Marc Yeats is a painter and composer whose work explores the interconnected languages of sound and image. Entirely self-taught in both disciplines, he approaches painting and composition as parallel forms of enquiry, with each continually informing the other. His paintings influence new ways of thinking about music, just as his compositional practice shapes his understanding of colour, form, texture, and space. Central to both is an enduring fascination with geology, the layered processes of erosion and transformation, and the unique resonances of landscape, seascape and place.
Working from his studio in West Dorset and inspired by his travels throughout the British Isles, Yeats is drawn to semi-abstract, expressionist painting as a means of expressing the shifting relationships between light, weather, sky, land, and sea. His paintings are not attempts to imitate nature or create an illusion of reality. Instead, they emerge from experience, memory, and prolonged engagement with particular places. He neither paints directly from observation nor works from photographs. Time spent walking, sketching, and absorbing the atmosphere of a location allows its essential qualities to settle in the imagination before they are transformed through paint.
Yeats's practice is grounded in the physical act of painting. Rather than beginning with a predetermined image, each work develops through direct engagement with the surface. Bold gestures made with oils, and sometimes acrylics, mixed media, crayons, markers, and pencils establish an evolving visual conversation in which each mark suggests the next. Although deeply intuitive, this process is informed by decades of experience. To disrupt habit and encourage discovery, he often introduces movement into the act of painting, sometimes even working with his eyes closed, allowing chance and embodiment to redirect the work. Through successive layers, forms gradually emerge—a fleeting quality of light, the contour of a hillside, the atmosphere of a coastline—until the painting resonates with remembered sensations rather than literal appearances.
At the heart of Yeats's practice is what he describes as polyphonic abstraction. Borrowing the term from music, where independent voices coexist within a single composition, he constructs paintings from multiple layers, rhythms, and perspectives that interact simultaneously. The result is a dynamic interplay of colour, texture, light, and form, creating spaces that remain fluid, open, and continuously shifting.
Underlying this approach is an intuitive understanding of relationships rather than fixed structures. Influenced by ideas found in topology, Yeats is interested in how forms connect, bend, stretch, and transform while retaining an underlying continuity. Rather than depicting recognisable landscapes, he explores the tensions and connections between elements—a cliff dissolving into sky, a valley folding into a hillside, colour migrating from sea to land, or weather dissolving distinctions between foreground and distance. Space becomes experiential rather than descriptive, inviting viewers to navigate the work through their own perceptions and associations.
His titles function as poetic points of entry rather than explanations. They evoke places, moods, memories, observations, or ideas, offering gentle prompts without prescribing meaning. Each painting remains open to interpretation because its significance is completed through the viewer's experience. These works are not representations of landscape or memory; they are encounters in themselves, where remembered places, physical gesture, and material process converge.
Although no single artist has shaped his development, Yeats admires painters including Van Gogh, Turner, Constable, Joan Eardley, Pollock, Richter, and Bacon. Alongside his painting, he has established an international reputation as a composer, with works performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra, and many leading ensembles, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He is also a published writer, with books exploring both his painting and composition, and most recently a collection of more than 230 poems reflecting on his life as an artist.
Across all of his creative work, Yeats pursues the same enduring question: how experience, memory, material, and perception can be transformed into forms that remain alive, open, and continually unfolding.