Old Themes - New Thoughts | Paintings by Colin Tozer

Colin Tozer is best known as a blues musician. He is a singer and songwriter who has been the frontman for numerous bands over the years (including Old Boots’n’Blisters with a line up of friends from London and Rye). Tozer studied at Camberwell College of Art in the late fifties and has exhibited in London and in France. His paintings have been described as “art with a social message”. This exhibition of new paintings in Rye marks a return to that artistic practice. Tozer’s paintings revisit old themes but offer new interpretations of them.His new work mines his inner life for material as well as responding to current events. Tozer explores the individual’s desire to be a part of world events and to effect change externally through social engagement.He recognises too that this desire is in opposition to a need for privacy, a separate space in which to think and create. Tozer illustrates here the human struggle between wanting to bare one’s soul and the need to protectively conceal the mind’s inner workings.