Vanessa Cuthbert is a British contemporary artist whose work explores the expressive potential of abstraction through painting, printmaking, and moving image. Her practice centres on the language of colour, shape, texture, and line, layered intuitively to create richly balanced compositions. Working primarily in oils and acrylics on canvas, she constructs her paintings through a process of addition and erasure-building up and breaking down surfaces until a sense of harmony emerges.
While her work is often rooted in visual memory and observation - landscape, objects, shifting light - it does not aim to represent the world directly. Instead, Vanessa draws on instinct and feeling to guide her compositions, with colour playing a central role. Her paintings suggest presence rather than describe it, creating spaces that feel familiar but remain open-ended and abstract.
Music remains a significant influence, particularly early 20th-century composers such as Debussy and Vaughan Williams, whose structures and tonal shifts inform the rhythm and layering in her work. Whether responding to a remembered place or an internal state, Vanessa's paintings evoke a contemplative stillness and invite the viewer into a subtle, resonant world of form and gesture.