Tarka Kings

Tarka Kings studied painting at the Royal Academy and has exhibited widely throughout the world as well as having works in important private collections.

Tarka’s choice of subject matter is generally unremarkable. The branch of a tree seen through a car’s windscreen, a thicket of signals on a traffic island, the view from the back window of a council block. None of these are necessarily subjects to stop you in your tracks but they all feature in Tarka’s world.

She might start with mundane fact but then what Tarka does is really remarkable. She looks and continues to look. A painting is not ready until she has finished looking and this can take a considerable amount oF time. She paints in situ, using her car as a an anonymous studio, and prefers gouache as a medium because she feels this is more akin to drawing, where every mark qualifies the preceding and the result is cumulative. It is as though she is consciously using this layering of paint to trap the passing of time and to reflect the physical changes to her subject as month follows on from month. Even the light appears to come from within the picture until foreground detail is submerged into the whole.

So, what might have begun as an unremarkable fragment has been transformed from the anecdotal to the universal and a modest panel can be viewed as a metaphor for life itself”. Nigel Greenwood 2004

studio: 3
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phone: 020 8969 6166

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