Chapel Arts Studios is delighted to present Hampshire-based artist Ed Saye at the Chapel Gallery in Andover, with his new solo exhibition Once Emerged from the Grey of Night, running from 16 October to 15 November.
This striking new body of work has been created in response to Chapel Arts’ 2025 curatorial theme of remembrance. The theme led Ed to reflect on the nearby Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, and to rediscover his deep admiration for the renowned British painter Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959).
“The invitation to exhibit got me thinking about Spencer’s murals at Sandham Memorial Chapel,” Ed explains. “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 celebrated painting cycle, completed between 1927 and 1932, was created entirely from memory. Drawing on his First World War experiences both as a soldier in Greece and as a hospital orderly in Bristol, the murals have been described as ‘Britain’s answer to the Sistine Chapel’.
In Once Emerged from the Grey of Night, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in Ed’s own reimagined, autobiographical painting cycle — a dreamlike world set within the atmospheric surroundings of St. Mary’s Chapel. Figures drift through luminous, surreal landscapes bathed in Ed’s signature, otherworldly glow.
“My paintings are full of middle-aged men like me — avatars — playing golf, watering lawns, smoking, floating, lying down,” says Ed. “They’re sometimes pensive, sometimes radiant. There’s not much happening, except maybe the low-key drama of just being. The figures move through surreal, dusky landscapes, rendered in saturated 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.”
Ed’s work explores the tension between lightness and unease, between the ordinary and the fantastical.
“The men in my paintings seem adrift, gently performing their leisure. Golf clubs become wands or weapons. Lawns stretch out like strange stages. It’s masculinity, but in costume — performative, nostalgic, unsure. These worlds aren’t utopias, but they’re not dystopias either. They’re invented landscapes of feeling. As Fernando Pessoa put it, ‘I make landscapes out of what I feel.’ That feels right. I’m painting fantasy to understand reality.”
To create these unique atmospheres, Ed combines traditional oil painting with digital drawing and image-making — blending the physical and virtual to form what he calls a “digital-physical fiction.”
“I use oil paint, but also digital tools in the early stages,” he says. “I grew up alongside the birth of computer games but was also immersed in painting. Now I watch my children play, and I want to see what happens when old and new mediums merge. The result, I hope, is something not quite real, but 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.”
Once Emerged from the Grey of Night runs from Thursday 16 October to Saturday 15 November.
The Chapel Gallery is open Thursday to Saturday, 11am – 4pm, and admission is free and open to all.
🔗 Visit: www.chapelartsstudios.co.uk/edsaye
🎙️ Artist Talk: Ed Saye in Conversation with Gianni Notarianni
Saturday 25 October, 2–3pm
Join us at the Chapel Gallery for a free artist talk with Ed Saye and Gianni Notarianni as they explore the ideas, processes, and inspirations behind Once Emerged from the Grey of Night.
Reserve your free ticket: Eventbrite – Artist in Conversation: Ed Saye & Gianni Notarianni