HENRY WARD: dumb ritual

HENRY WARD

dumb ritual

Thinking aloud is a process where it’s unclear where thought is leading. It’s trying to work something out to reach a conclusion. In a not dissimilar way, painting is a language that reveals itself through the process of action, but painting also goes beyond frontiers and the limits of intellectual understanding.

In Amy Sillman’s words, “Talking is painting in that it involves a deep structural understanding of the core grammar, how sentences are built, but the flexibility of not knowing what you are going to say next. You trust both kind of structures of thought. This is something I learnt in poetry, by reading poems out loud. Maybe talking and listening are painting! 1

Painting is fundamentally sensual, it expresses feeling and sensation. The materials interact in a physical dynamism with the artist. Colour evokes mood. How colours are toned and juxtaposed creates a sense of shift or movement. 

The mutable self with its achievements and failures tries again and again to begin a painting in a kind of dumb ritual where something new may emerge beyond its control.

In his studio in Woolwich, Henry Ward aspires to be what Duchamp called ‘as stupid as a painter’. “I investigate the formal qualities of paint; thick and thin; opaque and translucent; the gestural and the graphic, bringing different languages together in a single composition”. 2

Ward’s imagery draws on biomorphic forms which though abstract still conjure up imaginary beings that are not quite recognisable. The brain is subjected to pareidolia but Ward is not bothered if one seeks comfort in seeing or making sense of his paintings. Some of them depict legs and flippers as in ‘Clavel’ and ‘Lean’. These are creatures of an undefined world, unformed in the process of their becoming, actors complete with the ingredients of humour and pathos essential to their development. “I realised there was something about the distinct forms that was working, and it’s something I’ve been picking up on the work since. Forms that are almost like characters. Like they’ve got personalities, perhaps a little anamorphic, a bit comic.” 3

There is a warmth about Ward’s abstract paintings; they beckon to you, call you back to look at them again; they become familiar and, like new friends, they grow on you.

~ Vivienne Roberts

Excerpts from the book HENRY WARD: Bethany

1 Talking about Painting with Amy Sillman

2  Jonathan Watkins: Getting Away From It All

3 Studio Conversation with Jenni Lomax

Henry Ward is a painter living and working in London. He studied at Winchester School of Art, Goldsmiths College and Middlesex University. Ward has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been included in the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in 2018, 2019 and 2022; the Wells Contemporary in 2020 and 2024; the BEEP Biannual in 2020 and 2022, the Football Art Prize in 2022 and has been shortlisted for the inaugural Wrexham Art Prize in 2025. Ward was included in "A Generous Space" at Hastings Contemporary and "A Generous Space 2" at the New Art Gallery, Walsall. He has paintings in the Soho House collection. In 2023 he was artist in residence at The Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA. Alongside his painting Ward is a respected educator, having taught and lectured internationally, and is widely published. A substantial monograph, “Bethany”, by Anomie Publications, featuring works made during the Albers residency and afterwards, was published in 2025 and includes an essay by Jonathan Watkins and conversations with American painter Amy Sillman and curator Jenni Lomax.