its imperfection,” Toni says.
When asked what drives her to create the art that graces our gallery, Toni Cogdell replies: “I am on a pursuit to make contemporary portraits that dig beneath the skin to swim in our consciousness, diving through our layers while throwing light at our forgotten selves. That quiet and real landscape beyond view from which stories and longings and moments can rise and be felt.”
Exploring outer and inner worlds
Toni’s figurative portraits bring colour to a gallery wall, and are a mesmerising blend of acrylic, spray paint, collage and oil, and have captured the attention of other artists, including British musician Goldie.
He connected so deeply with her work that he bought a Toni Cogdell artwork to add to his gallery collection at Aurum Gallery in Thailand.
“I paint to remember, I paint to discover, I paint in search of things lost or not yet understood,” Bristol artist Toni Cogdell explains. “Pieces of me, pieces of you, who we are from the inside out, moment to moment, in no linear measurement and continuously remade by experience and contact with the world around us.
“Can our journeys be traced? Or do they leave no trail other than a tug in the heart, a gentle shift toward something new, something alchemised.”
Her art, which has been exhibited in many a gallery across the UK as well as in Thailand’s Aurum Gallery, features often ephemeral figures who she describes as “solitary, but not alone”. They are caught during an inward moment, their form fusing with paint marks, words and textures.
Toni explains that the whole “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.”
Toni Cogdell: solo exhibitions
The Bristol artist has enjoyed several solo exhibitions, including "Traces of Us" at the Turner Art Perspective Art Gallery in 2021 and "Ad", 2023.
Toni Cogdell describes her paintings as “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... 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.”
As well as gracing many a UK gallery, Toni Cogdell has received a number of accolades, including the Emerging Artist award from the Royal West of England Academy (RWA), one of only five Royal Academies of Art in the UK.
Toni was also shortlisted for Channel Five’s, The Big Art Challenge, and was a finalist in the 2003 edition of Not the Turner Prize from the Daily Mail.
Contact us
You can browse more of Toni Cogdell’s affordable art here
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