Thomas Newbolt

Born in 1951, Thomas Newbolt is an artist best known for his figurative painting. Newbolt studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1970 to 1974. Between 1974 and 1975, Newbolt was awarded the Italian Government Scholarship which allowed him to pursue his art in Florence. Following this, Newbolt was appointed as a Fellow-Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and was later elected as the Harkness Fellow at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin. From the late 1970s to 2000, Newbolt taught at both Camberwell and Anglia Ruskin University.

Newbolt has shown his work extensively around the world in solo and group exhibitions in London, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Most recently, he has held shows at Piano Nobile Fine Art in London and Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. Newbolt's work is held in public collections including those of Unilever, the Bank of England, Trinity, Murray Edwards and Churchill Colleges, University of Cambridge. Newbolt was awarded Ruth Borchard Collection's Self-Portrait Prize in 2013.

Newbolt won The Self-Portrait Prize with his evocative impasto oil portrait. Newbolt's 2013 Self-Portrait was completed in relative darkness in his large weather-boarded barn studio in the Cambridgeshire Fens. The liminal light of dusk pervades this portrait, dissolving and transfiguring its distinct quotidian shapes into magically, sometimes menacingly ambiguous new forms. Best known for his figurative painting, Newbolt often paints at dusk and from memory, combining the effects of fading daylight with the unreliability of memory.  In the words of Newbolt himself: 'I'm interested in the emotional area the painting opens up, so when I stand back I feel it's true.'