Dion Salvador Lloyd

Dion Salvador Lloyd is a contemporary British painter, known predominantly for his landscapes. All around him in his home and his studio are scattered remnants and objects collected from places he has been and journeys he has taken, sources of inspiration and insights into his nature. Dion is drawn to the history of natural things, their stories and mysteries. He is driven by this connection with the world around him, using painting as a way of telling us who he is, expressing those elusive things that can’t be put into words.

His own story starts in 1967 in Brighton, England. Given a name made-for-remembering by his father, a sculptor and vintage car collector, Dion worked for years in London hotels until a fire in his flat destroyed all he owned and he was forced to start again with a blank canvas, taking the opportunity to travel Europe for 6 months and reassess his life. Dion has always had a unique sensitivity and sensory connection with the world around him, obsessed with music and the emotional journeys and emotive responses it triggered within him, but it wasn’t until this point, on a beach in Turkey, that he realised these were the key ingredients for a career as an artist.

He is a self-taught painter whose peaks of inspiration and bursts of creativity, working in hotspots and purple patches, gives his work its energy and dynamism. His disciplined work ethic means he is always busy, developing and moving between medium and scales and subject matter, intuitively changing and developing his languages of paint and painting. The character and confidence of his paintings has shifted as his journey has unfolded, each exhibition of his work has grown in both subtlety and power.

He thrives on setting goals and targets for himself; in 2017 he achieved the distinction of his paintings being selected and hung in each of the Royal Academies in the UK and has 2 paintings selected for the Royal Society of British Painters exhibition at the Mall Galleries in 2018. Dion Salvador Lloyd is also represented by several prestigious galleries in London and the UK with an ever-growing profile of successful solo exhibitions.

‘My practice has always had at its heart a human presence; their memories, the places they have been, the spaces they travel through. Landscape is not always external – we have our own personal landscapes within us; they define us and make us who we are, all humans tread the landscapes of the mind. The world about us asks us to interact with it emotionally, the things we see, touch and change us, build our experiences, construct our personalities; my paintings have never been pictures of places, they have always come from within and been experiential rather than pictorial.

Alongside my familiar works, there has been for the last few years a hidden side to my practice. Starting in 2014 I have developed a body of work focused on the psychology and poignancy of the human head and the mystery it contains, painted on found and discarded papers, backs of old photographs, letters and postcards from lost people, lost in time.

There is a vast world around us and within us, we are the universe contained, limitless imaginations within a mortal frame. We are curious and mysterious creatures, subject to nature and its forces. We are ego, we are everything and nothing. These works explore the depiction of everyone, no one, someone.’