The young artist painter Raoul Orzabal describes the development of his artwork:
“As someone extremely dyslexic, I was removed from three different schools as a kid due to frequently having the poorest grades apart from art. It was during my A2 levels my passion for art grew. Before that time, art was a subject I was on and off with but knew it was what I could relate to best out of the other subjects, as what my parents encouraged at the time. When I had found a greater passion for it, my first phase of my work consisted of fragmented collages of urban cityscapes, mainly of modern architecture. From that point on I would only use the collages as reference only in order to copy them down into oil painting. Originally I was more into drawing and pastel but I felt I needed to work on improving my technique in painting. Oil painting was historically a rich medium and I felt this would be my primary one to use. My collages and oil paintings of 10 years ago were mainly influenced by the aesthetics of cubism, futurism and vortisism. I was more interested in being inspired by the designs rather than the artists as individuals.
During my foundation year, I had moved to London and have lived here since. As art foundation encouraged their participants to forget all that they previously learned and to engage in new mediums, I found it quite difficult to begin with but knew I could just brush to one side what I had learned previously but temporarily. Mixed media sculpture was largely encouraged along with video and performance art. As one who simply regards himself as an artist and not an ideologist, fields in conceptual art was something I struggled to relate to as it came across as more about research and written work rather than craft but I stuck to mainly mixed media sculpture toward the end of the course.
The final body of work I produced that year was sculptural painting where I presented three painted canvases above each other with cut-out sections revealing the additional paintings beneath.
I carried on this technique into the first year of my degree at the university of Westminster before moving onto to creating pastiche altarpieces, which were influenced by the design of my earliest works. I returned to 3D painting again late in my degree but carried on with jig sawed boards instead of canvas as they stayed straight after the holes were carved in.
After graduating in 2016, I have continued to produce more paintings but in smaller scales until mid 2018 where my current phase of my work started. The latest phase was where I would spend several months on single 2D painting and fill it up with as much detail as possible according to the photographic reference I created. It was also around this time I began to frequently sell work and additionally jointly wining the 2019 Art Gemini prize. During the covid-19 pandemic, my sales declined rapidly but this year have started to see a slow recovery. “
You can find Raoul’s portfolio here https://www.raoulorzabal.com/
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