In January 2016, the artist Tom Lamprell’s barn studio in Ringland Hills, Norfolk, burned to the ground. The following day, the Eastern Daily Press ran a story: ‘Artist loses his entire studio,’ reads the headline, ‘and hundreds of paintings in Honingham fire.’ One of the destroyed works had been sold at auction and was wrapped, ready to be shipped.
Ten years later, preparing for his exhibition at South Quay Gallery, Great Yarmouth, Lamprell reflects on how this accident freed him to return to forms of making that predated his commercially successful landscape practice: ‘I started to consider how I might shed some of the cultural, economic and professional expectations attached to painting without giving up the intense commitment to the thing that made those expectations possible in the first place.’ The fire was a transitional moment: an involuntary act of destruction that interrupted one form of practice while opening the possibility of others.
That relationship between accident, destruction and creation runs through the paintings and drawings on display at South Quay Gallery. Occupying two floors, the exhibition comprises approximately twenty paintings downstairs, including a group of large works produced during the previous six months, alongside earlier paintings dating back around two years. Upstairs, approximately forty drawings – predominantly charcoal and pencil on paper – span a decade, temporally and materially reaching back to the period of the fire. Although the architecture of the gallery appears to separate these activities, Lamprell questions the distinction: ‘The boundary between painting and drawing,’ he suggests, ‘is questionable anyway.’
The larger paintings downstairs make the relationship between construction and destruction particularly apparent; accident and contingency are integral to their making. Many begin with recycled aluminium advertising boards whose already besmirched surfaces might suggest somewhere to start. Lamprell works into them episodically, obscuring and sometimes almost eliminating what he has previously painted. He describes leaving a painting for a week alongside the paints he has been using. In the interval, the paints dry, evaporate and diminish. On returning, their altered condition might suggest how to go on with the painting. Rather than following a predetermined image towards completion, Lamprell allows time, material and accident to intervene in the process.
There are other reasons why recycled aluminium advertising boards are preferable to conventional stretched canvas. Their appeal derives partly from their lack of value. They are discarded surfaces and consequently arrive without the investment already embodied in a newly prepared canvas. Cotton has to be produced, timber stretchers constructed, and the surface stretched and primed before painting can begin. Such preparation entails both environmental consumption and psychological expectation: before the first mark has been made, considerable resources have already been committed to the object. Lamprell has not bought his own stretchers for around ten years.
Yet aluminium is not simply an ethical or economical alternative. Lamprell remains acutely attentive to the physical behaviour of different painting grounds. As a child, what initially drew him towards painting was the sensation of canvas pulling paint from the brush. Aluminium – as well as other surfaces such as carpet and felt – behaves differently, establishing another relationship between paint, brush, hand and surface. For Lamprell, painting is an intensely bodily activity: he talks of paint on his hands and the smell of turpentine as readily as he discusses images. Arriving at an image that ‘sits well’ is a simple thrill – ‘occasionally it happens,’ he says – but the finished composition is only one element of the activity. For Lamprell, the ‘being in painting’ is a large part of where its significance resides.
A carpet that began life on the studio floor makes this bodily relationship particularly explicit. Initially, it simply received excess paint as Lamprell wiped his hands while working. Gradually, those incidental deposits accumulated. Cleaning paint from his hands, Lamprell recognised something compelling in the resulting marks and began wondering where the process might lead. What started unconsciously therefore became increasingly deliberate, the carpet becoming what Lamprell calls a ‘wasteholder’: a repository for material that would otherwise have been discarded, but also an index of the physical activity of painting. An incidental residue of painting gradually became an image on its own terms.
This movement from accident to the recognition of a compelling image occurs elsewhere. In a thrashy, washed composition on a table-tennis table, Lamprell intended to cover an existing image and sand it back to establish a new ground. During the process, however, an intermediate image emerged that he wanted to retain. Instead of continuing towards his intended destination, he stopped. The painting exists, then, because Lamprell recognised something unforeseen within the process of destroying another image. In painting, knowing when to stop, he reminds us, can be as significant as producing the marks themselves.
The central whitewashed motif in this table-tennis work appears to redact something beneath it. It is a motif Lamprell has observed in the streets, where graffiti tags are routinely painted over, producing new compositions through acts intended to erase previous ones. Here, destruction and image-making become difficult to distinguish: covering one image inadvertently produces another.
The relationship between authorship and judgement becomes still more pronounced in a work incorporating the ‘OOSEY’ tag of Lamprell’s brother, Toby. When Toby tragically died, his wake was held at Ringland. Lamprell had been practising the tag ‘OOSEY’ in the studio for his brother’s coffin; others encountered these marks and took them as an invitation to add their own tags. The studio, including Lamprell’s canvases, was consequently marked by other hands, and these interventions were subsequently incorporated into the work. Rather than erase or paint over them, Lamprell recognised that the resulting composition worked. His intervention lies, then, not simply in applying paint to the surface, but in recognising, framing and retaining a configuration of marks produced beyond his control.
Lamprell describes this work, on display at South Quay, as a ‘gateway piece’: a route towards making work that felt less ‘encumbered by pretence’. Asked what constituted that encumbrance, he connects it partly to monetary value. Painting arrives carrying a substantial historical and economic inheritance. The conventional stretched canvas can encourage an expectation that the resulting object must justify the material, labour and money already invested in it. Discarded aluminium, graffiti, damaged surfaces and waste paint loosen this relationship. Yet Lamprell’s rejection of preciousness does not amount to a rejection of painting. Painting remains for him something historical, physical and visceral. What is being discarded is not painting itself but some of the expectations surrounding what a painting ought to be.
Throughout the exhibition, this investigation moves between figuration and abstraction rather than resolving itself into either. Earlier paintings establish a continuing relationship between the two, while recent works include recognisable subjects – a seagull, flowers – alongside paired paintings, triptychs and transcriptions of art historical paintings. Recycling therefore operates at several interconnected levels: discarded advertising boards become painting grounds; waste paint becomes an artwork; graffiti becomes composition; existing images are partially destroyed and rediscovered; historical paintings become material for transcription. Rather than beginning with an empty surface, Lamprell increasingly begins with something that already has a history.
The barn fire establishes a pattern that subsequently recurs materially within Lamprell’s practice. An established structure is destroyed; what initially appears to be loss creates an unexpected opening; and something new develops through what remains. The same logic operates when a painting is almost obliterated, when waste paint accumulates on a carpet, or when an unwanted advertising board becomes a support. Destruction releases Lamprell from the obligation to preserve existing value. Accident, in this sense, is not simply something that happens to the work. It becomes part of the method by which the work is made.
This also informs a question Lamprell raises about the location of artistic skill in the age of Artificial Intelligence. His answer is practice – and particularly depth of practice. In the works gathered at South Quay Gallery, skill appears increasingly displaced from technical execution alone towards accumulated judgement: recognising when something has happened, deciding whether an accidental image should survive, knowing when to intervene and when further intervention would destroy what has unexpectedly emerged. Painting is also a way of restaging the medium’s history: gestures, marks and tones in Lamprell’s works are full of significance.
Lamprell’s practice presents painting as a negotiation between intention and accident, value and waste, construction and destruction. His attempt to make work ‘unencumbered by pretence’ does not diminish his commitment to painting. Instead, it concentrates attention upon its most immediate conditions: material, surface, touch, time and judgement. Ten years after the destruction of the barn knocked his practice from its established course, destruction has become not simply something that happened to Lamprell’s painting, but one of the means through which painting can begin again.

Jonathan P Watts