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Peter Abrahams

The Aidan Threlfall award was very important to me and was the start of a life-long interest in Hispanic cultures and an obsession really with Spanish painting which continues to occupy me. I travelled to Spain in the summer of 1981 with the award, after finishing my degree in painting from Camberwell. I eventually married a Latin-American art historian in 1985 and we live together in London. So it was a life-changing experience.

My Black Paintings from the mid and late 1990s have a connection to the late Goya works in the Prado. Really all my current still-life photographs in the Illuminations, Vanitas and Miscibility series also arise from an immersion in the culture of Spanish painting, particularly referencing works by Velazquez and Zurbaran.

I work with photographic media now, but I may soon combine elements of painting and photography into new multi-panel images.