New Paintings - Nicholas Pound

'Vicki's Sweater' is a painting that remembers my first ever date (in Newmarket) with Vicki, the friend of the girl I actually liked. When I turned up to meet Vicki for the first time, she was wearing this beautifully made, horrific woollen sweater, so filled with the good intention of her and her entire family.

This exhibition lives within this contradiction of the beautiful and the horrific. The functional and the fashionable versus the possibly over-efficient sweater. Vicki’s woollen sweater was immaculate—every stitch was intentional. But the colour was wrong, the pattern was wrong, the sweater owned her in such an encompassing way. Loving, parochial. That's the knot I keep trying to untie in the studio: how do you make something with total commitment that also feels slightly off?