Once Emerged from the Grey of Night


A solo exhibition of new works by Ed Saye

““As if a Grünewald altarpiece got lost inside a retro video game” 


Chapel Arts Studios is thrilled to be exhibiting Hampshire-based artist Ed Saye at the Chapel Gallery in Andover from 16 October through to 15 November.


This solo exhibition showcases a brand-new body of work made in response to Chapel Arts' 2025 curatorial theme of remembrance. 


Ed’s contemplation of the subject inspired him to draw links to nearby Sandham Memorial Chapel (Burghclere, near Newbury), reawakening his long-standing admiration for the work of celebrated British painter Sir Stanley Spencer (1891-1959). 


“The invitation to exhibit got me thinking about Spencer’s murals at Sandham Memorial Chapel. His response to war was so defiantly unwarlike. Not battles, but floors being scrubbed, beds made, bread eaten. Intimate, bodily, repetitive. Profound in their commonplace, I wondered if I could follow that logic: painting my present, not as spectacle, but as the observance of the routine and ordinary.”


Spencer's remarkable painting cycle - completed between 1927 and 1932 - was painted from memory. It draws on his lived experience during the First World War as a soldier on the Salonika Front in Greece, and his time in Bristol as a hospital orderly. The murals have been described as ‘Britain’s answer to the Sistine Chapel’.

Visitors to ‘Once Emerged from the Grey of Night' will be immersed into Ed’s own reimagined, auto-biographical painting cycle within the setting of St. Mary’s Chapel. Subjects wander through the painterly dreamscapes, illuminated by Ed’s signature otherworldly glow.


“My paintings are full of middle-aged men like me, avatars, playing golf, watering lawns, smoking, floating, lying down. They're sometimes pensive, sometimes radiant, sometimes both. There’s not much happening, except maybe the low-key drama of just being. The figures move through surreal, dusky landscapes, rendered in saturated, acidic hues, with the faint apocalyptic hum of too much light on a summer evening. It's as if a Grunewald altarpiece got lost inside a retro video game”. 

“There’s meant to be lightness here, but also dread. The men in my paintings seem adrift, gently performing their leisure. Golf clubs become wands or weapons, depending on the angle. Lawns stretch out like strange stages. It's masculinity, maybe, but in a costume - performative, nostalgic, unsure. These worlds aren’t utopias, but they’re not exactly dystopias either. They’re invented landscapes of feeling. As Fernando Pessoa put it, “I make landscapes out of what I feel,” and that feels right. I’m painting fantasy in order to understand reality.”



Ed has been able to achieve the unique atmospheres and perspectives in his works by developing a hybrid process where analogue and digital tools collide:


“I use oil paint, but also digital drawing and image-making tools in the initial stages. I grew up alongside the birth of computer games but also exposed to painting and art. I loved the latter more than the former. Now I watch my children playing computer games; these are the tools and images around me, and I want to see what happens when old and new mediums merge to create a new language. The result, I hope, is a kind of digital-physical fiction. Something that’s not quite real but is trying to feel its way toward truth. 


At heart, I think I’m painting in defence of the everyday. And in defence of painting itself—a medium slow enough to hold conflicting things together: melancholy and joy, banality and wonder, digital noise and painterly touch."

Study of Two Golfers (2025), oil on gessoed panel. 18 x 14 cm



Join us for 'Once Emerged from the Grey of Night' this October. The exhibition opens Thursday 16 October and runs until Saturday 15 November, with the gallery open every Thursday, Friday and Saturday between 11am - 4pm. Free and open to all. 


And In Conversation will be held on Saturday 25 October between 2-3pm with Ed and artist Gianni Notarianni. Tickets free and available from chapelartsstudios.co.uk very soon!


Stay tuned for more information on other workshops with Ed during the course of the exhibition. 


About the Artist

Ed studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art in London.  He has exhibited around the UK and Europe and his work is held in private collections worldwide. He lives and works in Hampshire, UK. 


See more of Ed’s artworks and read his full CV at www.edsaye.studio


And follow him on Instagram for all of the latest updates from his studio @ed_saye