Artist Helen Latham, who lives and works in Cambridge, has a BSc in Colour Chemistry from Leeds University. She has worked for over 30 years in the textiles industry, but painting has always been a passion and in 2016 she graduated from the respected Turps Banana painting mentoring course.
Helen’s interest lies in the human condition – what it feels like to be alive today. In our complex and often superficial culture, how do we relate, in a meaningful way, to one another? She chooses the human figure as her subject, the most obvious yet complicated source of inspiration, and looks at the sense of belonging or alienation we can all feel.
In today’s society, where “we are inundated with jpegs and social media snapshots, which get a fleeting glance and are then discarded, painting has a radical new role,” Helen suggests. “It adds a layer of time, contemplation and introspection to an image. Paintings demand the viewer to gaze intently and engage with the feelings and meanings that the artist has poured into them.” By working from found digital images, Helen nevertheless incorporates rather than rejects modern-day technology in her process.
As a colour chemist, Helen has studied, and is fascinated by, the physical and psychological effects colour has on our brain, and she uses colour in her paintings to affect an emotional response. The depiction of children innocently at play in nature also evokes a strong sense of nostalgia.
Helen had work selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2023 and 2022. Other recent exhibitions include Cambridge Summer Open (2019), Dinner is Ready at the West End Centre, Aldershot (2018) and People, What Are They Like? at Déda in Derby (2018). In 2019, Helen was awarded the Honourable Mention Award by the Circle Foundation for the Arts. We were delighted to show Helen’s paintings for the first time at Battersea Affordable Art Fair in March 2024.
