Dom Theobald's luminously coloured and richly textured semi-abstract works derive from a wide variety of sources - cartoon forms, music, botanical drawings, documentary photographs, film and found objects among them.
From these he draws out images as varied as dragonfly wings and shoes, leaves and pools, lungs and bones, moons and feathers, images which, when set against the intense colours and densely worked surfaces that form the 'backgrounds' of his works, become metaphors for the sifting and selection of thoughts and feelings that the memory becomes involved in during the slow process of making a painting.
For Dom this is a process whereby the background becomes a kind of 'net' in which these forms, or 'stones' as he likes to call them, have been caught or dredged, each of them resonant with meaning and a vivid sense of life. Intensely poetic too, is the way in which these forms come to echo and reinforce each other, pulsating, not just across the picture surface but also from work to work, in a vibrant and impassioned statement of belief in how the magical ordinariness of things can come to embody the most profound sensations of the sacred and numinous.
Born in Surrey in 1963, Dom Theobald studied at Norwich School of Art, where his tutor Derrick Greaves was a particular influence, before going on to complete an M.A. in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1993, during which time he specialised in printmaking. Two years after graduating Dom returned to Norfolk and Ditchingham House, near Bungay, where he has lived and worked ever since, showing regularly in galleries in this country and in Europe and the USA over much of that time.
-words on Dom by Nicholas Usherwood