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Having studied at Cheltenham and Winchester School of Art, Ursell worked as a builder's labourer for a year or so, living rough in a barn up in mid Wales. He had a car which he sold and got on a bus to Berlin. There he was lucky enough to meet many artists chiefly among them was David Medalla the Filipino Kinetic Performance artist who was on a DAAD residency there. David Medalla's own paintings sowed a seed of possibility at a time when the medium was lagging in its popularity. Ursell had eight shows in the short time he spent there, returning with David to create the "Ecliptic Stelli" a flying camera obscura for the Eclipse in 1999. It was at the time of the Eclipse that Ursell’s first painting came to him, "The Broken Flower”, now in the collection of his principal patron, Mathias Zintler, in Hamburg. Although Ursell continued to make large monumental installations, most notably "The Garden of Love", a steady body of painting began to build. A British Council residency at Sacy-le-Petit helped further develop these embryonic canvasses. Ursell has been exclusively painting for the last seventeen years, his most recent works on display before you.
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