Ben Sadler

My name is Ben. I love painting. I live in Birmingham with my wife Katy, our daughter Hazel and our cat Oscar. Oscar has got three legs. I paint in the evenings. I paint pretty much every evening. I paint people and animals and things. Most of my paintings are small and intimate, pulled from photographs and memories. They are frameworks with which to explore a thought. I paint groups and series, figuring things out across a number of panels. I often start with a feeling. I think about that feeling as I paint. I paint and watch the painting, watch as it becomes something. I love the mystery of that: start with nothing and end up with something, turn a blank surface into a world, or a moment from it at least. There is a constant back-and-forth while painting, between the paint and the thing it is evoking. I am fascinated by this process, this delicacy. A personality can be teased from a pool of colour, a fleck of paint can change an entire expression. I love to lose myself in this, to feel myself disappear as a painting emerges and stillness takes me over. Each painting is a meditation, a chance to slowly clear my mind and imbue the work in front of me with some kind of life.

Biography
Ben Sadler is an artist based in Birmingham. He studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Fine Art & Drawing, University of Oxford, and at the Royal College of Art, London. Ben is a painter and is also one half of the artist duo Juneau Projects.

Ben was the winner of the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2026. He is represented by Taste Contemporary, Geneva, and presented his first solo show with them in January 2026. A publication on Ben’s work, ‘You and I’, was published by Hurtwood Books in April 2025.