École Des Arts: Just outside Toulouse: James Drinkwater

James Drinkwater’s "ÉCOLE DES BEAUX ARTS: Just outside Toulouse" is a paean to the beauty and brevity of the everyday. These works, born from his recent residency in France, are suffused with an unfiltered intimacy, capturing the delicate resonance in the seemingly mundane. Almost folkloric, Drinkwater invites us to witness a mosaic of small moments, where the art of living and the art of painting are one and the same.

Drinkwater is a devotee to intimate spaces: kitchens filled with loved ones, studios shared in quiet harmony, tables set for gatherings; simple encounters that mark the passing of time. Life is recited at his table daily. Here, the boundaries between artist and family blur. The table becomes a springboard for domesticity. Domesticity, in turn, becomes ritual—a series of gestures repeated each morning and evening. He reminds us of the profundity inherent in these simple, daily rhythms. An unfolding lineage of small, shared pleasures.

For Drinkwater, this familial reciprocity serves as both practical and spiritual nourishment. It is an exchange that he is compelled to translate, where every plate and guest becomes a part of his archive, layered memories that he then carries into his studio. His process is infused with personal artefacts—the French homework of his children, the corner of a restaurant napkin, rendered in colour and form. His paintings hold the oddities he has collected—the remnants of lives lived and spaces inhabited. These fragments and mementos from his environment are more than just keepsakes. They are artefacts which shift into raw, tangible materials for his paintings—scraps of the everyday, softened and transformed by his touch, which form the architecture for each creation.

He pulls us into a world where paint is almost incidental, a vehicle for memory rather than a medium alone. Conversations and laughter are captured in the soft smudges left by meals shared on a stained tablecloth. Scraps from the streets, flotsam to most, are for him fragments of stories waiting to reassemble, revealing secrets of a city and its people. It is a dance of materials and ideas passing from hand to hand, studio to studio. Each canvas holds remnants of these exchanges: pigments from a fellow artist’s palette, fragments of fabric, serviettes, notes—a bricolage of materials echoing the communal life in Albi.