Dr Marc Yeats is a painter, composer of New Music, practice researcher, writer, and poet.
His work as a painter and composer is closely linked to techniques developed over many years, with compositions influencing new approaches to painting and techniques in painting influencing musical development. Although interested in surfaces represented in sound, colour, form, and texture, his work is further influenced by a fascination with layering, geology, erosion, landscapes, and place-specific resonance and how this may manifest and be embodied. Understanding, strengthening, and researching this self-referential relationship remains his lifelong challenge and passion.
Yeats works in oils, acrylics, and mixed media on paper and board. Based in Somerset, England, he paints land & seascapes around Suffolk, Norfolk, Dorset, and the chalk downland of southern England.
Although Yeats is attracted to the abstract, he finds himself drawn to landscape as a fixed point to express light, shadow, sky and land, vegetation, season, topography, weather, vibrancy and all the other landscape features he enjoys. But he's not trying to mimic nature or create the illusion of reality. He's been there and done that in his 20s. Consequently, he does not paint from 'life', out on location, and he does not paint from photographs. However, he sketches and spends much time in the locations that inspire him. He paints the impressions and memories of the places he loves rather than translating the experience of those places into paintings on location. For Yeats, the very nature of a location, its structures, changing dynamics, and ambience are best represented when filtered through perception and memory over a gestational period to later emerge because of this process in the vigorous mark-making of his work.
As such, he doesn't set out to paint anywhere in particular. Instead, Yeats relies on the familiarity of the landscapes he experiences to manifest through how he throws paint around in the initial stages of making a painting as he plays with oil or acrylic paint, crayons, marker pen, and pencil on paper or board. His subjects always emerge from these actions. They are never premeditated. Having said that, through years of painting experience, it is likely the actions he calls spontaneous are, in fact, highly practised gestures and choices that, though feeling free of premeditation, are most likely to be automatic psychological and physical/kinetic responses to representing the world around him through paint and line. To mitigate this emotional familiarity with himself, he employs additional elements of kinetic force and motion in his gestures to allow the paint to move beyond anticipated outcomes, and sometimes, he will close his eyes once again to attempt to loosen control over these actions. He proceeds with these processes, often creating layers of activity until something he recognises emerges. This recognition may be tenuous at first, but once he's aware of something familiar, a light effect, a landscape form, an ambience, or anything that he has experienced in some way, he focuses his attention on that direction to further assimilate and consolidate the image around those impressions. The painting is finished when it resonates with memory, perception, or sensation he can locate in the world.
Yeats' music is performed, commissioned, and broadcast worldwide. As one of the UK's most prolific leading contemporary composers, his works have been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hallé Orchestra, with broadcasts on BBC Radio 3.
