Otis Blease (b. 1996, Bristol, England) is currently based in London, having moved to study on The Drawing Year in 2019. Before The Drawing Year he studied Drawing and Printmaking at Bristol UWE, where he was awarded The Dumfries House residency upon graduation. Having grown up in Cornwall, the move to London had a considerable impact on his work. The city’s constant state of motion added an energy and spontaneity to his practice. Working with mixed media materials, often onto stretched paper, he explores feelings of excitement and anxiety in his work, interested in the way life can seem both thrilling and mundane simultaneously.

His recent works start to draw on memories from childhood, a time where these feelings of excitement and boredom are often most viscerally experienced and the time where you learn your place in the world through exploration and making mistakes.