Lara Cobden (b.1971) is a painter living and working in Norwich, Norfolk.

Drawn by the unsettling nature of seemingly bucolic scenes, I am intrigued by the residue of memory left in the landscape and it’s benevolent capacity to absorb and bear witness, and by the alchemy of paint and it’s facility to express emotion through intuitive choices of colour, composition and brushwork. It is this trace of experience and memory I am trying to capture and the essence of what my landscape paintings are about...the everyday seen through an alternate lens - the quiet unassuming nature of scenes where nothing in particular is going on but all feels out of kilter.

A desire to capture the essence of experience - a fleeting moment, light and shadows, ephemeral and yet resilient in their presence, are what inspire me to paint. There is a pause between states in making a painting - I like to inhabit and explore this ‘nowhere’ or in-between place and try to collect and recreate some of that experience; like recording details, grasping at the gossamer fabric of waking from a dream. Initially starting from a combination of photos, sketches and memories, an image evolves from multiple thin glazes layered with opaque shapes and flicks and dots of paint built up to describe both watery surfaces and scratched marks scraped back through layers to reveal tangled branches and foliage. It is a combined love of pattern, using paint to describe complex surfaces and quality of light, layering, rubbing back, revealing and reworking, trying to achieve my experience of reality and dream, physical and ephemeral, and the play between them - seeing and being ‘in-between’ - an unreliable multi-layered truth.’ Lara Cobden 2022

Lara graduated with a degree in Painting at Brighton University in 1996, and then spent 11 years in Ireland before relocating to East Anglia. Predominately a landscape painter, focusing on memory and sense of place, her work is a response to the natural world around her. She is a member of The Arborealists, a group of artists specialising in the art of trees, who exhibit widely across Europe. In 2019-20 Lara completed a year on the Turps Banana Correspondence Course, a highly regarded programme of one to one online mentoring. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally and has been a recipient of a number of awards.