About us
Marcus Paintings is a web-site created for and by the psychotherapist and painter Marcus Price who is based in Kent UK.
Exhibition of a paintings at The Tavistock Centre, Belsize Park London. November 24th to December 29th 2025.
Captivity and Freedom
The paintings in this collection are largely free associative musings that sometimes reflect conflicting themes in my life: a countryman’s experience of living in suburbia, a psychotherapist working in forensics, a keen cricketer who now struggles to run quick singles. I wrestle with the institutions that pervade peoples lives and that congeal into the images, almost as fast as I try to escape by painting over them. It is an inevitable theme having grown up as a son of the manse in a Baptist tradition and spending most of my life working for healthcare organisations. Realising that all relationships can bring captivity and freedom, I gain the emotional energy to paint while in the vicinity of the people whom I love to love and this perhaps overflows into my love of painting.
I often paint during an alternative large group hosted in India by The Hank Nunn Institute (primarily a therapeutic clinic) which is attended by people from many different countries. Large group work has its own theory base and can assist people in making links between the personal and the political. Tuning into the group from my garden studio by zoom and responding in paint to the many personal and cultural struggles, it is unsurprising that troubling existential issues such as war and climate change seem to flow through the work. However, Such interpretations can limit possibilities or even be a distraction for the viewer rather than an aid to meaning. It is common for people to find temporary reassurance in diagnostic titles but for me, it is the implicit tensions in the images that carry meaning. Like dreams, the paintings contain multiple meanings and it brings me a lot of pleasure when people tell me about my paintings and help me discover them.
Like a lot of artists, my work flourished during the pandemic. I have had shows every year since 2020 at the Mick Jagger Arts Centre in Dartford and also exhibited at the 2022 Group Analytic Society International annual Foulkes lecture at Senate House, London. In 2020 I published an anthology of poems and paintings ‘Asleep on the Volcano, The Poetic Landscape of Psychotherapy.’ I am also currently working on illustrations for ‘The Visitors’ a novel written by Group Analyst, Mike Tait, some of which appear in this collection.