Based in Worcestershire, UK.
Original Abstract Art by Joe Eccles
Practice Statement — Learning to Hold
“My art practice and my life are so deeply entwined that each becomes a way of learning how to hold the other.”
Each of us eventually discovers that life places weight upon us. Some burdens are visible and sudden, others are silent and incremental.
Much of life becomes the gradual process of learning how to hold and carry these weights that cannot simply be put down.
Eccles’ painting practice manifests this idea, he learns to hold his paintings as he learns to hold his life.
Through layered surfaces and large physical spaces, the works embody endurance and the power of holding, not through a single act of bravery or strength, but through persistence.
The paintings are repeatedly reworked over long periods of time until they arrive at a state that feels lived-in, rather than manufactured. Marks remain partially buried beneath newer decisions, allowing earlier passages of the painting to continue existing inside the final deeply textured surface.
This process mirrors emotional experience: nothing is fully erased, only absorbed, as the essence of life seeps into you.
Within the tension between collapse and cohesion, darkness and light, the paintings search for moments of stillness — places where complexity can be held rather than solved. The work does not aim to provide answers. Instead, it asks whether there may be strength in remaining present inside uncertainty long enough for resilience to quietly form around it.
Over time, what once felt unbearable can become something we learn to carry differently.
That transformation — slow, imperfect, human — is at the centre of Eccles’ practice.