Born in 1966 in Cleethorpes, Wayne Sleeth began painting and drawing at a very early age and at 16 came across reproductions of Cubist paintings, “windows onto an alternative space”, which confirmed his passion for art. He began attending Grimsby School of Art, encouraged by teachers Tartellin, Ludlam and Tipper, at the age of 18, and after extensive travelling and working around Europe (France, Germany, where he began to exhibit; and the former Yugoslavia, where he had to flee the war in 1991) he returned to the south of England, to complete his graduate training at Bath Academy of Art (1994).

Turning professional in 1996 and taking a studio in York , he excelled as a muralist for schools, hospitals and night-clubs (from Burnley to Jersey ) before moving permanently to Lorraine , France , in 2001,and establishing a family there. He has now exhibited in most European countries, and regularly still in England , whilst teaching and doing murals to commission abroad. His paintings express much of the natural space particular to his early years, of the Humber region, and to his dual heritage; his family name is a derivative of the mediaeval Angle term for “flat field” , as in those of Lincolnshire . And his maternal family originates and resides still in Flanders , a hop across from Hull , with a parallel geography well-known to the artist; the big skies and flat expanses, the nuances of light and colour according to the seasons, the instant.

His recent canvases are a reduction of all that surrounds him towards the “essential”, at the same time a pursuit of heightened pictorial “values” – the orchestration of brilliant primary and sensual complimentary colours: a line signifying the continental horizon or the sea to create two planes, harmonious and richly-worked; two-dimensional paint laid thickly with a palette knife to suggest a third dimension; deliberate dripping or a wash ( a “field”) of local colour, limited only by the edge of the canvas itself... They are a call for balance, for composure, a freedom from detail other than the treatment of the surface itself, in evoking his primary sources of inspiration.